A Gift of the Kaiser

The Busch-Reisinger Museum is brick-and-mortar proof that even the hatreds of war cannot break the cultural bonds between America and Germany. For forty years, the squat, white building whose tower catches the shadow from Memorial Hall has been the center of Germanism at the University. As such, it has been the target of the distrust and suspicion accompanying two wars and their aftermath's. But war feelings have never hindered the steady accretion of art objects that has made the Museum a world famous storehouse of reproductions and home of the finest collection of German paintings outside Germany itself.

Both Germans and hyphenated Americans developed the Museum. It was the dream of Kuno Franke, Professor of German History. Its first pieces were gifts of Kaiser Wilhelm, while Adolphus Busch, the St. Louis malt-and-hops king, and his son-in-law, Hugo Reisinger endowed the building itself.

Scheduled in 1916, the opening of the Museum was delayed six years because of the first World War. Hatred of the Kaiser was so intense in Cambridge that attendants hustled his full-length portrait into hiding in the bell tower. Nevertheless, the very presence of something German in Cambridge stirred suspicion. The story floated around that the unusually heavy foundations of the building were really gun emplacements, from which Hindenburg's Big Berthas were to lob shells into the heart of Boston. Public pressure closed the Museum's doors during the second War as well.

To the uninitiated in art, the Museum is a somber place. One of them has called it "the greyest and grimmest collection of medieval plaster casts in America." The visitor passes caskets and kings, prophets and snarling gargoyles, and even one "wise" and one "foolish" virgin. Off the main foyer is a pleasant patio with a pool, overlooked by the Brunswick lion. This is a copy of the statue erected by Henry the Lion, founder of Munich, in 1166.

Two bits of modernity in the Museum, the murals in the foyer, stirred controversy during the thirties because of their unsubtle barbs in the direction of Adolf Hitler. Painted during the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi Great Rehearsal, one shows a dwarf in military breeches whipping a group of nude workers. In the other, some soldiers with poison gas and flame throwers face others armed with but swords and shields in what seems an acute prognostication of the Blitzkrieg.

From time to time groups with no Teutonic flavor whatsoever have used the Museum. In the thirties, Cambridge children trooped into the basement to splotch paint on paper at a very popular free Art Center. During the recent war, army chaplains trained upstairs. Now, the Lowell Institute's WGBH broadcasts from the basement and the top floor holds the offices of the Public Speaking Department. The great Baroque organ, whose pipes rise from the mezzanine like a cluster of stalagmites, is usually reserved for E. Power Biggs' Sunday morning broadcasts. However, others play on it during the week if they can convince the attendant that the organ for them is a major interest.

Charles L. Kuhn, associate professor of Fine Arts and curator of the Museum since 1930, has tried to soften the strong diet of medieval art in the Museum with exhibitions of modern European work. Last year, designs of the famous Bauhaus school lined the wall. Modern Swiss paintings and a major exhibition of Scandinavian industrial art are planned for this year.

Dr. Kuhn admits that it has been "quite a struggle" to rid the Museums of the stigma born of forty years of national hatreds, but he is satisfied with the progress Busch-Reisinger has made toward its triple goal: to serve the art department, the German department, and the General needs of the University.