Publication details
A Primordial Divide: Belting and Germany’s Polyvalent Artistic Identities
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Citation | |
| Description | Throughout Hans Belting’s extensive and diverse approach to images, one constant emerges: as long as images have existed, assailants have tried to impose limitations on them. Images possess enduring power but can be limited, destroyed, desecrated – people die for images. On the first page of Bild und Kult (1990), Belting implicitly references the events of Joseph Roth’s novel Tarabas: Ein Gast auf dieser Erde (1934), in which the damaging of an image of the Mother of God causes a pogrom against the Jews of a Galician town. Writing about the events of Tarabas’ life in 1910s, Roth was, of course, writing about the rise of antisemitism and fascism in his 1930s Germany. Similarly, in writing about images’ power to unite or divide, Belting was intuitively writing about the desire for a reunited Germany in the 1990s. This relation of Belting with images and with his own identity as a German is most palpable in a series of reflections spanning the entire 1990s. Starting from Die Deutschen und ihre Kunst (1992) to Identität im Zweifel (1999), Belting – in what are perhaps his most intimate books – confronts himself with the ways in which Germans managed, or did not manage, to come to terms with “their” art. This topic, while seemingly contained to some articles and books, occupies much of Belting’s thought. This paper wishes to read these contributions in a historiographical light, highlighting their special – and often overlooked – place within the scholar’s bibliography. In doing so, I wish to show how the Reformation, identified by Belting as the pivotal moment in the split between two “German” artistic identities, frequently resurfaces in his work. At the same time, I will unearth the more recent foundations of this cleavage through figures of the field of art history which were formative for Belting, such as Friedrich Gerke, Ernst Kitzinger, or František Dvorník. |