Art and Resistance in Germany 9781501344862, 9781501344893, 9781501344886

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Art and Resistance in Germany

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Visual Cultures and German Contexts Series Editors Deborah Ascher Barnstone (University of Technology Sydney, Australia) Thomas O. Haakenson (California College of the Arts, USA) Visual Cultures and German Contexts publishes innovative research into visual culture in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, as well as in diasporic linguistic and cultural communities outside of these geographic, historical, and political borders. The series invites scholarship by academics, curators, architects, artists, and designers across all media forms and time periods. It engages with traditional methods in visual culture analysis as well as inventive interdisciplinary approaches. It seeks to encourage a dialogue amongst scholars in traditional disciplines with those pursuing innovative interdisciplinary and intermedial research. Of particular interest are provocative perspectives on archival materials, original scholarship on emerging and established creative visual fields, investigations into time-based forms of aesthetic expression, and new readings of history through the lens of visual culture. The series offers a muchneeded venue for expanding how we engage with the field of Visual Culture in general. Proposals for monographs, edited volumes, and outstanding research studies are welcome, by established as well as emerging writers from a wide range of comparative, theoretical and methodological perspectives. Advisory Board Donna West Brett, University of Sydney, Australia Charlotte Klonk, Humboldt Universität Berlin, Germany Nina Lübbren, Anglia Ruskin University, UK Maria Makela, California College of the Arts, USA Patrizia C. McBride, Cornell University, USA Rick McCormick, University of Minnesota, USA Elizabeth Otto, University at Buffalo SUNY, USA Kathryn Starkey, Stanford University, USA Annette F. Timm, University of Calgary, Canada James A. van Dyke, University of Missouri, USA Forthcoming Volumes in the Series Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School edited by Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler Photofascism: Photography, Film, and Exhibition Culture in 1930s Germany and Italy by Vanessa Rocco Single People and Mass Housing in Germany and Beyond, 1850-1930: (No)Home Away from Home by Erin Eckhold Sassin ii

Art and Resistance in Germany Edited by Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Elizabeth Otto

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC 1B 3DP , UK BLOOMSBURY , BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America, 2019 Copyright © Deborah Ascher Barnstone, Elizabeth Otto and Contributors, 2019 Cover design: Maria Rajka Cover image: John Heartfield, Alle Fäuste zu einer geballt (All Fists Clenched as One), Oct. 4, 1934 (DETAIL) © The Heartfield Community of Heirs / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN :

HB : 978-1-5013-4486-2 ePDF : 978-1-5013-4488-6 eBook: 978-1-5013-4487-9

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents List of Illustrations Introduction: Welcome to the Resistance! Elizabeth Otto and Deborah Ascher Barnstone 1

How Art Resists Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Elizabeth Otto

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Part I Art That Alters Worldviews 2 3 4

Cut with the Kitchen Knife: Visualizing Politics in Berlin Dada Patrizia McBride Walter Gropius’s Dammerstock and the Possibilities of an Architectural Resistance Kevin Berry Authority and Ambiguity: Three Sculptors in National Socialist Germany Nina Lübbren

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Part II Art That Inspires Action 5

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Teach Your Children Well: Hermynia Zur Mühlen, George Grosz, and the Art of Radical Pedagogy in Germany between the World Wars Barbara McCloskey Parting Shots: Ella Bergmann-Michel’s Wahlkampf 1932 (Letzte Wahl) Jennifer Kapczynski “War Feeds its People Better”: Mother Courage and the Limits of Revolutionary Theater Noah Soltau

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Part III Art That Critiques Symbols 8

Montage as Meme: Learning from the Radical Avant-Gardes Sabine Kriebel 9 On the Possibility of Resistance in Two Silverpoints by Otto Dix James van Dyke 10 A Whisper Rather than a Shout: Ursula Wilms and Heinz Hallmann’s Topography of Terror Kathleen James-Chakraborty

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Part IV Art That is Created in Acts of Resistance 11 From Anti-Nazi Postcards to Anti-Trump Social Media: Laughter as Resistance, Opposition, or Cold Comfort? Peter Chametzky 12 Opera as Resistance: The Little Match Girl and the Terrorist in Helmut Lachenmann’s Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern Joy Calico 13 Montage as a Form of Resistant Aesthetics Today: Marcel Odenbach and Thomas Hirschhorn Verena Krieger List of Contributors Index

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Joman, Mein Covfefe, 2017, internet meme. Printed with permission of the artist. “If only the Führer knew!” Banner flown during the marches in Wunsiedel, Bavaria in 2017. © Rechts gegen Rechts. George Grosz, “Print XVI ,” Ecce Homo, 1922/23. Offset lithograph, 10.4 × 7.9 in., 26.4 × 20 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, NJ / VG Bild-Kunst. Copyright Agency, 2018. Josephine Meckseper, RAF Tray, 2002. C-print (cebachrome), 20 × 16 in., 50.8 × 40.6 cm. The picture shows showing Meckseper as a cigarette girl (background) with her aunt, a member of the RAF, in the foreground. © Josephine Meckseper / Courtesy Timothy Taylor London/New York. Käthe Kollwitz, Die Freiwilligen (The Volunteers), 1922/23. Woodcut, 18.0 × 25.75 in., 47.5 × 65.4 cm. The print shows five volunteer soldiers who have all given their lives to the cause, with Kollwitz’s son Peter in the upper left, in Death’s embrace. Woodcut. Museum of Modern Art, New York/Digital Image. © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA /Art. Gustavo Aceves standing next to one of his horses in Lapidarium, in front of the Brandenburg Gate, 2015. © Australscope. A view from underneath the glass floor of performers, with audience above, Anne Imhof ’s Faust, 2017. © ANSA . Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann in front of their works at the First International Dada Fair, 1920. On the left is Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919–20. © 2018 Berlinische Galerie / Foto: Kai-Annett Becker / Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / ADAGP, Paris / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Hannah Höch, Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands, (Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany), 1919. Photomontage and collage on paper, 44.9 × 35.4 in., 114 × 90 cm. Photo: Jörg Anders. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz (Nationalgalerie, Berlin)/Art Resource, New York. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Detail of lower-right quadrant of Cut with the Kitchen Knife featuring the phrase “Weltrevolution” (“World Revolution”; undated picture). © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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List of Illustrations Detail of lower-right quadrant of Cut with the Kitchen Knife featuring the phrase “Die große Welt-Dada” (“The great Dada world”). Walter Gropius. Bedroom Dwelling Group 9, Siedlung Dammerstock, Karlsruhe, 1928–9. Photographer: Atelier Bauer. Credit: BauhausArchiv Berlin. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Walter Gropius. Site plan of Siedlung Dammerstock, Karlsruhe, 1928–9. Credit: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Walter Gropius. Exterior view of Siedlung Dammerstock, Karlsruhe, 1928–9. Photographer: Adolf K. Fr. Supper. Credit: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG BildKunst, Bonn. Walter Gropius. Elevation, plan, and section of Dwelling Group 9, Siedlung Dammerstock, Karlsruhe, 1928–9. Credit: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Oda Schottmüller, Alraune (Mandrake), c. 1941. Photograph of Oda Schottmüller dancing and wearing a mask of her own making © Archiv Susanne und Dieter Kahl, Berlin. Oda Schottmüller, Studie zu einer Gartenskulptur (Study for a Garden Sculpture), undated (c. 1941). Plaster, whereabouts unknown. © Archiv Susanne und Dieter Kahl, Berlin. Hanna Cauer, Allegretto, 1935–6. Bronze, whereabouts unknown © Bildstelle und Fotoarchiv Stadt Nürnberg. Hanna Cauer, Nischenfigur (Niche Figure, or Moderato), 1935–6, exhibited at the Great German Art Exhibition, 1937, in Gallery 15 [at right]. Plaster, dimensions unknown, location unknown © Stadtarchiv München, Fotosammlung; Photo: Georg Schödl, 1937. Milly Steger, Kniende (Kneeling Woman), cast stone, 32 in. / 81 cm high; fragment of Kniende as it was discovered as part of the Berliner Skulpturenfund of 2010. Property of the German Federal Republic © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, Berlin; Photo: Achim Kleuker. Milly Steger, Sinnende (Sitzende Figur) (Musing Woman [Seated Figure]), c. 1937. plaster, whereabouts unknown © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann; Photo: Heinrich Hoffmann, 1937. George Grosz, Der Dorfschullehrer (The Country Teacher) in Kleine Grosz-Mappe (Small Grosz Portfolio), 1917. Transfer lithograph, 8.25 × 5.5 in., 20.9 × 13.5 cm. Art © Estate of George Grosz / Licensed by VAGA , New York, NY. George Grosz, untitled illustration in Bruno Schönlank, Sonniges Land (Sunny Land), Berlin: Paul Cassirer Verlag, 1920. Art © Estate of George Grosz / Licensed by VAGA , New York, NY.

