Childhood in the Past An International Journal ISSN: 1758-5716 (Print) 2040-8528 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ycip20 Childhood, Art and Education in Late Nineteenth Century Berlin: An Autobiographical Account Paul Jacobsthal, Katharina Ulmschneider & Sally Crawford To cite this article: Paul Jacobsthal, Katharina Ulmschneider & Sally Crawford (2011) Childhood, Art and Education in Late Nineteenth Century Berlin: An Autobiographical Account, Childhood in the Past, 4:1, 11-30, DOI: 10.1179/cip.2011.4.1.11 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1179/cip.2011.4.1.11 Published online: 18 Jul 2013. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 55 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ycip20 Childhood in the Past 4, 2011, 11–30 Childhood, Art and Education in Late Nineteenth Century Berlin: An Autobiographical Account Original German Text: Paul Jacobsthal Introduction and Translation: Katharina Ulmschneider and Sally Crawford Abstract This paper presents extracts from a newly-discovered autobiography of the German archaeologist Paul Ferdinand Jacobsthal. In this thoughtful account, Jacobsthal describes and analyses his childhood experiences in Berlin in the 1880s and 1890s, and reflects, as an established scholar in his mid-thirties at the time of writing, the extent to which his career was shaped by his childhood experiences, by his family, or by innate qualities within himself. Keywords: Jacobsthal, autobiography, childhood, Berlin, nineteenth century, art history, archaeology, education Introduction This is Professor Paul Ferdinand Jacobsthal’s account of his childhood in late nineteenthcentury Berlin. Jacobsthal (1880–1957) was an eminent classical art historian and archaeologist at the University of Marburg, Germany, from 1912 until 1935, when he was deprived of his position ‘aus rassischen Gründen’ (Frey 2007, 7–8; Losemann 2004, 502–3). In 1936 friends helped him to find a new home at Oxford and he was appointed a Student at Christ Church and a Reader in Celtic Archaeology at the University of Oxford in 1937 (Grenville 2004).1 Jacobsthal remained at Oxford until his death in 1957, and his papers relating to Celtic Art were subsequently housed at the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford, where they still remain (Crawford and Ulmschneider 2010; 2011). Following the launch of a research project on Jacobsthal’s archive,2 the authors were contacted by Kay Baxandall, who had been a friend of Jacobsthal, and who had inherited an unpublished and previously unrecorded draft of his autobiography, which Authors’ addresses: Sally Crawford and Katharina Ulmschneider, Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford, 36 Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2PG, UK, Email: sally.crawford@arch. ox.ac.uk, katharina.ulmschneider@worc.ox.ac.uk 12 Paul Jacobsthal, Katharina Ulmschneider and Sally Crawford she passed on to us. We are grateful to Kay Baxandall for permission to publish this abridged translation of the autobiography. The manuscript is written in pencil and black ink in German, and consists of fortyfour single sheets of very thin paper (Fig. 1). It is dated to around 1916, during World War I, when Jacobsthal was serving as a medical orderly and an interpreter for an interned Greek Army corps. It is dedicated to his ‘only beloved reader’ – presumably his wife Emma Auguste Dorothee Bräuning (‘Guste’), whom he had married in 1915 (Losemann 2004, 503). The autobiography deals almost entirely with Jacobsthal’s family background and childhood years, and appears to be a serious attempt to reflect on the relationship between his heritage and childhood experiences, and the subsequent trajectory of his adult life. The autobiography is incomplete. Given the space limitations of this journal, we provide here an edited version of the text, presenting those sections which are specific to his childhood. A full text in German is in preparation. Jacobsthal was born in Berlin on 23 February 1880. Although he came from a Jewish family, he was baptised as a Protestant (Losemann 2004, 502). As the eldest child, Jacobsthal might have been expected to follow in his father’s footsteps as a doctor, and his autobiography shows that there was also a family expectation that he might go into his cousin’s import/export business in Hamburg. Jacobsthal, however, broke the mould. The disjunction between the mercantile and scientific background of his family and his own eminent career in art history and archaeology (one of his earliest papers was on the artist, Ingres, and his academic thinking was highly influenced by the poet Stefan George) forms a central theme of Jacobsthal’s exploration of his own childhood (Losemann 2004, 503). In the first part of the work, Jacobsthal tests the possibility that nature, rather than nurture, might explain his own interest in art, but he can find nothing at all in his parents’ or grandparents’ interests and characters that could explain his own attraction to art. The family insistence that a neighbour’s son, Ernst Pickardt (1876–1931), might have been influential, is robustly negated. The possibility that an appreciation of art and beauty might have been inculcated in him by his education is also given careful thought, before being rejected. Finally, the possibility that his environment – the furniture at his grandparents’ house, or the architecture of Berlin, or the museum he haunted as a child – might have been the source of his affinity for art history and appreciation is given due consideration and also put aside. After thoughtful analysis, Jacobsthal feels that his urge to explore art was essentially innate and unique to himself: his childhood provided scope for the expression of his affinity for art, but that affinity would have been expressed under any circumstances. Jacobsthal’s perspective of the way in which a child is shaped by education is surprising for a man who taught art history. As he reviews his childhood, he argues that his original childlike responses to art and beauty, which he can barely now recapture, were truthful. Education has taken away his ability to see art with honest eyes: instead, he now sees all art and architecture in terms of its context, history and form. Education has erected barriers between his adult self and art, whereas his child self had a liberated perspective, which, for the adult Jacobsthal, is irretrievable. For Jacobsthal, too, education, when it involves formal schooling rather than spontaneous discovery, is part of the meaningless exercise of adult authority. Jacobsthal Childhood, Art and Education in Late Nineteenth Century Berlin Figure 1: The opening page of the manuscript (reproduced courtesy of K. Baxandall). 