‘‘Wrestling Match in the Show Booth’’ (1903) by Heinrich Zille, whose spirited images of Berlin make many Germans feel nostalgic. A hinterhofe, or inner courtyard, below, in an 1896 photograph by Zille.

MICHAEL KIMMELMAN ESSAY

BERLIN - Onstage and in various exhibitions Berlin this year has been celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Heinrich Zille.
If you’re not German, the name probably is not recognizable. But here, where thousands turned out for his funeral in 1929, and where a small museum is now devoted solely to him, it’s a different story.
The other day a flood of Berliners lovingly pored over his sketches, prints, paintings, photographs and obscene drawings (did I mention he was a sometime pornographer-) on the last day of a retrospective at the Academy of Arts. The show seems to make Germans wax nostalgic.
The world is not such a small place, it turns out. That’s one of the lessons of Zille’s sesquicentennial. Art is today widely presumed to be universal. But countless Zilles still thrive in cultural byways of parochial pride.
Europeans especially cherish their local heroes. When earthquakes struck Umbria a decade or so ago, it was notable how headlines around the world fretted about the basilica in Assisi and about frescoes by Cimabue and Giotto. These were famous objects, and the cost of art was most easily measured in dollars.
But Italians actually living there worried about their local churches and hometown painters . Constantino Centroni, then the superintendent for art in Umbria, summed it up best. “Each of us, myself included, he said, “has deep roots in these places where we were born, and each of us wants his church or bell tower because it represents his own culture and heritage.
He was talking about value, not cost.
Were he a Berliner, he might have been thinking of Zille, who was born near Dresden on January 10, 1858, but came to Berlin as a child and bound himself inextricably to the city. A friend, a Berlin native, at the mention of Zille’s name recently, nodded. “Oh, yes, he’s famous, she said, as if this were self-evident, explaining that everybody knows his pictures of the old mietskasernen, or rental barracks, with their hinterhofe, or inner courtyards, now largely vacant but once noisy places of earthen privies .
And then my friend added that her own grandmother was the kind of woman yelling down from one of the tenement windows to her children in Zille’s drawings, even though my friend’s grandmother was not nearly old enough to have been around when he made these pictures. Zille, she was basically saying, gave the city an enduring image of itself .
Zille made a name with the masses drawing illustrations for books and satirical newspapers - affectionate but never sentimental and often brutal pictures .
What matters is why Berliners still love him now. Partly the explanation can be found in his remarkable, almost offhand photographs of the city’s underbelly - its back alleys and wide avenues and its garbage blowing in the wind and piles of dirt and tent villages on the edges of town - literally views of the end of the road. These encapsulated a notion of a place, Berlin, forever unfinished and, as locals like to say, kaput.
Global culture focuses on big names and rankings, to our general impoverishment. John Willett, a scholar of German culture, contemplating the Secessionists, wrote about the dangers of embracing “a national or parochial view of art - as even the most enlightened are sometimes tempted to do, because “as you narrow your horizon in this way you no longer judge by the highest standards.
That’s right.
But Zille reminds us that high standards are not the only standards that count when grappling with legacies like his. After all, the essence of his pictures was to show how monotonous life would be if we only cared about what’s great in the world and not about everything local and particular and even sometimes untranslatable that actually makes life rich. When Berliners celebrate Zille’s birthday, this is what they are celebrating.