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George Grosz, cover illustration for Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Was Peterchens Freunde Erzählen (What Little Peter’s Friends Tell Him), 2nd edition, Berlin: Malik-Verlag, 1924. Art © Estate of George Grosz / Licensed by VAGA , New York, NY. George Grosz, illustration for Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Was Peterchens Freunde Erzählen (What Little Peter’s Friends Tell Him), 1st edition, Berlin: Malik-Verlag, 1921. Art © Estate of George Grosz / Licensed by VAGA , New York, NY. Heinrich Vogeler, illustration for Was Peterchens Freunde Erzählen (What Little Peter’s Friends Tell Him) in Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Es war einmal . . . und es wird sein: Märchen (Once Upon a Time . . . and What Will Be: Fairytales), Berlin: Verlag der Jugendinternationale, 1930. “Militarization of Children,” part of the exhibition Nature of the Enemy, Office of War Information (OWI ), Rockefeller Plaza, New York, 1943. Photograph by Arthur S. Siegel, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. George Grosz, God of War, 1940. Oil on canvas, 3ft. 11 in. × 2 ft. 11.5 in., 119.5 × 90 cm. Art © Estate of George Grosz / Licensed by VAGA , New York, NY. Ella Bergmann-Michel, Wahlkampf 1932 (Letzte Wahl), 1932 (Figures 6.1–6.2 and 6.4–6.8). A Litfaßsäule plastered with campaign posters vies for voters ahead of the November 1932 national vote. Screenshot. A close-up of a poster for the Center Party list for the November 1932 elections. Screenshot. On a Berlin Litfaßsäule, the profile of the murderer in Fritz Lang’s M (1931) casts a shadow on the wanted poster describing his own crimes. Screenshot. Pedestrians gathered before a Frankfurt NSDAP outfitting shop stare sternly at Ella Bergmann-Michel as she films. Screenshot. A rally attendee heckles the filmmaker while she works. Screenshot. A frame from the final shot of Letzte Wahl, of a poster advertising for a February 1932 lecture by novelist Alfred Döblin for neue frankfurt. Screenshot. Hitler and Hindenburg stare down from a tattered poster appealing to voters before the March 1933 election that completed the Nazi takeover. Screenshot. Below the poster of Hitler and Hindenburg, a provocative blank space that Bergmann-Michel compels us to contemplate. Screenshot. The complete campaign poster featuring Hitler and Hindenburg, created for the March 1932 election. The poster reads: “Never shall the Reich be destroyed if you are united and faithful.” Reprinted courtesy of Art Resource. Credit: bpk Bildagentur / Heinrich Hoffmann (1885–1957).

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List of Illustrations The Airforce Thunderbirds aerial demonstration team flies over the opening of a Minnesota Twins game. © Department of Defense, July, 2009. Meryl Streep as Mother Courage in the Delacort Theater production. © Kino Lorber/Kanopy, 2008. Meryl Streep at the 2012 Academy Awards. © Associated Press, 2012. Anonymous, Portrait of Donald Trump, 2016, retweeted by chelsanity. Anonymous, Appropriation of John Heartfield’s Self Portrait with President Zörgiebel, 1929 for use in the London student protests. Mona Lisa beheads George Osborne, British Conservative Party politician and Chancellor of the Exchequer, 2014, internet meme. Puma Superstructure advertisement, Bus Stop in Berlin, Germany, 2009. Photograph by Author. Anonymous, Portrait of Donald Trump, 2016, internet meme. John Heartfield, Wer Bürgerblätter liest wird blind und taub! Weg mit den Verdummungsbandagen! (Whoever reads bourgeois newspapers becomes blind and deaf. Away with the stultifying bandages!), AIZ 9, no. 6, 1930. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-S194). John Heartfield, Der Sinn des Hitlergrusses (The Meaning of the Hitler Salute), AIZ 11, no. 42, 1932. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-S194). Phil Kremer, Portrait of Donald Trump, n.d. Reprinted with permission of the artist. Creator unknown, Memorial Plaque of The Bowling Green Massacre, 2016, internet meme. Creator unknown, Fusion of Donald Trump and Richard Nixon, 2017, internet meme. Otto Dix, Der Senn Joseph (Joseph the Dairyman), 1934. Silverpoint and pencil on cardboard. 11.7 × 5.8 in., 32.2 × 24.8 cm. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Inv SZ Dix 12. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche Museen Berlin / Art Resource, NY. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Otto Dix, Der Senn Ephraim (Ephraim the Dairyman), 1934. Silverpoint and pencil on primed paper. 11.7 × 6 in., 32.5 × 25 cm. Private Collection. Photo: Courtesy of Otto Dix Estate, Bevaix, Switzerland. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Otto Dix, Selbstbildnis als Zeichner (Self-Portrait Drawing), 1933. Silverpoint and pencil on primed paper. 12.8 × 18.6 in., 58.3 × 47.2 cm. Inv. SZ Dix 10. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche Museen Berlin / Jörg P. Anders / Art Resource, NY. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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Hans Baldung-Grien (1484–1545), Karlsruher Skizzenbuch (Sketchbook of Hans Baldung-Grien), fol. 58 recto. Münster Preacher Caspar Hedio, 1543. Silverpoint on primed paper. Inv.-Nr. VIII 1062. Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe. Photo: bpk / Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe / Art Resource, NY. Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, Der Hulebauer, Rauhe Alb (Swabian Farmer). 1932, as published in Das Deutsche Volksgesicht (Face of the German Folk). Photo: Author. Otto Dix, Der Judenfriedhof von Randegg (The Jewish Cemetery of Randegg), 1934. Silverpoint. 19.1 × 21 in., 48.6 × 53.2 cm. Kunstmuseum Albstadt (Stiftung Sammlung Walther Groz) Inv. Nr. SWG 76/574, Photo: Courtesy Kunstmuseum Albstadt. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Otto Dix, Judenfriedhof in Randegg im Winter mit Hohenstoffeln (The Jewish Cemetery in Randegg in the Winter with the Hohenstoffeln), 1935, oil on panel, 23.6 × 31.5 in., 60 × 80 cm. Inv. Nr. Nl 919. Saarlandmuseum Saarbrücken, Stiftung Saarländischer Kulturbesitz. Photo: Tom Gundelwein. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Eduard Thöny, “Das künftige Oberland” (“The Future Heights”), Simplicissimus 24, no. 22, August 26, 1919. Photo: Courtesy Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek Weimar / Hans Zimmermann. “Tiroler Aufstand 1921 (Frei nach Defregger)” (“Tyrolean Rebellion 1921 [Loosely after Defregger]”), Kladderadatsch, October 30, 1921. Photo: Courtesy Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg. Ursula Wilms and Heinz Hallmann, Topography of Terror, 2006–10, Berlin. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Topographie_des_ Terrors_2011.jpg Daniel Libeskind, Jewish Museum, 1989–99, Berlin. https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Garten_des_Exils_Gesamt.jpg Peter Eisenman, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 1997–2005, Berlin. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Memorial_to_the_ Murdered_Jews_of_Europeabove.jpg Aldo Rossi, IBA Housing, 1987, Berlin. Courtesy of Livia Hurley. Prince Albrecht Palace, 1737–9, Berlin, as remodeled by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in the 1830s. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Prinz-Albrecht-Palais.jpg Ursula Wilms and Heinz Hallmann, Documentation Center, Topography of Terror, 2006–10, Berlin. https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Topographie_des_Terrors_1.jpg Martin Gropius and Heino Schmieden, Martin Gropius Building, 1877–81, Berlin. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gropius_ Bau_Berlin_1.jpg

