Wilhelm Waetzoldt, der Erzieher oder über den missglückten Versuch, Mitteldeutschland kunsthistorisch zu einen

Summary Professor Wilhelm Waetzoldt, banned by the Nazi Government from the post of the General Director of the Berlin State Museums to the University of Halle, in the place of Professor Paul Frankl, gave a public lecture on “Medieval Art in Central Germany”on the 9. January 1936. His aim was to construct an artistic unity mainly characterized by constant qualities, as herbness and smoothness, due to the geographic and also ethnic position of this territory. Waetzoldt's views can be regarded, even in comparison with his own work, as a concession to Ideology. The interest in questions of geography of art in this time could be found in dissertations of F. W. Deichmann (1934 in Halle) and Paul Pieper (1936 in Bonn). The opposed view to Waetzoldt's was reprensented mainly by Paul Frankl, who regarded, at the International Congress of Art History in Stockholm (1933), the climatic, art psychological and sociological problems as premisses for such a methodological approach.