The people of Brandenburg can thank a dynasty and a poet for the fact that, today, this landscape of sand and pine trees is nonetheless regarded as one of the great European „cultural landscapes.“ The Hohenzollerns transformed the lake-rich landscape around Berlin and Potsdam into a work of art, a secular Arcadia whose beauty stands in strange contrast to the sandy soil whence it was wrung. It is a miracle in the middle of the „box of sand“ – as the Brandenburg Marches have contemptuously been called – and it is unparalleled in Europe. You have to visit Tuscany, Venice or the palaces on the Loire to find anything similar, and the astonishment felt by the many visitors at this great effort to achieve beauty is understandable. And instead of declining into insignificance, the Mark Brandenburg aristocracy’s „cottages“ were elevated to the same level by Theodor Fontane in his „Walks through the Mark Brandenburg.“
The Hohenzollerns built themselves into the hearts of their subjects with the palaces of Sanssouci, Charlottenburg, Rheinsberg, Glienicke, Babelsberg, Charlottenhof, Paretz and Cecilienhof. Fontane saved Ruppin, Gransee, Wustrau, the Oderbruch, Friedersdorf and the Barnim from oblivion – or rather made sure that they were discovered. And today you sometimes see visitors standing in front of the palaces holding a copy of the „Walks“ rather than a common-or-garden guidebook. You can even say that Brandenburg was a creation of Fontane’s, long after it had been absorbed into Prussia. Even today you will find out more about the people and landscapes from Fontane’s novel „Stechlin“ than from any guidebook on the region.
Brandenburg had a long prehistory under the Ascanians and the early Hohenzollerns, who came from South Germany and had previously been Castle Counts in Nuremberg; and long after it had been politically replaced by Prussia as the dynasty’s heartland, the region experienced a short era of artistic genius; today it is searching for its future. Brandenburg is all that remains of Prussia, an idea that had a state – or an army that possessed it, as the critics would say.
Only once did Brandenburg ride at the head of a column: not in the battles of Frederick the Great, but afterwards, after his death, from 1790 to 1840. Prussian classicism is a Brandenburg creation, and virtually all its representatives were born here: Gilly and Schinkel, Schadow, Rauch and Persius. For a generation they dominated the style of architecture and sculpture throughout Europe. All the large buildings of Berlin were built in this style between 1820 and 1840: the Neue Wache (New Guardhouse), the Schauspielhaus (Theatre) and the Alte Museum (Old Museum). It is astonishing and hard to fathom that, for a historical second, Germany’s intellectual centre was not located in the „genius corner“ in the southwest of the country, but in the world of carrots and potatoes between the Prignitz and the Uckermark.
Add the writers, Heinrich von Kleist, the Schwerins, the Arnims, Fouqué and Chamisso, and the romantic impetus is carried from the Mark into the world. Nearly all the arts suddenly begin to thrive on the local soil; in painting, too, people like Blechen, Menzel and Liebermann will ultimately leave the other regions of Germany behind them. But it only lasted for a summer, a short century, and the rest was a longdrawn-out parting, which Liebermann’s pictures perhaps capture best.