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Bielandberg and Moser, Europa Building, 1926–31, rebuilt 1959–66, Berlin. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Berlin,_Kreuzberg,_ Stresemannstrasse,_Europahaus,_Bundesministerium_für_ Wirtschaftliche_Zusammenarbeit_und_Entwicklung.jpg 10.9: Ernst Sagebiel, Detlev Rohwedder Building as seen from the Topography of Terror, 1935–6, Berlin. https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Finanzministerium_Berlin_Rückseite.jpg 11.1: Willi Baumeister, Jokkmokmädchen (Maiden from Jokkmok), 1941, collage on a postcard of Adolf Ziegler, Terpsichore, 1937, 5.8 × 4.1 in., 14.9 × 10.5 cm. Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. 11.2: Willi Baumeister, Altered Avenger, pen and ink drawing on reproduction of Arno Breker, The Avenger, page 194 from article “Die Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung 1941, II ,” Kunst dem Volk (Vienna), September 1941, Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. 11.3: Twitler, Facebook screenshot, September 7, 2017. 11.4: Oskar Schlemmer, Postcard to Willi Baumeister, 1912, collage, 4.1 × 5.8 in., 10.5 × 14.9 cm. Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. 11.5: Franz Krause front of postcard to Willi Baumeister, c. 1942, collage and pen and ink, 5.8 × 4.1 in., 14.9 × 10.5 cm. Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. 11.6: Franz Krause back of postcard to Willi Baumeister, c. 1942, pencil, 4.1 × 5.8 in., 10.5 × 14.9 cm. Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. 11.7: Franz Krause, front of field postcard to Willi Baumeister, c. 1942, pen and ink and stamps, 4.1 × 5.8 in., 10.5 × 14.9 cm. Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. 11.8: Franz Krause, back of field postcard to Willi Baumeister, c. 1942, pen and ink, 4.1 × 5.8 in., 10.5 × 14.9 cm. Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. 11.9: Robert Michel, Postcard to Willi Baumeister and Family, November 21, 1936, typed text and pen and ink, 4.1 × 5.8 in., 10.5 × 14.9 cm. Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. 11.10: Robin Bell, #Emoluments Welcome, projection on Trump International Hotel, Washington DC , May 15, 2017, as circulated on Twitter. Photo by Liz Gorman/bellvisuals.com. 11.11: Mike Mitchell, “Ћ 45” on the Street, 2017, as reproduced in Brian Boucher, “Meet the Artist Whose Swastika-Inspired Anti-Trump Logo Has Gone Viral Across the Country,” artnet.com News, August 22, 2017. Courtesy artnet.com News and Mike Mitchell.

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Helmut Lachenmann, Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (The Little Match Girl), Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2007, page 173, measures 196–203. Marcel Odenbach, Abgelegt und Aufgehangen (Put Down and Hung Up), 2013; collage: ink on paper 7 ft. 5 in. × 6 ft. 10 in., 225 × 208 cm. Sammlung Hildebrand, Leipzig. Photo: Vesko Gösel. Courtesy the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018. Marcel Odenbach, collages at an intermediate stage of production. Photo: Vesko Gösel. © Marcel Odenbach. Marcel Odenbach, Mahnmal für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus unter Freiburger Universitätsangehörigen (Memorial for the Victims of National Socialism among the Students, Staff, and Faculty of the University of Freiburg), 2005; collage: c. 36 ft. 1 in. × 2 ft. 11 in., 28 × 2 m. University of Freiburg, Germany. Photo: Sandra Meyndt / Universität Freiburg. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018. Marcel Odenbach, Die Gute Stube (The Nice Parlor), 2011; collage, ink on paper: 5 ft. 7 in. × 4 ft. 7 in., 170 × 140 cm. Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf. © Photo: Vesko Gösel. Courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018. Martha Rosler, Patio View. From the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, 1967–74; photomontage. © Martha Rosler. John Heartfield, Alle Fäuste zu einer geballt (All Fists Clenched as One), Oct. 4, 1934; photomontage, rotogravure: 15 × 11 in., 38.2 × 28 cm. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018. Thomas Hirschhorn, Collage-Truth no. 20, 2012; photo collage: 14.6 × 12 in., 37 × 30.5 cm., private collection. Courtesy of the artist and Office Galerie Susanna Kulli, Zürich. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018. Thomas Hirschhorn, Ur-Collage 130, 2008; photo collage: 17.7 × 11.6 in., 45 × 29.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018. Thomas Hirschhorn, Ur-Collage B XXIV , 2008; photo collage: 21.8 × 14.6 in., 55.5 × 37 cm. Collection Princeton University Art Museum, Laura P. Hall Memorial Fund. Courtesy of the artist. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018.

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Introduction: Welcome to the Resistance! Elizabeth Otto and Deborah Ascher Barnstone

In the limbo time of late Fall, 2016, when so many were still reeling from Donald Trump’s surprise election to the United States’ presidency, but he had not yet been inaugurated, the two of us met in Munich for a conference on “Passages of Exile.” Over the course of several days, we were part of an international group of scholars considering how the journey into exile—the passage itself—left traces in the work of artists, architects, writers, and filmmakers.1 Although our shared work was focused on the past, participants’ despair at recent unexpected political events in the U.S. and elsewhere was palpable. It was particularly fresh in everyone’s minds that a philistine bully had been elected to the post that many still considered as leader of the free world. But equally as disturbing was the fact that this was one of many previously unthinkable populist earthquakes, including the United Kingdom’s squeaker vote earlier in the year in favor of “Brexiting” and the shocking rise to power of right-wing parties in countries including Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, and Switzerland. Painful as these recent events were, they were lent a particular perspective by our location. Infamously, Germany had become a paradigmatic freethinking democracy after the First World War but then quickly devolved into a dictatorship of genocidal racists by the early 1930s. Germany of 2016 was, however, also a country that had just generously opened its doors to significant numbers of refugees from Syria and elsewhere and seen a strong right-wing backlash to that action. When the conference ended, the two of us retired to a Munich bar for a late-night postmortem and began to discuss ways to activate our research and to work collectively with other scholars for positive change. Art and Resistance in Germany is the result of these efforts. “Resist” has become a watchword of our time; it crops up as graffiti in our cities and as bumper stickers on our cars, a short message to express dissent, convey solidarity, and invite activism. In this volume, authors look to the past century to consider in particular how creative people found new ways to express dissent, challenge injustice, and, in short, to resist. United in researching works made by filmmakers, authors, architects, playwrights, composers, and artists—cultural producers working in often dangerous situations where they felt called to stand against governmental oppression—the authors of Art

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Following the conference, Burcu Dogramaci and Elizabeth Otto produced Passages of Exile (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 2017), an edited volume of essays. Some of these were first presented at the conference, including papers by both Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Elizabeth Otto.

