ABSTRACT
A new wave of enthusiasm for the baroque passed through Germany in the 1920s, reversing the rejection of this period of art and architectural history as disgraceful, exuberant and grotesque. 1 Georg Dehio, one of Germany’s most senior art historians, in 1926 reported the heightened admiration with which his contemporaries regarded the artistic mastery of the baroque; his critic Carl Neumann observed a modish turn towards, and even a fanaticism for, the baroque; 2 and Hugo Schnell, an emerging scholar at the time of the Weimar Republic, later remembered a “secret congeniality” between that period and the baroque era. 3 The increased popularity of the baroque in Weimar Germany is clearly evidenced by an increase in the number of publications on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art, architecture and culture, ranging from scholarly productions to popular booklets and coffee-table books. 4 This body of scholarship was compounded by the renewed attraction, in the 1920s, to baroque monuments and architectural sites as a kind of modern mass tourism phenomenon, in which tens of thousands of visitors were purported to have been transported to such Bavarian baroque churches as the Wieskirche or Balthasar Neumann’s Vierzehnheiligen by the developing coach trip business. 5