13 14 Paul Jacobsthal, Katharina Ulmschneider and Sally Crawford was a conventionally ‘good’ scholar – some of his school reports survive in the Jacobsthal archive to support his assertion – but he is vehement in his insistence that school brought him no benefits – he remembers nothing, and learnt nothing (see Fig. 3). The loss of childhood is emphasised within the text as Jacobsthal recaptures the child’s full physical engagement in the world – not just with sights, but with sounds, tastes and textures. Jacobsthal skilfully draws the reader into the intensity of the child’s focus and experiences. The noise of the waves at the beach is painfully loud, though the bells are beautiful. The shops of his childhood are characterised by their smells – cheese, spices, fruit – while at the surgery, the smell of the carbolic acid is almost more intensely painful than the operation. Even red granite has a smell, as well as a texture and colour, for the child. Childhood is intense and transformational, with every sense reaching beyond the range of an adult. Childhood experience may be transformational in its intensity, but the adult world, for Jacobsthal, is narrowing and joyless because it is made shallow and meaningless by the institutionalisation and the organisation which give it form. Education is an aspect of the destruction of childhood intensity and joy. Organised swimming is a dark and torturing experience of black water and bodily odour, compared with the joy of ‘wild’ swimming in the river. Dancing is a humiliation, contrasted with the secret and enthralling walk home with his dancing partner. There are no redeeming aspects to the awful humiliation of the ice rink. Even the kaleidoscope which he is obliged to look at as a child recovering from eye surgery surprisingly has no beauty for him. Institutionalised art, for Jacobsthal, is an oxymoron. Just as an organised family trip to the country could not bring a connection to nature, so an enforced viewing of a kaleidoscope has no emotional value, compared with the spontaneous pleasure of playing with his mother’s coloured wools. Adulthood, Jacobsthal stresses, is characterised by a cutting off and withering of childhood enthusiasms and abilities. For Jacobsthal, geniuses are those rare beings who are able to resist the narrowing process of adulthood, and retain their childhood engagement with their fullest senses. Jacobsthal’s keen awareness of the difficulty of being ‘honest’ in his accounts is a striking feature of his writing. He tells his reader that he has already written an autobiography more than a decade earlier in which he inadvertently presented himself as a ‘hero’ in the manner of a novel.3 He also points out the gap between what he knows he was feeling and thinking as a boy – overwhelmed by his emotional and psychological responses to nature – and what he actually wrote in his diary at the time. Ineffable feelings were too vast for text: instead, he noted what he had for dinner. There is ‘truth’ in the dinner – it was given and eaten – but a more important ‘truth’ remains unexpressed. In the same vein, he finds himself incapacitated before a beautiful sunrise – he cannot even begin to confine beauty to normal artistic media – his feelings are too intense to be painted or written about. As a child, Jacobsthal could not find a way of expressing his feelings in writing or art, but he also suggests that the adult world is not interested in honesty or honest expression. Over and again, he describes lack of comprehension in the adults around him, and the parallel development of a guarded secrecy about his true feelings from others, which makes childhood an isolating experience. He cannot talk to his mother, he Childhood, Art and Education in Late Nineteenth Century Berlin 15 quickly realises, because she does not comprehend him, and he cannot talk to anyone about the maid, particularly since he is alone in disliking her. As far as he is concerned, the maid transgressed the boundaries in giving him sex education as a seven year old, but his only expression of this is revulsion at the food she offers. The meal he would not eat from her table is seared on his memory. We know that Jacobsthal wrote at least one further autobiographical account, of his 1940 internment by the British as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man (Jacobsthal 1992; and see also Megaw and Megaw 1998, 124). The internment account was written in English, and while he insisted that it was for private purposes and not for public consumption, the manuscript became widely known and was certainly sent out to his friends. The internment manuscript was itself based on a diary he kept during his imprisonment, a diary written in English, German, Latin, Hebrew and Greek.4 The diary records events and thoughts that are not included in the English account. Even in the version of his childhood published here, Jacobsthal is aware of the difficulty of presenting an accurate account. He knows he is a private person, and that he is good at creating appearances that do not correspond with his internal world. Jacobsthal warns his reader that, even though he is trying to offer an accurate and honest portrayal, this work, like any autobiography, is only one truth amongst many – ‘I have described many single traits without anyone really being able to understand what I was like then’. He knows, as he concludes this, that he has failed in his best efforts at producing an honest account: ‘the awareness of the spirit of life which holds everything together is hard to recall and even harder to put into words’ – but at least the self-aware attempt was made. It is a significant moment in Jacobsthal’s life. Previous attempts to express himself – to his mother, in words, in art – had been abandoned or never begun, but his experiences, by 1916, had brought about major changes in Jacobsthal’s outlook. English Translation Jacobsthal’s Earliest Memories5 ‘I believe that I can remember one picture from the first two years of my life – no-one can have told me. My mother carried me on her arm and I saw into a garden with pavilion-like buildings made out of white-grey bricks containing ornamental bands of glazed tiles: the whole appeared to me in the colours of a magic world. Whether this dream fitted the reality of Prinzenstrasse 50, where I was born and spent the first two years of my life, I have never been able to determine. Otherwise I only remember the location of the piano in the front room, but not where the fifty melodies came from, which I knew by my second year of life. I retain more coherent memories of the years 1883–1885, when my parents moved from Prinzenstrasse to the new house in Ross Ecke Wallstrasse (pulled down years ago). I retain memories of the barges on the Spree river, which were either gliding past our windows or anchored in rows at the Waisen Bridge, the smell of their fruit cargo; the Petri Church; the Spittelmarket; the streets of Old Berlin, the houses mostly one-storey high, as the eighteenth century and the Empire had left them; the stairs of the house with a high-lying curb in front of the entrance; the lobbies, especially in the Wallstrasse 16 Paul Jacobsthal, Katharina Ulmschneider and Sally Crawford and Dresdener Strasse, still had the booths of small traders, who were selling hats, pipes, tobacco products, musical instruments, behind the houses large gardens; noble shops like Lampe’s, a merchant in the Grünstrasse, Buntebart’s in Dresdenerstrasse, Trinther’s in Grün Ecke Wallstrasse, smelling