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and Resistance in Germany responded to our initial call to investigate “Cultures of Resistance.” The project began with three days of fiery, interdisciplinary presentations at the 2017 German Studies Association’s annual conference, in which some of this volume’s papers were germinated; other contributions were written subsequently. At the same time, many of us have engaged in various forms of protest against right-wing parties and governments’ policies and actions, and we have sought to build coalitions to support refugees, immigrants’ rights, women’s rights, and minority rights—as in the Black Lives Matter movement, among others. As a form of collective action, this book argues for the imperative of uniting our historical scholarship with our concern to chart a better future. As a form of activism between covers, Art and Resistance in Germany seeks to inspire readers likewise living through troubled times. One particular image helps to illuminate the project of Art and Resistance in Germany; it was produced not in Germany or even Europe, but in the US, and is drawn from the Internet, our now-ubiquitous ecosystem for sharing not just images but also political content, a platform that has also been deployed nefariously and cynically to foster the rise of right-wing groups. This picture bridges time by linking iconography rooted in Germany’s most notorious historical epoch to the present through a technique made famous by artists like John Heartfield: humor. Masquerading as the cover to a book titled Mein Covfefe, the picture was uploaded to the content sharing website Reddit on May 31, 2017, by an artist called Joman, in response to Trump’s 12:06 a.m. Twitter post of that same day. Trump’s short missives have become a hallmark of his term; they ooze his own daily cocktail of self-serving nationalism, narcissism, and populism. The May 31 message began with familiar words, only to take a surprising turn: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe,” he posted. And that was it. Many believe that the president fell asleep mid Tweet, a logical explanation for how such nonsense could have remained visible throughout the night in the feed of a man famously obsessed with his media appearance. Meanwhile, the Internet exploded with playful speculative definitions of “covfefe.”2 Later that day, then-White-House Spokesman Sean Spicer stated—or perhaps he quipped?—that “the president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant.”3 The word has had staying power, particularly among those who want to highlight Trump’s lack of presidential qualities. Joking “covfefe” slogans are widely available on T-shirts and mugs; it garnered the vote for 2017’s Word of the Year from readers of The Telegraph.4

2

3

4

Matt Flegenheimer, “What’s a ‘Covfefe’? Trump Tweet Unites a Bewildered Nation,” The New York Times, May 31, 2017. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/us/politics/covfefetrump-twitter.html [accessed Feb. 5, 2017]. For further reactions, see Elle Hunt, “What is Covfefe? The Tweet by Donald Trump that Baffled the Internet,” The Guardian (US Edition), May 31, 2017. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/31/what-is-covfefe-donaldtrump-baffles-twitter-post [accessed Feb. 6, 2017]. Louis Nelson, “Spicer Refuses to say Trump’s ‘Covfefe’ Tweet was a Typo,” Politico, May 31, 2017. Available online: https://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/31/trump-covfefe-tweet–238967 [accessed Feb. 5, 2017]. Joe Shute, “Revealed: Telegraph’s Word of the Year,” The Telegraph, December 29, 2017. Available online: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/29/revealed-telegraphs-word-year/ [accessed Feb. 5, 2017].

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Figure 0.1: Joman, Mein Covfefe, 2017, internet meme. Printed with permission of the artist. In contrast to the general Schadenfreude at yet another presidential gaff, Joman’s Mein Covfefe is chilling. As Sabine Kriebel points out in her contribution to this volume, “A joke on the face of it, the montage also links Trump’s political program to that of Hitler’s right-wing, racist, authoritarian, narcissistic text, Mein Kampf.”5 A century after his rise to prominence with the 1920 founding of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—the Nazis—and the 1925 publication of his autobiographic screed Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler remains the extreme example of political evil personified. His image fosters comparison because he is still always beyond compare. Like Joman’s appropriated malapropism, our book engages the injustices of the Nazi era with essays that probe the possibilities and limits of resistance to that totalitarian regime. Against the backdrop of our own time’s alarming rise in right-wing populism 5

See Sabine Kriebel’s essay in this volume. It was through her essay that we first became aware of Joman’s work.

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and resurgent nationalism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and demagoguery, Art and Resistance in Germany argues that we can find both solace and inspiration by examining how historical and contemporary cultural producers have sought to resist, confront, confound, mock, or call out situations of political oppression. Essays address a broad spectrum of historical moments and media, as well as a range of targets and strategies. For our book’s cover we have selected one of the best examples from the tradition of resistant art, Heartfield’s anti-fascist Alle Fäuste zu einer geballt (All Fists Clenched as One), originally the cover of the October 1934 Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper). Through the blunt but artful symbolism of his montage, Heartfield literalizes the solidarity implied by the raised fist and makes a direct plea to ordinary citizens: “show the Fascists your violence!” He calls for them to rise up as a united front. As co-editors, we have provided the book’s first essay, “How Art Resists,” which considers the question of art and politics in the present and offers a systematic typology of modes and strategies of creative resistance. The rest of the book is organized in four sections that move through art’s resistant strategies to offer a variety of perspectives on questions of creativity as resistance within the German context. The essays in Part I, “Art that Alters Worldviews,” explore how artworks may shift viewers’ perceptions—and thus, perhaps, change their minds. Such art often resists oppression by “speaking truth to power,” in the words of the Quaker slogan.6 Patrizia McBride’s “Cut with the Kitchen Knife: Visualizing Politics in Berlin Dada” offers a new interpretation of Hannah Höch’s famed 1919 collage through the lens of the artist’s feminist perspective, which moderated her critique of Weimar’s new political order and her embrace of Dada’s political aspirations. Kevin Berry follows with “Walter Gropius’s Dammerstock and the Possibilities of an Architectural Resistance,” an examination of a major housing project as Gropius’s deliberate attempt to question the political economy and the efficacy of mass housing schemes of the interwar Republic. Nina Lübbren’s “Authority and Ambiguity: Three Sculptors in National Socialist Germany” explores a range of reactions to the advent of dictatorship through the work of three female sculptors and the quandaries posed by their medium, one that so easily lends itself to monumentalizing statecraft. Part II , “Art That Inspires Action,” probes artworks as calls to political engagement. In “Teach Your Children Well: Hermynia Zur Mühlen, George Grosz, and the Art of Radical Pedagogy in Germany between the World Wars,” Barbara McCloskey argues that a highly original but nearly forgotten children’s book offers a novel approach to children’s leftist political education—as well as a deeper context in which to consider Grosz’s work. Jennifer Kapczynski’s “Parting Shots: Ella Bergmann Michel’s Wahlkampf 1932 (Letzte Wahl)” argues that abstraction beckons subtly to resistance in Bergmann Michel’s avant-garde documentary short-film engagement with the end of democracy and the ascent of fascism. And in “War Feeds its People Better: Mother Courage and the

6

Stephen G. Cary (writing as Chairman of the Executive Board of the American Friends Service Committee), “Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence,” pamphlet published March 2, 1955. Available online: http://www.quaker.org/sttp.html [accessed Feb. 28, 2018].

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Limits of Revolutionary Theater,” Noah Soltau contends that today’s celebrity-led resistance to right-wing politics only extends so far. Part III , “Art That Critiques Symbols,” engages art that resists by representing, reconfiguring, or questioning political symbols. “Montage as Meme: Learning from the Radical Avant-Gardes,” by Sabine Kriebel, draws parallels between the photomontage of yore and today’s memes by analyzing them both as pictorial tools of resistance. James van Dyke’s “On the Possibility of Resistance in Two Silverpoints by Otto Dix” subtly scrutinizes two of Dix’s portraits to suggest that they question the stereotype of the German Jew and push back against Nazi propaganda. Kathleen James-Chakraborty’s “A Whisper Rather than a Shout: Ursula Wilms and Heinz Hallmann’s Topography of Terror” explores how, through their design for the Topography of Terror Museum, members of a little-known German architecture praxis—rather than one of the many, nearly de rigueur “starchitects” for such projects—successfully transformed the site of the former headquarters of the Nazi Schutzstaffel (Protection Squadron, better known as the SS ) into a space commemorating resistance to the Nazis. Finally, Part IV, “Art That is Created in Acts of Resistance,” reflects on artworks that activate by inviting participation in their making. In “From Anti-Nazi Postcards to Anti-Trump Social Media: Laughter as Resistance, Opposition, or Cold Comfort?” Peter Chametzky uncovers the stories of Germans who resisted National Socialism by creating and sharing artistic postcards that had clever, veiled messages, a practice often deployed today in political protests. In “Opera as Resistance: The Little Match Girl and the Terrorist in Helmut Lachenmann’s Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern,” Joy Calico interprets a highly-abstract, experimental opera’s sound elements as an engagement with the radical politics of West Germany’s post-Second World War Red Army Faction. Verena Krieger’s “Montage as a Form of Resistance Aesthetics Today: Marcel Odenbach and Thomas Hirschhorn,” concludes the volume with analysis of two contemporary artists who use the medium of photo-collage to engage both Germany’s violent past and the ongoing state-sponsorship of violence today. We are both tremendously grateful to our contributors for answering the call to look to history for examples of how creative people have resisted political oppression. These authors are our day’s proof that the keyboard is mightier than the sword! We are indebted to Margaret Michniewicz, our wonderful editor at Bloomsbury Academic who supported this project with great enthusiasm from its earliest stages. Two anonymous peer reviewers offered extremely helpful feedback at key points in this book’s creation. Elizabeth Otto wishes to acknowledge the Frank H. Kenan Fellowship at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, which supported her during our work on this book.

