An uncommon museum

B.N. Goswamy

Hardly anyone here is likely to have heard of the place or the museum I write about here: Gottorf, a small but attractive former Duchy in the northern-most part of Germany, right next to the border with Denmark. But this is no surprise, for I too knew precious little about it even when I was at close-by Kiel, capital city of Schleswig-Holstein, decades ago. I had gone to teach as a visiting professor at the university there, but I was struggling with other things: settling down, for this was my first assignment abroad; getting acquainted with a very different culture; keeping pace with an altered rhythm of life; learning the German language. Art was not on my horizon then, for history is what I had gone to teach. All the same, on looking back, I know that I should have gone to Gottorf. For that small place was once a distinguished centre of culture, had featured in the Late Renaissance and High Baroque periods of northern Germany, had a wonderful castle and palace, had been nurtured by some remarkably cultivated and curious Dukes, and had history written all over it, having been buffeted between different powers — Germany, Denmark, Russia — for close to two centuries. So, regrets remain.

The Gottorf Palace, having seen good days and bad, is now the largest museum complex in northern Germany. In the midst of lavishly laid out, extensive gardens, it houses a remarkable collection: great sculptures and paintings, including portraits of former Dukes and their wives, and works by women artists of the 18th and 19th centuries, dazzling Gobelin tapestries and other hangings, five centuries of furniture and decorative arts, a Prints and Drawings department, even an end-of-nineteenth-century Art Nouveau department. There is so much to see and absorb: the legacy left by Duke Frederick III (1597-1659) alone having enough to engage one for hours.

It is naturally not possible to go into things at any great length, but at least two areas I wish to enter here. First, to draw attention to the works — not only sculptures but also one hundred original casting models, preparatory maquettes and studies — of the famous German sculptor, Hans Wimmer, which were donated to the museum a quarter of a century ago by his family. Hans Wimmer’s range of work was singularly wide, but his greatest achievement was in the area of portraits which can be seen to be marked by ‘a high degree of psychological penetration of the sitters’ characters and a translation of physical appearances into compelling artistic form’. Wimmer was very aware of his contemporaries and celebrated them through portraits: Ernst Junger, the man who became famous not only as a war hero but also as a writer and philosopher who authored Storm of Steel, a much admired memoir of the war; Wilhelm Furtwangler, the great conductor who everyone saw as ‘eyes closed, forehead furrowed’, as if to shut out the outside world as he made music; Oskar Kokoschka, the great painter who led people to his ‘school of seeing’ through his startling portraits; perhaps more even than these, Aba, the lovely African lady who took Europe by storm with her majestic presence and ‘an unbroken sense of her own body’.

The second ‘area’ I spoke of earlier as entering, was one of the most remarkable objects made in its own times — the Duke Frederick III conceived it — that came to be known as the ‘Giant Globe’. Reflecting the great interest in things scientific that was in the air in the 17th century, it was a truly giant globe, over 10 feet in diameter, bearing on its surface ‘a cartographically exact representation of the then known world’, and, on the inside — you could actually enter it and sit on a bench that could accommodate 12 people — in this hollow sphere was displayed the ‘entire firmament’ showing the course of the planets and stars: something like a planetarium. This massive apparatus was set in motion by a water mill in the basement of the Globe House, which worked using the latest clock-making technology. This marvel of technology, that won instant fame as the ‘Gottorf Globe’, brought the place great prestige.

But then the Globe also aroused jealousy, or avarice. The Czar of Russia, Peter the Great, wanted it for himself when Gottorf was defeated in a conflict with Denmark, then under Russian shadow, and actually had it removed to St. Petersburg in 1717. This, however, was not the end of the story, for in 1747 it was severely damaged in a fire. It was renovated, but was never the same again. It changed hands again, returning briefly to Germany, but was back in Russia in 1947. All that the Gottorf museum was left with was a reconstructed drawing of the Globe and its working. It is easy to see now why I regret never having been to Gottorf when I had the chance.