What Worpswede, with its gripping life stories, shows is how tricky the relationship to land, nation and the new century was in the wake of the rapid industrial modernisation of German cities, and how an embryonic Modernist art focusing on individual feeling and a back-to-nature conservatism were two contrasting responses. 

The British art historian, sometime Master of the Queen's Pictures and Communist spy, Anthony Blunt, once declared that an alternative 20th-century European school of painting was in the making in the 1920s. With hindsight, one might argue the fascist art of the 1930s began with Millet and early van Gogh. Men like Mackensen, Modersohn and am Ende seem by this token to be caught up in the fascist story of art, busily denying Post-Impressionism. But I don't find them guilty as painters. Even as they worked, their styles were being ideologically instrumentalised beyond their control. The same is true of Becker, the irony that her utterly different qualities also owed much to the late work of van Gogh.

Worpswede was a compellingly diverse search for new ways to live, with appropriate art forms, for the European 20th century. It's there for all of us to understand, in our quest to understand Germany.