1

How Art Resists Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Elizabeth Otto

Imagination is the chief instrument of the good. . . . Art is more moral than moralities. For the latter either are or tend to become, consecrations of the status quo, reflections of custom, reinforcements of the established order. The moral prophets of humanity have always been poets even though they spoke in free verse or by parable. . . . Art has been the means of keeping alive the sense of purposes that outrun evidence and of meanings that transcend indurated habit. John Dewey, Art as Experience1 In November of 2014, 250 Neo-Nazi activists again converged on the tiny town of Wunsiedel, Bavaria, for their annual pilgrimage to the former burial place of the Nazi Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess. After years of anguish and ineffective attempts to stop the annual invasion, locals decided to meet this unwanted political agitation with creativity and humor. Their clever gambit was to initiate a clandestine walkathon, for which local individuals and businesses could “sponsor” one of the right-wing activists—without the invading marchers’ knowledge or consent—at ten Euros per kilometer. The NeoNazis unwittingly raised 10,000 Euros through participation in the event the villagers named “Rechts gegen Rechts” (Right against Right); all funds were donated to an organization that supports those seeking escape from such extremist groups. The organizers were able to transform the political march into a performance-art piece by meeting marchers with a set of banners with double meanings and puns like, “If Only the Führer Knew,” the name of a famous satirical novel about Adolf Hitler (Figure 1.1).2 Bananas passed out to the unwitting walkathon participants were labeled,“Munition 1” and “Mein Mampf ” (local dialect for “my chow”) a play on the name of Hitler’s memoir Mein Kampf (My Struggle).3 This reframing leant a deep sense of ironic comedy

1

2 3

John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin, 1934), 362; cited in James M. Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 2. Otto Basil, Wenn das Führer wüßte (Munich: Molden, 1966) (Vienna: Milena, 2010). Jon Blistein, “Neo-Nazis Tricked into Raising Thousands for Anti-Extremism Charity,” Rolling Stone, November 18, 2014, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/neo-nazis-tricked-intoraising-thousands-for-anti-extremism-charity–20141118 [accessed February 12, 2018].

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Figure 1.1: “If only the Führer knew!” Banner flown during the marches in Wunsiedel, Bavaria in 2017. © Rechts gegen Rechts.

to a situation that, for years, had been a local source of tension.4 Yet the Rechts gegen Rechts action can also be considered as a form of public performance that borders on art. Seen in this light, it is also an example in a long-standing tradition of using media culture and art as political weapons, tools wielded powerfully against fascism by myriad artists like John Heartfield in his photomontage Adolf the Superman Eats Gold and Spouts Junk (1932), Max Beckmann in his painting Birds’ Hell (1938), Charlie Chaplin, with his daring 1940 Hitler spoof The Great Dictator, and Walt Disney Productions’ 1943 pro-US animated short, Der Fuehrer’s Face, which, improbably, starred Donald Duck. While artistic interventions may not eliminate offensive political groups or politicians, they help diffuse tensions and raise awareness, and they may also increase participation from people who are reluctant to engage in overt political demonstrations but wish to have their resistance and opposition recognized. The marches in Bavaria are symptomatic of what appears as a stark, worldwide lurch to the right that has seen the election of right-wing populists such as Rodrego Duterte in the Philippines and Donald Trump in the United States, and center-right politicians like Norway’s Prime Minister, Erna Solberg, collaborating with that country’s far-right

4

Elena Cresci, “German Town Tricks Neo-Nazis into Raising Thousands for Charity,” The Guardian, November 18, 2014. Rechts gegen Rechts is now an annual event that has spread to other European countries: http://rechts-gegen-rechts.de/ [accessed February 14, 2018].

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“Progress” party. Shortly after Britons marginally voted to leave the great experiment of the European Union with “Brexit” in 2016—a move fueled in part by anti-immigrant and nativist sentiments—the far-right Austrian Freedom Party won more than twentysix percent of the votes in that country’s 2017 elections, and the anti-immigrant and radically homophobic Jobbik party continued to make news as Hungary’s third largest. Only one year later, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany)—with its platform of thinly veiled Neo-Nazism—entered the national parliament for the first time, with record results and over twelve percent of the seats, making it the third largest party. Both France and the Netherlands likewise have recently witnessed serious leadership challenges from their right-wing parties, Le Front National (FN , The National Front) and De Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, The Party for Freedom). While they are located in countries that have very different cultural and political traditions, these candidates and parties share a nationalist, anti-immigrant, and populist approach that seems to have growing appeal. Citizens, politicians, and academics on the left have been reeling as they wonder why what used to be fringe beliefs—seeming relics of a politically backward past that would soon die out—are instead gaining currency. And while the trend is global, the turn of events is perhaps most disturbing in Germany, given its dramatic history; it began the twentieth century as a monarchy, but after the First World War turned quickly to a lively experiment in democracy, which was cut short by the rise of National Socialism. Once Germany was again defeated in the Second World War, the period of the Cold War saw the country split into the German Democratic Republic, a member of the Eastern Bloc that was wholly dominated by the Soviet Union, and the Federal Republic of Germany, democratic and capitalist, yet with barely-concealed ties to the Nazi past.5

Resistance “Resistance” is a now oft-used term across disciplines including sociology, political science, German history, art theory, and art history, yet scholars share little consensus on its meaning, which makes it difficult to construct an analytical framework for its use. In spite of the lack of consensus, political scientists, sociologists, and historians still have a more developed vocabulary of resistance than historians of art, architecture, film, and media culture, so it is helpful to look to their literature first. Scholar of political resistance James C. Scott offers a simple but incisive definition of resistance as one way people respond when they feel oppressed by the more powerful in society.6 Scott sees at least two types of resistance: what he calls “everyday resistance,” which is informal and often spontaneous, and resistance that is organized, formal 5

6

While there is extensive scholarly literature on each of these historical periods, a nuanced overview is available in: Mary Fullbrook, A History of Germany 1918-2014: The Divided Nation (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015). See James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), xv–xxiii and James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

