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the people but instead by the "strongman from above," as Bismarck
was called. 
This sort of coup was far more difficult to transpose into noble pictures
than either 
the 1848 attempt at a revolutionary transformation or the 1813 "war
of semi- 
insurrection.'"2 For what aspect of the Franco-German War of 1870-71
could 
possibly be transfigured? The superiority of the Prussian needle guns? General
Roon's organizational talent, Moltke's battle plans, the Bismarckian blood-and-
iron outlook, the theatrical posing of individual kings and dukes? Granted,
these 
very themes were taken up in the following years by such popular artists
as Anton 
von Werner, Theodor Rocholl, and other so-called battle and panorama painters.
They provided those "stirring" genre paintings in the style of
bourgeois realism 
featuring German soldiers enthusiastically raising their swords at the sight
of their 
commanders and ruling dynasts, tossing their caps into the air,3 taking up
com- 
fortable quarters in French palaces after their hard-won victories, and so
on- 
pictures which, as reproductions, made their way into German civil service
of- 
fices, bourgeois parlors, and schoolbooks. 
But such blatant themes were too base, too vulgar for the more demanding
"serious" painters of this era. Elated by German victory over France
and the 
founding of a new empire, they also tended toward the bellicose and heroic
in 
their outlook, but they were more likely to express it in mythological exaggera-
tions: in struggles among centaurs, battles with Amazons, and rides of apocalyp-
tic horsemen.4 This is attested by all those scenes of bloodshed and triumph
in 
the paintings of Feuerbach, Triibner, or B6cklin, which abound with acts
of vio- 
lence and the use of power. They take as their pictorial subject not Kaiser
Wilhelm, 
nor Moltke, nor Bismarck, but rather some sort of mythic conqueror or creatures
of fable, thus making a completely timeless impression, even while-viewed
objectively-demonstrating the same "might makes right" standpoint
so typical 
of the 1870s. Even Bismarck's harsh critic Nietzsche was, as we know, in
such 
a fundamental agreement with this quest for power as to dream of a "German
rebirth" through the spirit of war.5 Very few artists of the era felt
really repelled 
by this neo-German arrogance-what is perhaps the most persuasive example
of 
such a critique is to be found in the works of Menzel. As early as 1866,
he saw 
nothing heroic in the Battle of Sadowa (or K6niggratz) and confined himself
to 
portraying the misery of the dying and wounded.6 In 1870-71, he still refused
to be swept along by Germany's universal intoxication with victory. The subject
of the only picture he made during this war is the arrival of a prisoner
transport 
in Berlin,7 and the work's unfinished condition actually heightens its gripping
quality. Here, we see on one side a Prussian militiaman with planted bayonet,
carrying out his duty with routine composure, while on the other side two
hulk- 
ing figures lurch out of the door of the railroad car, their half washed-out,
half 
sketched-in outlines making them look like monsters or even corpses. 
The decades just previous to World War I, on the other hand, were quite 
different, both ideologically and aesthetically. The years between the mid-1870s
and 1890 constitute a period when Bismarck shifted to peaceful diplomacy,
and 
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Hermand