of spices, dried plums, cheese; the view every evening from our balcony to the Waisen Bridge and the other side to Ravené, where the first electric arc lamp6 that Berlin saw flashed up at dusk (Fig. 2); the first snowman with coals as eyes, that we saw being built by the maid; a Christmas tree in the decorated room, into which Mama is carried, very sick from the birth of Ernst;7 the nursing grandmother with her petite movements, kind and stern – all these are clearly recorded, durable and well-kept impressions. I also remember (on a journey from the Holstein Baltic to Scharbeutz)8 the sea … that the noise of the waves caused pain; in contrast I liked the sound of the bell calling out at midday, which I, being picked up by the Spa guests, set into motion. I also vaguely remember the layout of the garden and in particular the smell of the heliotrope-pots, which were flowering on the landing along the railings of the flight of steps. What, and if, I “thought” anything special in those first five years, I do not record. In the year 1885 my parents moved to Old Jacobstrasse. This house, No. 128, and this area turned into the home of my childhood years, which I remember not less fondly than someone remembers his birthplace, even if it is more picturesque and full of character. Even now in my dreams I still travel from the train station to Old Jacobstrasse and find the house empty’. Jacobsthal’s Childhood Home ‘Quiet streets, still without horse-trams, where we played safely in summer and winter; many one-storey houses in individually-designed forms of private Berlin architects of the first half of the 19th century, which, untouched by anything “artistic”, had been built by respectable master masons; in between, larger tenement blocks of the 60s and 70s in schematic neo-Classicist style, which the pupils of Schinkel9 had taught these masons; also a few houses, which, like ours, had been marked by a real architect: all these observations I made quite early on, even if the names and terms only came to me much later. Measured lighting, scarce gas-lanterns on very low poles, fitted well with the quiet bourgeois character of this area, as did the humble dimensions and types of display in the shop-windows in the picture of this – measured by the standards of Berlin after 1896 – pretty provincial world. All the more impressive were the changes in the shop-windows at Christmas, when jewellery, lighting, colours became livelier and richer, and our childlike imagination was fired all the more by special exhibits, such as the nodding Chinaman in the general store of Ehrecke in Leipzigstrasse, or the mill, where, changing from minute to minute, the miller and his wife looked out of the window (this one in the shop-window of the watchmaker at Jerusalem Church). Amongst the modest attractions of this street I also include the lighting-up of the plain clock in front of the superior court of justice through two collecting lenses attached to gas lanterns situated at the front of the house, which aroused my interest in my later childhood years. It was to this world that we moved in 1885, when Papa received the position of a Childhood, Art and Education in Late Nineteenth Century Berlin 17 Figure 2: Electric street lights being installed in Berlin in 1890 (August Fuhrmann). panel doctor10 in this district through his friend Ruge. I still remember the first night, which I spent half frightened, half curious in the unfamiliar, still unfinished flat’. Jacobsthal’s Mother and Father ‘I find it difficult to talk about my mother,11 as I have the dark, enduring and pressing feeling that many a thing in and with me would be better now, if she could have given me an upbringing beyond the half, bodily care of my first decade of life. She remained uninvolved in every sense in the development of the mind, imagination, and intellect. As the oldest child, she loved me more than my siblings, and I returned this love as a young boy by inwardly taking her side when my father, often, was harsh to her in 18 Paul Jacobsthal, Katharina Ulmschneider and Sally Crawford our presence. I also remember the almost sensual pleasure, whenever I saw her sitting en decollier in front of the mirror with an ivory hand glass and other cosmetic items. But already very early on, maybe in my eighth or ninth year of life, I sensed that she could only half understand all my questions and the worries affecting me, and perhaps already by the age of fourteen I had put a name to this unemotional here-and-now, this lack of “upper storey” – as Fr. Th. Vischer12 called it – and I had already realised that this was the spirit of her parental home, which continued in her and her brothers, only that with the latter this sobriety of mind was bridged by their many interests, the urbane habits of great merchants, and the glimmer and poetry of foreign overseas worlds which reached into the dry comptoir. How much I actually owe to my father,13 I have not always recognised. Yes, the fight against him was the main problem in my development in my final years at school and early student years. There is the knowledge in me that I understood him completely later on, and that I could give him the gratitude and love, which he deserved and for which he repaid me with his friendship and trust. Yes, it is one of my most precious memories that in his last weeks of life, often only semi-conscious, and when he did not like anyone around him anymore, he asked for me. In my mind’s eye, from my childhood years, my father appears to me as a fresh, healthy and good-looking man, always clean and precise, dressed without pretention as is becoming for a doctor. His only foibles were the old-fashioned black ties and the polished and gleaming long boots, which he would not give up out of conservative principle. In contrast, I was pleased by his white shirts with their precious knottedthrough pearls, and even more his field staff doctors’ uniform, which he wore at patriotic festivals and for his military parades’. Jacobsthal’s Siblings and the Family Servants ‘During my childhood years, my siblings were completely alien and distant from me, and I later often wondered about the reasons for this. I will speak of this in another place. The household was completed by Emilie, the nursemaid, and Pauline, the cook, who remained in our service for twelve years. Pauline, a Wendin from the Spreewald, Emilie, a peasant daughter from the Uckermark, who was so far corrupted by the city, that, after a few years, she yielded to lucrative dealings with old men. My not-veryastute parents knew nothing about it, and would never have found out, if my cousin Walther14 had not told them of his observations years later. We were left to this girl for many hours a day for many years; daily after lunch she took us to the Zoo and at dinnertime we returned home: this was enough time to make her a substantial factor in our upbringing. Unfortunately my parents trusted her. Ernst and Trude were so attached to her, that a competition took place as to who could drink their milk out of “Milies” cup: I would rather have gone thirsty for days than drink out of her cup. I remember