Max Liebermann: Assimilation and Belonging

97 The fame of the German-Jewish painter Max Liebermann (1847–1935) was such that the answer to the question “Where does the painter Liebermann live ?” was well known to Berliners : “When you come into Berlin, immediately go left !”1 Liebermann’s home on the Pariser Platz, next to the Brandenburg Gate, | fig. 1 | was located in the heart of the city. Diagonally across the square was the Prussian Academy of Arts, where Liebermann served as president from 1920 to 1932. The Pariser Platz was also where the Nazis marched soon after they had gained power in 1933, parades that the artist could have seen through his windows. Liebermann’s home thus stood for his integration into German society at one point in time and his expulsion from it at another. In an often-cited letter of February 28, 1934, to Breslau businessman and art collector Carl Sachs, Liebermann lamented his life-long striving for Jewish equality in German society. “We have unfortunately, unfortunately,” the eighty-six-year-old artist wrote, “been awoken from the beautiful dream of assimilation.”2 Gershom Scholem later suggested that for assimilated German Jews, “the unending Jewish demand for a home was soon transformed into the ecstatic illusion of being at home.”3 In this paper, I employ Liebermann’s Berlin house as a central motif in a discussion of his sense of belonging. Feeling at home for Liebermann, however, involved not only a physical place, but also a socio-cultural position, language, and, especially in his later years, memories of youth. In the early twentieth century, Liebermann held a prominent if controversial place as the leading German impressionist painter. In the reception of his work, nation and race figured significantly in claims made by his detractors and champions. From the first decade of the century, he also started to focus more of his attention on self-portraiture. Often set in the studio Liebermann had built on top of his Berlin home, these self-portraits engage in a dialogue of proximity and distance, which are at the crux of his sense of being at home, at the heart of his position as modernist painter and assimilated German Jew. The concept of assimilation in the German-Jewish context is often understood as what the Jews were to give in return for emancipation or equality, which was granted to Jews by many German states in the nineteenth century before unification and then by the German nation in 1871.4 Assimilation could take on a variety of different forms from acculturation (integration into German society while keeping one’s Jewish identity) to amalgamation (merger via intermarriage, conversion and name change).5 Many assimilated Jews En raison de la nature très publique de sa vie à l’époque de l’Empire allemand et de la République de Weimar, le peintre juif allemand Max Liebermann (1847–1935) a souvent été considéré comme un représentant exemplaire de l’assimilation juive à la vie culturelle allemande. Plutôt que de traiter Liebermann comme le représentant d’un groupe, cet essai explore la complexité de son expérience individuelle d’appartenance afin de suggérer que son sentiment d’être chez lui, même avant 1933, n’a jamais été complètement résolu. La maison berlinoise de Liebermann, située au cœur de la ville, est un motif central dans cette étude de son sentiment d’appartenance. Cet essai explore également sa position sociale, son sens du langage, la réception de sa peinture et sa pratique d’autoportraits. Souvent mis en scène dans l’atelier que Liebermann avait construit au-dessus de sa maison berlinoise, ses autoportraits engagent un dialogue de proximité et de distance qui est à la base de son sentiment d’être chez lui et au cœur de sa position de peintre moderniste et de juif allemand assimilé.