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political activity. Both forms of resistance attempt to register disagreement with public policies or particular politicians. In addition, resistance can occur at the individual level or in groups.7 In Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Scott distinguished between public acts of resistance that are easily recognizable, and covert acts that are private critiques of power made in political contexts where criticism and resistance cannot be expressed in public because the oppressed group lacks political power. These categories of resistance—spontaneous vs. organized, individual vs. group, and public vs. covert—are of particular use in analyzing Germany’s National Socialist period, when overt resistance was often difficult if not impossible. Lastly, Scott identified three qualities that many acts of resistance share, including creative works made with resistant intent: a response to injustice; an engagement in an “ideological struggle”; and a reaction against the “appropriation of symbols” in a way that rankles.8 Political scientists and sociologists have other important tools for distinguishing types of resistance, namely as either violent or non-violent, the latter also referred to as “civil resistance.” The sociologist Kurt Schock defines resistance as “the sustained use of methods of nonviolent action” and “non-routine political acts” against oppression and injustice.9 And according to Erica Chenoweth and Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, non-violent methods can include protests, marches, strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations that are “outside the defined and accepted channels for political participation defined by the state” including forms of artistic expression.10 As several scholars in sociology have revealed, dissident culture appears when power relationships are out of balance; when those in positions of political, economic, and social power abuse the public trust in some way. This can include economic policies that seem to favor the rich over the poor; situations of repeated indiscriminate police violence; conditions of unchecked racial tensions stoked by the government; and circumstances of perceived inequities in public amenities, social programs, and opportunity, to name just a few factors that provoke resistant action. As sociologists Jocelyn A. Hollander and Rachel L. Einwohner assert, resistance always describes directed action of some kind and embodies oppositional intent. It is “expressive behavior that inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or prevents alternatives to cultural codes.”11 Expressions of resistance can take many forms; everyday resistance can range from foot dragging to throwing a spanner wrench in machine works, or from marching in the streets to spraying graffiti on urban surfaces. It can involve online actions like tweeting opinions and images, posting material on Facebook and Instagram, and signing and sharing online petitions. In the arts, resistant activities can range from 7

8 9

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Scott’s The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale, 1977). Scott, Weapons, xvii. Kurt Schock, “The Practice and Study of Civil Resistance,” Journal of Peace Research, 50: 3 (2013), 277. Erica Chenoweth and Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, “Understanding Nonviolent Resistance: An Introduction,” Journal of Peace Research, 50:3 (2013), 271. Victoria L. Pitts, “Reclaiming the Female Body: Embodied Identity Work, Resistance and the Grotesque,” Body ad Society, 4:67, cited in: Jocelyn A. Hollander and Rachel L. Einwohner, “Conceptualizing Resistance,” Sociological Forum, 19:4 (2004), 538.

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creating slogan-bearing posters to found-text collages, from composing silent performance art to catchy songs, from writing poetry to painting, from building installations to shooting film; in short, any medium can become the vehicle for a message of resistance if deployed with oppositional intent.12 Hollander and Einwohner also identify intent and visibility as critical elements in the sociological literature on resistance. Resistance has two different audiences: “targets (i.e. those to whom the act is directed) and other observers (who may include onlookers at the time of the resistance, the general public, members of the media, and researchers).”13 Early scholarship on resistance, which focused on large-scale protest movements and revolutions whose members confront their targets directly and openly, took for granted that resistance is visible and easily recognized as resistance.14 Yet the everyday resistance that James Scott studied from his political science point of view, and in fact much of cultural resistance, is often quietly subversive and largely invisible except to those in the know. Scholars debate whether visibility and recognition are necessary to classify an act as resistant. Here, intent plays a role; if an action was meant to be resistant but was not recognized as such by its target audience or by others, some scholars like Scott still accept it as resistant; for them, some forms of quiet resistance are intentionally concealed but might still have a subtle impact, like stealing from an employer as retaliation for substandard wages, thus, a quiet mode of resisting the power structure of an entrenched class system. For over sixty years, historians have debated the meaning of “resistance” in a particularly nuanced conversation in relationship to the National Socialist regime, in which they have debated whether or not resistance was even possible for Jews and nonJewish Germans and, if it was, what it looked like under those particular conditions of extreme pressure.15 Many of the leading figures writing on German history contributed to this long tradition of resistance studies, including Hans Mommsen, Martin Broszat, Ian Kershaw, and Detlev Peukert.16 Like their colleagues in political science and sociology, they considered power relationships, violent and non-violent actions, and visibility of actions and intent, but the special circumstances of the Third Reich and Holocaust have added dimensions to their discourse, particularly in relation to the

12 13 14 15

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Hollander and Einwohner, “Conceptualizing Resistance,” 533–54. Hollander and Einwohner, “Conceptualizing Resistance,” 541. Hollander and Einwohner, “Conceptualizing Resistance,” 539. Martyn Housden, Resistance and Conformity in the Third Reich (London: Routledge, 2002) 160–99; Michael Geyer and JohnW. Boyer, “Introduction: Resistance against the Third Reich as Intercultural Knowledge,” The Journal of Modern History, 64, Supplement, Resistance Against the Third Reich (1992), 1–7; Alf Lüdtke, “The Appeal of Exterminating ‘Others’: German Workers and the Limits of Resistance,” The Journal of Modern History, 64, Supplement, Resistance Against the Third Reich (1992), 46–67. Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale, 1989); Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); Martin Broszat, “A Social and Historical Typography of the German Opposition to Hitler,” ed. David Clay Large, Contending with Hitler: Voices of Resistance in the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Hans Mommsen, “Resistance against Hitler and German Society,” in From Weimar to Auschwitz: Essays in German History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) 208–23.

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question of what constitutes resistance within the Nazi context, the moral implications of specific types of action, and potential risks or consequences for a resister. Since overt opposition to the regime was extremely dangerous, much resistance was covert and relatively small in scale, although Jews in the Warsaw ghetto did mount a relatively large armed resistance in 1943.17 Resistance also took myriad forms, including individual and group activities, planned and spontaneous actions, small-scale subversions—such as the postcard protests Peter Chametzky discusses in this volume—and complicated plots, like attempts to assassinate Hitler. These debates make clear how difficult it is to define resistance in a narrow way. And because so many who resisted either subsequently fled Germany or did not survive the Nazi period, ensuing political resistance in Germany often drew on models from outside of the country, even as those activists were, in part, still struggling with the Nazi past that was all around them but largely suppressed in favor of a narrative privileging the “Wirtschaftswunder”—the economic miracle of a country that rebuilt itself to become a capitalist powerhouse.18 Debates in German history also chart how essential the subject of resistance is to Germany past and present, and they underscore the rich and varied types of resistance that exist and can be implemented across different media, including the arts. Turning to the question of cultural production, the definitions and debates from the fields of political science, sociology, and history give structure to considering art as resistant. Yet cultural production also has its own specific properties. For example, while intent can be debated in many realms, the question of intent is less contentious in the arts than in other areas, since art is always intentional. Art today has a very broad range—it encompasses traditional media like drawing, painting, and print making and newer media like photography, collage, and film, high art like opera, ballet, and classical music as well as popular art like posters, cartoons, memes, and advertising. Resistance can, and has, been incorporated into every artistic medium conceivable.

What Can Art Do? Political activism in Germany has long been abetted by artistic production. Art can be used as an instrument of political activism to provoke a response in the body politic, register a protest, or resist or attempt to change unwanted policies and opinions. Since dissident culture appears when power relationships are out of balance, when those in

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There were numerous smaller Jewish ghetto uprisings in Vilna, Mir, and Lachva, to name just three, but none as large as the one in Warsaw. There was also resistance in the concentration camps. For example, see James M. Glass, Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust: Proceedings of the Conference on Manifestations of Jewish Resistance, Jerusalem April 7–11, 1968 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1971); Shmuel Krakowski, The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942–1944 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1984); and Joseph Rudavsky, To Live with Hope, to die with Dignity: Spiritual Resistance in the Ghettos and Camps (Northvale, NJ : Jason Aronson, 1997). On all of these points, see Charity Scribner’s “Buildings on Fire: The Situationist International and the Red Army Faction,” Gray Room 26 (2007).