that I was once taken by her to visit her relatives in Potsdam:15 there the odour of the peasant house dazed me so much, that I could not eat anything of the cutlets – after twenty-nine years I still remember the food and the drink – and that in the evening I returned home hungry and depressed. Also, thanks to her, I unfortunately was given sex education: she gave it when I was a seven year old boy: all of this without my Childhood, Art and Education in Late Nineteenth Century Berlin 19 parents being aware of the wickedness of this apparently respectable peasant girl. I was also too shy to say anything about it’. Jacobsthal’s Grandparents ‘Now I still have to say something about the house of my grandparents: as long as they lived, I visited them almost daily. In my fifth year, I visited them for the first time in the Oranienstrasse – not knowing that my father was following far behind me – and even as an associate professor I still visited my grandmother almost daily, when on holiday from Göttingen. The house was situated in Oranienstrasse on a little square next to the Oranienpark (later Waldeckpark), where we bought our Christmas tree year after year from the furrier Schmidt. There were blue, red and yellow panes with star patterns in the hall and staircase, which I carefully imprinted on my memory. To this house also belong the sound of a street organ and the singing of the carollers’. … ‘After an active life, which took place in Pyritz,16 they lived their last peaceful years here, amidst their children and grandchildren, and in communication with other friends and acquaintances, connected to them by old ties. Many different kinds of people went in and out of here for a quiet hour’s chat, or to ask for advice and help. All of them were brought together by the golden wedding – an embarrassing memory for me, as are all occasions – thankfully few – where I had to perform on a stage before the public, be it as a Pommern Platt-speaking peasant boy as on this occasion, or as the “Postillon of Lonjumeau”17 at the wedding of the youngest brother of my mother in 1889. (By the way, I performed only one single time with ease and without any fear or racing heart, in 1909, when in best mood, filling in for an ill performer, I semi-improvised to great applause a frivolous couplet in between fast and frivolous girls). In my boyhood years, my grandfather was over seventy years old, a tall, gaunt man with a beardless face, very small lips, a high bare forehead, fine hands and feet, and a measured nature: half a pastor, which he was often mistaken for when travelling, half a diplomat. He hardly ever left his room, the air of which was filled with the smoke from his long pipe. He particularly enjoyed standing at the window on Sundays when thunderstorms broke out, watching the tawdrily dressed petty bourgeoisie getting drenched. Despite receiving chocolate biscuits, which were kept in a cylinder-bureau, every time I visited him, I felt a bit unnerved by his sarcasm’. … ‘As I have spoken now of the grandparents’ house on my father’s side, I want to add in this place a description of the house that my mother came from. I lived in the house of my grandmother in Hamburg for many weeks every year until age nine, and ties there were also strengthened by visits. Whereas I had the feeling that the Jacobsthal grandparents’ house was in no way different to Old Jacobstrasse, Hamburg was already an appealing and half-foreign world, made attractive by the wealth, comfort, and poetry of trade and the port, but at the same time already repellent to this boy because of its self-assuredness and intolerance against our kind’. … ‘I never got to know my grandfather;18 he died in 1877 from a lung-disease. He was, as pictures of him show, a delicate medium-sized man with a very white complexion, fine blond hair, and with sideburns in the English tradition, which Hamburg merchants of 20 Paul Jacobsthal, Katharina Ulmschneider and Sally Crawford this time were emulating together with their dress and lifestyle. He spoke English and Danish like his mother tongue, travelled to these countries every year and essentially imported the products of the Scottish jute spinning mills. After his death the business, in a bad crisis, but built on a solid basis, passed to his barely-grown sons, the oldest of which, then eighteen, managed to overcome the crisis with prudence and diligence. His mother stood by his side, an exceedingly petite, almost dwarfish woman with a practical mind: her imagination, like that of her sons, was exhausted by the business. She was completely the opposite of my grandmother Adelheid, whose sister she was. After the death of my grandfather she was more or less the senior director of the business, which, after a few years, was sizeable again, and after twenty years was one of the largest export-businesses in Hamburg. I will talk about this at a later time’. Jacobsthal’s Worst Memory ‘I want to recount my eye-operation a year before I went to school, i.e. in 1885, which was conducted by Prof. Fröhlich and my father, whom I still admire for his composure. They cut through the oculomotorius of the right eye and shortened it so that the eye became properly accommodated, meaning that I stopped squinting. As a hypersensitive child, I was very scared of pain – this is an operation where even local anaesthetics are impossible – but I controlled myself enough so that I did not make a sound either before or during the operation, while I lay helplessly on the table and felt the cold instruments in my eye. My reward was a beautiful steamboat with gleaming copper and brass mechanisms, which I floated in the pool around the victory column on Bellealliance Square. Almost more distressing than the pain were the smell of the carbolic acid19 and the sight of the suffering working-class people I saw in the waiting room of the professor, who also held his polyclinic practice in this place in Oranienstrasse. To achieve an even use of my normal left eye and the operated-on right eye, I very reluctantly had to look at boring landscapes, typefaces, and geometric figures through a stereoscope and diligently set a kaleidoscope into motion: but because these exercises were forced onto me and I did not readily see their benefit, my ability to enjoy beautiful things, which was already awakened in those years, failed, and I was bored by the colourful, thousand-fold figures, which I could generate in arbitrary fashion: only glass-tubes with mobile water drops awoke my interest because of their oddity. The stitching and sewing, which I was urged to do for the same reason, appealed to me much more. For years I lovingly performed this, in effect female, needlework. This also established the basis for my special interest in any type of female needlework later, when I was no longer doing it myself. A few years afterwards, I sorted by shade the woollen threads, which my mother used to make knotted carpets’. Primary School ‘In October 1886 I started at the pre-school of the Luisenstadt Gymnasium.20 I looked up to the teachers of the first three years, Haucke, Fläschendräger and Bethge, as a faithful peasant servant would look up to the divinely appointed ruler. This was assisted by the good old-fashioned principle of my father: “the teacher, of course, is right”, which Childhood, Art and Education in Late Nineteenth Century Berlin 21 Figure 3: Jacobsthal’s school report from 1891. He has missed 145 hours of school, but he has never been late; has never been asked to stay behind; and has never been reprimanded. He has received 14 commendations (reproduced courtesy of The Institute of Archaeology, Oxford). 