Never again would any ruler, however, not even in Germany, be so spendthrift a patron of architecture. Considering the deterioration in quality evident in these palaces and castles of the seventies and eighties from the work done for Ludwig’s predecessor Ludwig I or for Frederick William IV of Prussia in the thirties and forties, this was just as well. Fortunately the activities of William II were less related to the building arts; and Hitler, a thwarted architect, had too little time.
Far more typical of the turn German architecture in general was taking in the seventies than the Ludwigsschlösser were such things as the von Tiele house in Berlin by Gustav Ebe (1834-1916) and Julius Benda (1838-97). In its crawlingly rich German Renaissance detail and its irregularly gabled silhouette this prepared the way far more definitely than Raschdorf’s contemporary Cologne buildings for a veritable flood of such coarse work all over Germany in the next decade. This characteristic German mode has analogies with the English style-phase of the seventies and eighties somewhat perversely known as ‘Queen Anne’; more specifically it often resembles very closely what is called ‘Pont Street Dutch’ in England. But leadership comparable to that provided in England by Webb and Shaw was entirely lacking, and even lesser talent of the order of George’s or Collcutt’s (see Chapter [12]).
Usually executed in dark-coloured brick with stone trim, this prime manifestation of the bourgeois ambitions of the Bismarckian Empire produced a spate of buildings of all sorts that have come to look very grim indeed with the accumulated smoke of years. Old photographs indicate that many of them once had a certain lightness and even a quite festive air, Wagnerian in the Meistersinger vein rather than in that of the Ring as at Neuschwanstein. But the materials used were always hard and mechanically handled and the execution of the detail at once fussy and metallic. No positive originality in general composition or in planning made up, as with much comparable work in England, for the anti-architectonic character of the basic approach.
A prominent late example is the Rathaus[[205]] in Hamburg built in 1886-97. This vast and turgid edifice contrasts most unhappily with the suave High Renaissance design of Wimmel & Forsmann’s contiguous Exchange built in the thirties. Its tall tower, moreover, has neither the richness of outline of Scott’s on the Nikolaikirche nor the simple directness of de Chateauneuf’s on the Petrikirche, with both of which it still disputes the central position on the Hamburg skyline.
The nationalistic ‘Meistersinger mode’, so to call it, had only too long a life, lasting well into the twentieth century. But it was early challenged by a new modulation of German taste in the eighties, parallel to that which the English also experienced, towards an eighteenth-century revival—here in Germany definitely Neo-Baroque—of which Linderhof was probably the first really sumptuous and striking example. Ebe & Benda early deserted the German Renaissance for a German Baroque at least as chastened as that of Hitzig’s much earlier Exchange when they built their Palais Mosse in Berlin of 1882-4. In 1882 Paul Wallot (1841-1912), who had also worked earlier in the Meistersinger mode, won the competition for the Reichstag Building with an overpoweringly monumental Neo-Baroque project recalling Vanbrugh more than Bernini or Schlüter. Erected by him in 1884-94, this was soon matched at the inner end of Unter den Linden by Raschdorf’s cathedral.
Figure 16A and 16B. Vilhelm Petersen and Ferdinand Jensen: Copenhagen, Søtorvet, 1873-6, elevation
Unlike Napoleon III and Francis Joseph, the German emperors William I, Frederick I, and William II did not succeed in making their capital an important exemplar of nineteenth-century urbanism. Moreover, the influential position that Germany had occupied in the international world of architecture in the first half of the century was less and less maintained after the death of Stüler. Not until the twentieth century did Germans again make a significant contribution to European architectural history (see Chapter [20]).
With the deterioration of German leadership in the seventies and eighties went also a general decline in the architectural standards of the Scandinavian countries that had so successfully based their later Romantic Classicism and their Rundbogenstil on German models of the thirties, forties, and fifties. In Denmark the work of Meldahl was increasingly inferior to that of Herholdt. Although he was only nine years younger than Herholdt, his direction of the Copenhagen Academy, beginning in 1873, coincided with the feeblest and most eclectic period in Danish architecture, from which recovery started only in the nineties with the early work of Martin Nyrop (1849-1925) in Copenhagen and of Hack Kampmann (1856-1920) in Aarhus (see Chapter [24]).