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positions of political and social power abuse the public trust in some way, art—with its powers of multivalent communication and opportunities for double-speak—becomes an ideal instrument with which to challenge existing mechanisms of power and cultural dominance. As art historian Ariane Della Dea points out, “Art condenses meaning and demands and draws supporters to the cause through metaphors for and depictions of oppression or the oppressor.”19 This property is part of art’s potency as a tool; it allows artists to embed many levels of meaning in a single work, including meanings the artist might later disavow. It thus provides cover against potential persecution in certain instances, and it allows viewers to choose their level of engagement and understanding. There are four primary ways that artistic resistance can operate.20 First, artists can make objects that help us see the world in new ways—that literally alter our Weltanschauung or world view. They do so through framing devices that alter viewer perceptions or through commentary that calls our attention to aspects of a situation or event that we may not have considered before. A second type of resistant art has the potential to inspire people to organize and to act. Third, artistic resistance can also itself function as political resistance when it critiques a set of accepted conventional cultural symbols and meanings. Fourth and last, art-making can be a form of political resistance in and of itself. Of course, resistant art often performs multiple functions simultaneously; nevertheless, these four categories are a useful way of evaluating differences and similarities in artistic strategies of resistance. The confluence of Germany’s charged political landscape since the early twentieth century, a period known for its deep national veneration for the arts, culture, and intellectual pursuits, makes Germany rich in examples of artistic resistance. Berlin in particular has been the site for many activist protests and installations, and for the production and exhibition of resistant art of all kinds. Its status as the capital city before 1945 and since 1990, its location as ground zero of divided Germany during the Cold War, and its status as Germany’s center for experimental culture for nearly the entirety of the past hundred years—with the exception of the Nazi period, during which culture was regulated and weaponized—has made Berlin an obvious site for political activists of all kinds. Tracing a range of types of artistic resistance created during disparate time periods and in a range of locations allows us to illustrate the breadth and depth of work made in Germany, work that makes the subject of this volume so compelling to students and scholars of culture both inside and beyond Germany. In the rest of this essay, we will explore examples of the four ways that art can resist: art that alters viewers’ worldview; art that intends to inspire action; art that critiques conventional symbols; and art that is forged in the act of resisting itself.

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Ariane Della Dea, “Representation of Resistance in Latin American Art,” Latin American Perspectives, 39:3, (2012), 6. We are indebted to Stephen Duncombe for his insights here. Duncombe wrote about “cultural resistance” more broadly but his categories apply to art as well. See Stephen Duncombe, “Introduction,” Cultural Resistance Reader (London: Verso, 2002), 5–7.

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Art that Alters Worldview There are many instances of art created in order to provide a different, or corrected, view of the world as a means of political resistance. Two examples from very different moments in German history illustrate the range of such work: Georg Grosz’s art from the 1920s exposed the depravity of the Weimar Republic’s politicians and the struggles of everyday Germans in post-World War One Germany; by contrast, Josephine Meckseper uses contemporary art installations and photography to critique and resist the neoliberal order.21 Born Georg Ehrenfried Gross, the artist Anglicized his first name to “George” and changed his last name to “Grosz” shortly before his friend Helmut Herzfeld became John Heartfield; both were protesting the nationalism that they experienced in the First World War, in which they served. Grosz’s many lithographs, paintings, and pen and ink drawings, sometimes embellished with watercolor, showed brutally honest aspects of the war’s aftermath to his countrymen, who were largely shielded from the true state of things. Although some critics and historians refer to Grosz’s work as satire, others recognize its utter seriousness as social critique.22 Grosz wrote of the situation in Germany after the First World War, “All moral codes were abandoned. A wave of vice, pornography, and prostitution enveloped the whole country. . . . The streets became ravines of manslaughter and cocaine traffic, marked by steel rods and bloody, broken chair legs.”23 Works like Grosz’s 1922/3 folio of eighty-four offset lithographs and twenty-six watercolors titled Ecce Homo epitomizes his approach. The name means “Behold the Man,” an ironic commentary on the subjects of Grosz’s images, which show the worst sides of humanity, a subject rarely shown in art—the things we normally wish to avoid beholding. The name is also a traditional subject in Christian art, where Jesus Christ is shown as mocked prior to his crucifixion, and he is often shown wearing the crown of thorns. By referring both to Christian iconography and his own contemporaries, Grosz casts both church doctrine and his contemporaries in an unflattering light by sarcastically portraying the very human vices Jesus supposedly died to redeem. Plate XVI is a watercolor from the series that pictures a group of urban figures, rendered in line work and bright colors (Figure 1.2).

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Liam Gillick,“Josephine Meckseper,” Interview, November 21, 2008, https://www.interviewmagazine. com/music/josephine-meckseper [accessed February 16, 2018] and Barbara McCloskey, George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918–1936 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). George Grosz, George Grosz: An Autobiography, trans. Nora Hodges (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and McCloskey, George Grosz and the Communist Party, esp. Chapter  1, “War and Radicalization, 1914 to 1918” (11–47), and Chapter 2, “Dada and Communist Revolution, 1919 to 1923” (48–103); and Wendy Maxon, The Body Disassembled: World War I and the Body in German Art 1914–1933, diss. University of California, San Diego, 2002. Grosz, Georg Grosz, 119.

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Figure 1.2: George Grosz, “Print XVI ,” Ecce Homo, 1922/23. Offset lithograph, 10.4 × 7.9 in., 26.4 × 20 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, NJ / VG Bild-Kunst. Copyright Agency, 2018.

Using a technique almost akin to collage, Grosz superimposes partial images of six figures onto a fractured urban architecture that suggests the broken society he portrays. The figures are types that populated many of his interwar images: a crippled, unshaven, blind man, dressed like a proletarian; a strutting officer in decorated full regalia; two smoking businessmen—one who looks positively sinister and another who seems selfsatisfied; and a woman—likely a prostitute who may have the start of venereal disease— in a fashionable hat with crooked teeth and her eyes rolled back into her head to form a frightening expression. Emerging from the unclear mist at the composition’s center is

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the faint outline of a man who appears to be in a military coat and the Pickelhaube, the helmet German soldiers wore in the First World War. Grosz has collapsed perspective in a way that eliminates spatial and, by implication, social hierarchy. The two most respectable looking of his subjects are the soldier and the beggar; their more serene profiles tie them together and suggest that the apparent distance between the economically fortunate and unfortunate, as well as the politically powerful and the disenfranchised, may not be so great. This cautionary political message is aimed at both the average German and the elites, who Grosz believed were abdicating their constitutional obligations to the people. By speaking truth to power, Grosz hoped to raise awareness of the plight of many of his fellow citizens. Josephine Meckseper takes a very different approach to Grosz, by directly engaging the political system and revealing it and historical events in a new light. In 1998, the artist mounted an unsuccessful bid for a Senate seat in the United States, not because she expected to win, but in order to make a statement about the nature of contemporary politics. As John Reed asserted, Meckseper’s “qualifications” for office included having “two grandfathers in the SS , an uncle who was a radical leftist and member of the West German communist party, and an aunt who at 16 became involved with the ill-fated Baader-Meinhof gang.”24 The run for Senate was intended to change notions of who should have political power; instead of the typical white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant man, she presented a white, German-born immigrant woman who was an artist. Meckseper’s work inserts itself in the space between the political right and left in order to alter perceptions of the political landscape. According to Meckseper, “Artists face the obvious accusation of elitism. The fundamental principle of my work is that it critiques capitalism in very specific ways. . . . Instead of ‘aestheticizing’ political issues, I try to change perspectives.”25 The bid for office was part of a larger project in which she also staged photographic images of political protest and counterculture to re-frame how these function in contemporary society (Figure 1.3). In the photographs, such as RAF Tray (Red Army Faction Tray), in which she inserts herself into an historical image of her aunt who was close friends with Ulrike Meinhof, co-founder of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group, Meckseper shows protest culture as a form of youth fashion.26 Meckseper’s aunt sits in the foreground, a stunning blonde woman dressed in a black evening gown; Meckseper stands behind, dressed in a low-cut, sparkling, black, sequined dress. Meckseper offers her aunt a silver tray with a matchbox that has the RAF logo on it, literally tempting her with fire.27 The curls of smoke behind the women recall the early RAF actions—bombings of the Frankfurt Kaufhof and Schneider department stores in 1968. The RAF initially sought to attack what it saw as the abhorrent capitalist culture in 1960s and 1970s West Germany in

24

25 26 27

John Reed, “Josephine Meckseper,” Bomb, 84, July 1, 2003, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/ josephine-meckseper–1 [accessed February 16, 2018]. Reed, “Josephine Meckseper.” Pamela M. Lee, Forgetting the Art World (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2012) 136. Scribner, “Buildings on Fire,” 35.