22 Paul Jacobsthal, Katharina Ulmschneider and Sally Crawford was upheld against us children until secondary school. As an overly-conscientious boy, I took school so seriously, that it completely pervaded these first years. I took praise and censure unduly to heart, and especially the roughness of senile, half-mad Bethge, who carried out a brutal cane-regime, so much so that it affected my already light sleep. Through diligence and good conduct in my second year I became a “Primar”21 and got exemplary school reports – and, apart from a few accidental interruptions, this remained so until my teen and puberty years radically changed my rapport with school (Fig. 3). Between my sixth and twelfth year I took such a great effort with my homework and did it so diligently, that I arguably “overworked” myself – although this word even later on was never used. Only when I was grown up, my father told me that he went to Haucke behind my back, to lower the quantity of homework, which the then inexperienced teacher had not yet managed to judge properly’. … ‘In my dreams in particular, I can conjure up the smell of this school building, which was built with the lovelessness and unimaginativeness of a fiscal building – the carved benches, the dilapidated fronts of the teachers’ desks, on whose splintered surfaces with worn remnants of paint I imagined landscapes, mostly of towns and ports. In my dreams I am also surrounded by the bleakness of the schoolyard with its scarce trees, artificially kept fresh through plentiful sprinkling and watering, which was surrounded by the tenement houses of Brandenburgstrasse and Oranienstrasse, with at least one house-wall being pleasantly overgrown. The guardian of this yard was the caretaker Tissot, of whom tradition has it that he modelled as a child for one of the Kaulbach22 frescos situated in the staircase of the Neue Museum: in my time he was a gaunt, bony man with piercing eyes and a yellow-greenish complexion, and like all my fellow students I hated him, not for being French, but because he watered the thermometer in July to lower the temperature in the heat and deprive us of the pleasure of being able to leave school early at 10am rather than at 11am or 12am – this belief we kept up until our Abitur,23 although it is not very likely that the man stood in his own fortune’s way. A sergeant will hardly call for a drill at night if he himself has to attend it’. Art and Beauty ‘Contact with the great arts of the past was of enormous influence and determined my later choice of career. I never walked through the front parlour without glancing at the pretty miserable copy of the bust of Apollo in the Belvedere24 (made of ivory) and in Papa’s room I looked for hours at the small casts of the Pergamon Gigantomachy;25 with my pocket money I also bought a small collection of wax and cast sculptures, like those which were shown on the balustrade of the Bellealliance Bridge at Christmas. Apart from a bust of the old emperor – where objective patriotic reasons prevailed, which cannot be held against a boy, as even gallery curators occasionally do the same – all of them were reproductions of antique sculptures, whose identity captivated my senses. They were the famous and renown busts of the gods: the Zeus of Otricoli, Diana of Versailles, Apollo in the Belvedere, and Hermes of Olympia.26 I am indebted to Franz Harden’s Latin lessons in the Quarta,27 which, by means of a few miserable illustrations, for the first time imparted knowledge of this art world to the class – or I should say me, as I was the only one where the seeds fell on fertile ground and Childhood, Art and Education in Late Nineteenth Century Berlin 23 Figure 4: Paul and (seated) his little brother Ernst, later to become a famous mathematician. The image is reproduced from a very poor photocopy found in the Jope Archive at the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford. It is not known whether the original photograph survives. flourished early on. If anywhere in my life there seemed to be a plan, it was here. How much “art” is imparted to children these days – I am thinking especially of Du BoisReymond28 and others –; how rare and accidental was what was offered to me, and all of it unconnected with my upbringing at home – and with how much voracity and love I seized upon these small suggestions. I am telling this to counter one of the frequent comments of my father, who tended towards causal explanations, as was the custom of his time: “It is due to Ernst Pickardt’s29 influence, that you devoted yourself to the arts and became an archaeologist”. But why were my siblings not influenced, whose route to Ernst Pickardt in the Museum was no further? No, however much was blind, opaque, and frail in my life, in this sphere I felt as if I had been wonderfully led and protected by a superior force from childhood onwards (Fig. 4). Every Sunday at twelve noon I stood outside the forged double-winged doors of 24 Paul Jacobsthal, Katharina Ulmschneider and Sally Crawford Schinkel’s Old Museum,30 and when the clock struck twelve and the doors slowly opened, I slipped inside together with a random group of adults – so as not to be held back because of being a child. Today, after spending countless hours in these rooms studying and enjoying various works, which I immediately associate with firm academic theories and doctrines, I find it hard to remember the frame of mind of the child, coming to this building for the first time, seeing and exploring. I never looked at things in an historical way, i.e. I never searched for illustrations of facts, which had been conveyed to me in class or via books, and also unhistorical in the sense that I, who thank God had never been educated in “art”, had no idea of the history and development of the arts. The prevailing sentiment of ignorant museum visitors was: “Just look, that someone could already do this 200 years ago”. Even as an eight year old child the trite response was alien to me. I felt more like the people, who hundreds of years ago had placed beautiful antiques and pictures in precious halls. To me the museum was a wonderful castle full of treasures, like a wonder world, which one could step into for a few hours, and I completely devoted myself to its harmony, the halls by Schinkel, the fairytale magic and smell of the red granite in the subterranean Egyptian collection, as well as the Greek deities and soon afterward the pictures of the great painters. I envied the wardens being allowed to stroll here every day from early morning till afternoon – that experts existed behind closed doors, who presided over these collections, and devoted their lives to researching the arts, I never knew until my Abitur exams’. Science ‘If I found my own path early on, there was nevertheless another sphere of play and earnest activity, in which my father and my cousin Walther,31 four years older than me, influenced me. As much as my father was reserved towards others in conveying and explaining medical matters, so much he enjoyed teaching me general scientific and especially physical matters from early on. In 1890, I received the Meiser and Mertig32 experiment kit for Christmas, which, apart from a book of experiments, contained a small assemblage of devices for illustrating the most simple physical facts – lifter, heronsball,33 magnets, electrophone,34 balls of elder-pith,35 and rubber rods. My interest in physical matters thus suddenly supplanted the joys of playing with toy soldiers, painting enamel, and stitching, and even my jigsaw skills were now put to the service of scientific constructions. In the autumn months, when our cousins from Strasbourg36 came for their yearly visit (at the time of the southern German summer break), we celebrated true physical and chemical orgies. At those times our nursery was turned into a laboratory, all pocket money was spent on glass-tubes, bottles, wires, acids, and my mother moaned about all the hopelessly ruined floors, ceilings, and walls, which had been indiscriminately punctured to allow bells and house-telephones to be installed. Walther, already an excellent teacher as an older boy, managed to teach me so much about the theory of what we were constructing, that for many years I hardly learned anything new in my physics lessons. But despite all the interest and enthusiasm with which I learned these things, and despite my dearest wish for many years to be an engineer or physicist, I lacked natural ability and independence of thinking. I was unable to develop something without external stimuli and help. Childhood, Art and Education in Late Nineteenth Century Berlin 25 This brings to an end the description of my special interests and activities as far as they perhaps differed from the games and activities of all boys’. Sport ‘I was an active boy. I never just sat there without doing anything. I managed to find time for lots of things despite my homework. How broad are the interests of a boy, and how narrow those of a grown man! Geniuses like Leonardo and Goethe may be understood as Wunderkinder, whose development has not stagnated, where everything that is inherent in gifted children, instead of following the laws of nature and withering to support a single shoot, has evenly developed and grown to bloom. I, at least, feel resigned when I compare the boy to the man. Perhaps I should say a bit about my physical development. I did not enjoy gymnastics. The bleakness of the “civic” gym made me feel depressed in the same way as the swimming lessons, started too late, in the Victoria Baths in Neuenburger Strasse with its stale water and smell of human bodies, were painful and embarrassing: I also had a nearly insurmountable aversion to jumping from the board into the black, cold water. I only became a devoted friend of the art of swimming, when I was allowed to swim under the open sky in the River Elbe, where I could manage forty-five minutes of uninterrupted swimming. Similarly unpleasant are my memories of my first attempts at ice-skating. Whereas other children were elegantly gliding past, I stood there, alone and freezing amidst cheerless house-walls on one of those barren plots of land off Wassertorstrasse or Alexandrinenstrasse, which were turned into a skating rink in winter. Here, as in many things of this kind, I lacked parental encouragement and example. My dancing classes with the principal-dancer Schackwitz in Alexandrinenstrasse, to whom I was sent aged twelve with my even younger siblings, is also not a poetic memory. The children did not come from any defined social circles, but were a colourful, jumbled up group, at most connected locally in the same way as children of a school-class are connected. I was scared of the huge, barren hall with its mirrors and parquet flooring, which was intended for evening amusements and upper middle class weddings, and it cost me quite an effort to lead my “lady” successfully around the hall in front of the eyes of fifty people, to the loud instructions of my dancing teacher. Nevertheless, amongst these otherwise unpoetic dance lessons, which, regrettably, we were subjected to before the age of puberty, there is the memory of a secret children’s love story which no-one noticed. The girl was named Margarete Sonntag, and she was the daughter of a baker in Zossenerstrasse. She had blonde hair with a parting, blue eyes and a pleasant voice. I asked her for every dance, and, as a gentleman, walked her home. I cannot remember a single word of what we talked about, but I remember the pleasure of holding her in my arms and the smell of her hair. It is characteristic of my exaggerated wish to hide my feelings that even my mother, who accompanied us to every dancing class, and my astute sister Trude, never noticed this affection’. Freedom and the Countryside ‘From early on, I was aware of the constraints of growing up in a big city. I was bored by the daily walks to the zoo, which we were forced to undertake until my ninth year 26 Paul Jacobsthal, Katharina Ulmschneider and Sally Crawford of age under the supervision of the above-described Emilie. A soon as Spring arrived, we played ball-games and marbles on the street, according to the month, in a firmlyestablished tradition. On Sundays, the only day when my father was reasonably free of his duties, we travelled to the River Spree or the Grunewald forest37, often accompanied by friends or relatives. Then the child’s joy in beloved and missed nature was countered by opposition to the family-controlled institutionalisation of this activity. I liked it much more when Grenzendörfer, the barber and bone-setter, who lived opposite us in the basement, who cut my hair for only 10d – good old times – and who was recommended by my father as a masseur, took me on lengthy hikes to Rixdorf, Britz, and Rudow.38 Then we picked massive bunches of poppies, corn-flowers, and delphinium, and cut mushrooms. I also liked the wheat beer and working-class cheese sandwiches of some suburban tavern, which concluded our visits. I returned from these excursions completely exhausted and happy, but I dimly felt how much more happy children must be, whose joy and introduction to nature does not have to take place on the outskirts of a metropolis and in such company. As I have already pointed out, every year we spent at least our summer holidays at the house of my grandmother in Hamburg, and, after the death of my grandmother in 1889, at the house of my eldest uncle. There we lived in a semi-rural environment, as at that time Hamburg merged into the Holstein countryside. The flowers in the garden, grazing livestock, evening walks along paths flanked by bushes, as was the Holstein way, the ships in the port, and the view across the powerful river from the Blankenese hills – all these made a powerful impression, which became more firmly rooted than what is offered by a holiday-tour of several weeks. And then the background, the flourishing firm with its connections to countries all over the world, the colourful stamps, which I was allowed to cut out, the paradise-birds and exotic weapons I saw, but also the prosaic connections abroad, the sudden matter-of-fact visits to London or the subsidiary in Dundee, the arrival and departure of telegrams, the fluid command of four or five languages, generally the masterly command of commercium (which to the Latin speaker does not just mean trade, as we understand it, but generally “trade and travel”) stirred my fantasy. I had an inkling of the spirit which drove all this forward – whereas my father only ever saw the pursuit of money as the guiding motive. As my cousin Ferdinand would not be able to head such a large firm on his own, I was viewed as the natural co-successor, and, accommodating my interests, I was introduced to everything I could understand. But here again providence, which was looking after me, intervened: despite all my joy in the commercial bustle, I never for a moment contemplated being the successor. I was not immune to the luxury, compared to which our lifestyle was poor, quite the contrary: I was very happy to participate – but I had the feeling that appreciation of the best in the world was missing here. These differences only came in conflict with each other later on. I shall conclude this chapter here. You, my only beloved reader, will quite rightly point out that I have described many single traits without anyone really being able to understand what I was like then. Yes, the awareness of the spirit of life which holds everything together is hard to recall and even harder to put into words … 24th March 1916’. Childhood, Art and Education in Late Nineteenth Century Berlin 27 Jacobsthal’s Concluding Thoughts on Childhood ‘Before I start to write about my next stage of life, the final school years, I want to add something about the development of my feelings for nature and of my observations of nature. I very well remember seeing the Wartburg castle from the Hohe Sonne39 in 1885, and that the coachman placed two large stones against the wheels so that the coach would not roll back down the hill. I also started to take an interest in ferns and trees when, each day under the supervision of the nursemaid, we were picking blueberries behind the villa in Liebenstein,40 which we lived in that summer. I was most impressed by the bells, ringing in the wind, of a Japanese garden pavilion inside the castle of Altenstein,41 whose sections, stylised and bordered by plants, imprinted themselves on my memory so firmly, that when, after my first tour to Pergamon in 1906, I came to the Lindenstein area again on my way to visit Dörpfeld42 in Thuringia, I found everything exactly as I had memorised it. About two years later, I still see my father and me standing together on a field near Mariendorf43 early on an August day, waiting with blackened glasses for the total eclipse of the sun amongst thousands of people, whose loud conversations suddenly ceased. I also shuddered at the terrifying spectacle, for which the mythology of the Germanic people and the Japanese have found practical interpretations (since then I had the same feeling once again, at the total eclipse of the sun at the end of April 1913: then I stood on the platform of the station at Belfort, on the way from Paris to Basel). I can also remember that during this summer I often stood with my father at the window of the dining room at sunset, when a thrush sang from the telephone poles and the weather-vane of the neighbouring house, and that he pointed out the glowing red clouds in the sky to me: the dust expelled into the air by the Krakatoa volcano,44 which had erupted at this time and – if I am not wrong – did terrible damage to one of the Sunda islands. And I stood in awe and could not comprehend that someone in Old Jacobstrasse could watch what the dark forces of nature could do in a far away part of the world. This is when, for the first time, I felt the urge to travel to these far away parts of the world on one of the steamboats which I saw at the Hamburg quay. But for the present it was the Uckermark region, the Harz and Thuringia, and the Baltic Sea and Bohemia, which I got to know on my holidays, though I cannot remember the exact details. On all these holidays I tried to sketch in pencil what I saw. These hours were the happiest of my years as a young boy, where, without any guidance and honest before nature, I was working hard to try and master subjects which were too difficult for my poor technique. This striving was so honest, that I was not in the least bothered about whether the finished sketches showed something presentable and well-rounded, but I was only interested in holding on to what I saw. On one of my holidays, in Obergrund (in the Bohemian Alps) this striving attracted the attention and friendship of a painter, ten years older, from the foremost financial circles of Vienna, and a friend of Hofmannsthal,45 who encouraged me – I was around fifteen years old then – to make painting my profession. But I was critical enough of my attempts at painting – rightly so – that I was not swayed by this expert praise. Incidentally, I met him again in 1911, in the company of Hofmannsthal at a festive Bach concert in Vienna, and we recognised each other immediately after sixteen years’. … 28 Paul Jacobsthal, Katharina Ulmschneider and Sally Crawford ‘The greatest impression of nature from all these holidays was seeing the Baltic. We had arrived late in the evening at Heringsdorf,46 and I had spent the night half awake due to my anticipation and the roaring of the sea. In the morning, at sunrise, my father took me outside on the balcony and there was the incredible green expanse, livened up by a few sails, and, rising in the background, the red sun. The impression was so overwhelming that I never dared to try and recreate it in pencil or colour, or to capture it in words: my diary, which I had brought with me on holiday as usual, simply tells the trivial facts of excursions and lunches with detailed menus: so anyone who would try to reconstruct my frame of mind at that time, based on this “literary” material, would be much misled. (This, by the way, also sometimes may happen with the history of real “literature”). The joy of wandering in nature, awakened by these holidays, continued at home, and, once I gained complete freedom of movement around the age of thirteen, I began exploring the surroundings of Berlin, sometimes accompanied by school- or playmates, but preferably alone. I very quickly learned how to use the travel network of the town and suburban rail in a way that would allow me to finance these excursions with my small amount of pocket money. I often wandered three times a week through the Grunewald to the River Havel. Just as some hunters use hunting as an excuse to enjoy nature, so I used to hunt butterflies. I greatly enjoyed their markings, which I tried to recreate in pencil and watercolour, and I also bought a few large Brazilian specimens, whose wings resembled blue sateen, but, as in botany, I lacked the urge for scientific insight. It cost me great effort to spear the animals on needles, and after a female brimstone butterfly, already speared on a needle, laid eggs, and the caterpillars, whom I tried to raise, died, deplorably emaciated by the wrong food, I was overwhelmed by such pity that I gave up hunting butterflies – but not without being scolded at home for getting bored with a hobby so quickly that I had so eagerly started (of course I had been too embarrassed to give the real reason, and had rather put up with the accusations). In effect I fared here no differently than I did with the past: I was stirred by and enjoyed the colourful appearance, the beauty of the form: be it the jumping spark of my Leiden jars,47 the painting of a butterfly, or a great scene from history, the picture of which stood in front of my eyes: I became at peace with that, without the urge to explore its essence. I think that, to this day, I have still hardly changed this attitude in my own work’. Acknowledgements Our thanks to Denise Leigh and Helgard Ulmschneider for their advice on aspects of the German translation – any infelicities remain, of course, our own – and to Kay Baxendall, Vincent Megaw, Chris Gosden, Marissa Kings, Megan Price and Judith Curthoys. Childhood, Art and Education in Late Nineteenth Century Berlin 29 Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. Contra e.g. Losemann (2004), who gives the date of the Readership as 1947. We are grateful to Judith Curthoys, archivist at Christ Church, Oxford, for access to the Jacobsthal archive which shows that his Readership was initially conferred in 1937 for three years. ‘Persecution and survival: the experience of the German Jewish refugee Paul Jacobsthal’ supported by the Reva and David Logan Foundation and the Heritage Lottery Fund. Page one of the handwritten autobiography: ‘My first and only attempts to write part of my memoirs fall, not randomly, into the years 1902–4 … What I sketched then, rather than properly described, were more like chapters of a development novel, the hero of which had only little in common with me’. Now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The streets mentioned by Jacobsthal are all located in the area of Kreuzberg/Berlin Mitte, the centre of Berlin. Lamp creating artificial light through an electric arc. First used for street-lighting in Berlin by Werner von Siemens in 1879. Ernst Erich Jacobsthal, mathematician, born 16 October 1882. German sea-town on the Baltic coast. Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841), German architect and city planner, renowned for buildings in the Neoclassical and Neogothic style. i.e. not a private doctor. Ida Rosenstern (b. 1860). Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807–1887). German philosopher and scholar of literature. His main work was on aesthetics. Martin Jacobsthal. Walther Jacobsthal (b. Strasbourg, 1876), son of the musician Gustav Jacobsthal. Fifteen miles south of Berlin. Part of Prussia before 1945; now Pyrzyce in north-west Poland. An opera by Adolphe Adam (1803–1856). Ferdinand Rosenstern (1823–1877). A disinfectant. A humanities Gymnasium. i.e. top of the class. Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1805–1874), painter. Commissioned by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia to paint the stairway of the Neuen Museum Berlin in 1845–1865. Final exams at school. Belvedere courtyard of the Vatican Museums. The battle between the Giants and the Olympian gods, depicted on the frieze of the Pergamon Altar in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin. In the Vatican Museums; Louvre in Paris; and Olympia Museum in Greece. The seventh year of school. Emil Heinrich Du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896), Berlin physician and physiologist, with a strong interest in philosophy and culture. Ernst Pickardt (1876–1931), portrait, flower, and landscape painter, as well as lithographer. The Neoclassical ‘Old Museum’, home of the art collection of the Prussian royal family, was built by Schinkel in 1823–1830. Walther Jacobsthal, born 1876 in Strasbourg. A Dresden firm supplying physical and chemical kits. A type of steam engine, described in the first century AD by Hero of Alexandria, after whom it was named. An instrument which produces sound through electricity. 30 Paul Jacobsthal, Katharina Ulmschneider and Sally Crawford 35. A non-conductive substance, used for example in pith-ball electroscopes, to demonstrate electric charges. 36. Walther and his brother, Erwin Jacobsthal. 37. On the outskirts of Berlin. 38. Villages located south-east of Berlin, now within the city. 39. Former hunting-lodge of Duke Ernst Augusts von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, located six kilometres south of the Wartburg Castle, Eisenach, Thuringia, Germany. 40. Bad Liebenstein, the oldest spa town in Thuringia, Germany. 41. Chinese pavilion with aeolian harp, built around 1800 and demolished in 1923, inside the park of the castle, which was the summer-seat of the Dukes of Sachsen-Meiningen. 42. Wilhelm Dörpfeld (1853–1940), German architect and archaeologist, who continued Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations at Troy. 43. Berlin Tempelhof-Schöneberg. 44. Krakatoa, a volcanic island in the Sunda Strait in Indonesia, which experienced massive volcanic explosions and a tsunami on 26 and 27 August 1883. 45. Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929), Austrian novelist, poet, librettist, and essayist. 46. Seaside-town on the German Baltic popular with Berlin society. 47. An early form of the capacitor. Invented independently by Ewald Georg von Kleist, a German cleric, and Pieter van Musschenbroek, a Dutch scientist from Leiden in the mideighteenth century. References Crawford, S. and Ulmschneider, K. 2010. Life between the nations – the wartime correspondence of German Refugee archaeologist Paul Jacobsthal. British Archaeology 115, 30–3. Crawford, S. and Ulmschneider, K. 2011. Paul Jacobsthal’s Early Celtic Art, his anonymous coauthor, and National Socialism: new evidence from the archives. Antiquity 85, 129–41. Frey, O.-H. 2007. Keltische Kunst in vorrömischer Zeit (Kleine Schriften aus dem Vorgeschichtlichen Seminar Marburg Heft 57). Marburg: Vorgeschichtliches Seminar der Philipps-Universität Marburg. Grenville, A. 2004. Sebastian Flyte, Meet Albert Einstein ... (Part 2). Journal of the Association of Jewish Refugees http://www.ajr.org.uk/index.cfm/section.journal/issue.Apr04/article=309 Jacobsthal, P. F. 1992. The Long Vac 1940, pp. 198–228 in Cooper, R. M. (ed.), Refugee Scholars: Conversations with Tess Simpson. Leeds: Moorland Publishing. Losemann, V. 2004. Jacobsthal, Paul Ferdinand (1880–1957), pp. 502–6 in Todd, R. B. (ed.), Dictionary of British Classicists. Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum. Megaw, V. and Megaw, R. 1998. Cartoons, crocodiles and Celtic art: images from a scholar’s notebooks. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 17, 121–6.