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Figure 1.3: Josephine Meckseper, RAF Tray, 2002. C-print (cebachrome), 20 × 16 in., 50.8 × 40.6 cm. The picture shows showing Meckseper as a cigarette girl (background) with her aunt, a member of the RAF, in the foreground. © Josephine Meckseper / Courtesy Timothy Taylor London/New York. order to “disrupt authoritarian structures of politics and society.”28 The image acts in multiple ways. On the one hand, it ties the RAF ’s anti-capitalist stance to Meckseper’s own work, which begs the question, what is more effective—non-violent artistic expression or terror? At the same time, the image aestheticizes and objectifies the radical women of the movement, which calls into question their motivations and their cause. If radicalism is only fashion, what purpose does it serve? If it does not serve a legitimate political purpose, perhaps other forms of resistance would be more effective.

28

Scribner, “Building on Fire,” 33.

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Art that Inspires Political Action Käthe Kollwitz used her art to promote an anti-war agenda and hoped that, through it, she could draw more of her fellow citizens to the anti-war cause.29 As historian Ingrid Sharp argues, Kollwitz intended her art to bear witness to the effects of war and thereby to persuade other Germans of the need to avoid another war at all costs.30 Most antiwar art Kollwitz produced in the 1920s took precisely this home front as its subject. As Sharp persuasively argues, the pain caused to those at home was as real and as deserving of representation and consideration as that of soldiers at the front, since the war affected all Germans. Whereas many have interpreted Kollwitz’s work in an overly reductive manner—as, for example, merely bearing witness, or as a “woman’s perspective”—Sharp shows that Kollwitz portrayed far more complex responses to the war, and that she was an effective moral and emotional witness.31 Not long after the start of the First World War, in 1914, Kollwitz’s younger son Peter was killed; this traumatic event caused the artist tremendous pain and grief, and it inspired doubt about the logic of war.32 Kollwitz had been torn between conflicting emotions when Peter requested his parent’s permission to enlist; at the time, she believed in the notion of sacrifice for the nation.33 She only changed her mind slowly after Peter’s death. Kollwitz had contributed pro-war prints to Paul Cassirer’s broadsheet Kriegszeit (Wartime), which initially used lithographs by well-known German artists to support the war effort. By 1916, however, Kollwitz had lost her pro-war stance; by the war’s end she had adopted a strong anti-war position. Krieg (War), her series of seven woodcuts, was exhibited in 1924 at the pacifist Ernst Friedrich’s International Antiwar Museum in Berlin. Large-format woodcut was a relatively new technique for Kollwitz at that time; she had decided to learn it after seeing Ernst Barlach’s work at the Berlin Secession exhibition of 1920.34 Adapting this technique to convey her own message, woodcut’s rough-hewn imagery allowed Kollwitz to create evocative images using large areas of black ink, bold line, and minimal detail. There are only seven prints in Kollwitz’s Krieg series, and they largely depict the war from the perspective of its victims at home rather than on the battlefield. Although Kollwitz has radically limited the number of subjects she addresses and abstracted them through her rough-hewn technique, these are deeply personal portraits. The prints bear the straightforward names of their subjects: Die Witwe I (The Widow I), Das Opfer (The Sacrifice), Die Eltern (The Parents), Die Witwe II (The Widow II ), Die Mütter (The Mothers), Das Volk (The People), and Die Freiwilligen (The Volunteers) (Figure 1.4).

29

30

31 32

33 34

Dora Apel, “Heroes and Whores: The Politics of Gender in Weimar Antiwar Imagery,” The Art Bulletin, 79/3 (September 1997) 366–84. Ingrid Sharp, “Käthe Kollwitz’s Witness to War: Gender, Authority and Reception,” Women in German Yearbook, (2011), 88. Sharp, “Kollwitz’s Witness,” 88. Angela Moorjani, “Käthe Kollwitz on Sacrifice, Mourning, and Reparation: An Essay in Psychoaesthetics,” MLN , 101:5, (1986), 1110–34. Moorjani, “Kollwitz on Sacrifice,” 1121. Jutta Bohnke-Kollwitz, Kathe Kollwitz: Die Tagebücher, 1908–1943 (Munich: btb, 2007), 476.

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Figure 1.4: Käthe Kollwitz, Die Freiwilligen (The Volunteers), 1922/23. Woodcut, 18.0 × 25.75 in., 47.5 × 65.4 cm. The print shows five volunteer soldiers who have all given their lives to the cause, with Kollwitz’s son Peter in the upper left, in Death’s embrace. Woodcut. Museum of Modern Art, New York/Digital Image. © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA /Art. Only Die Freiwilligen pictures soldiers. It is the image of six figures emerging from an inky black background. Kollwitz’s son, Peter, is next to Death at the far left, wrapped in his arms in a cold embrace, looking upward, and rising towards the upper left-hand corner, while four other soldiers are depicted in various stages of agony and death. Curved lines above the heads combine with the angular positions of the faces and with jagged strokes above and below the figures to animate the soldiers’ visible anguish. By restricting her depiction largely to the figures’ heads, Kollwitz focuses the viewer’s attention on the emotion of each of her subjects. The central figure, who is propped up by hands belonging to an invisible source, appears to be almost floating in his peaceful repose. In contrast, the three figures to his right all seem to be screaming in distress. The image conveys the agony of war in visceral terms and suggests that, in place of the glory usually associated with the term “volunteers” and pictured in the heroic genre of war art in general, this is a scene of young men who have inadvertently volunteered for death. In Die Eltern, another image from this series, Kollwitz captures the raw grief so many shared over the loss of a child during the war.35 A husband and wife are wrapped 35

The entire series is online at: https://www.moma.org/s/ge/collection_ge/objbytag/objbytag_tagvo69682_sort–5.html [accessed February 14, 2018].

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in each other’s arms, doubled over in agony. Both kneel on the ground, the wife is bent into her husband’s lap; he holds her with one arm and covers his face with his other, large, gnarled hand, in a gesture of profound grief. Kollwitz renders the figures in solid black fields with white lines that emphasize their form and suggest light and shadow. Revealing these figures’ profoundly embodied pain, Kollwitz manages to convey the distress these two people share without showing either face. The question posed to the viewer is, is war worth this pain? Krieg was not the only work that Kollwitz made in the service of the anti-war cause. Once she became determined to oppose war she made other prints and a series of antiwar posters which included Nie wieder Krieg (Never again War) from 1924, as well as a 1942 lithograph showing a mother protecting her children. This latter piece was made to protest the resumption of military recruitment. Kollwitz hoped to use her prints to influence her fellow Germans to renounce war as a political instrument. While it would be difficult to know for certain that her efforts had a direct impact, what is clear is that she created a powerful set of images of human suffering that still convey war’s aching grief today.

Art that Alters Symbols’ Meaning If Kollwitz used her art both to resist political authority and to attempt to convince others to join in her resistance to militarism, installations at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin operate by reconfiguring a national symbol to create new meaning and, often, resistant statements about contemporary politics. Considered a symbol of Germany’s complex history and especially its division into two countries during the Cold War, the Brandenburg Gate has been the site of interventions of many kinds over the years. It is simultaneously a piece of urban architecture, a political symbol, and a canvas on which artists have created resistant work. Designed by the German architect Carl Gotthard Langhans and erected by the Prussian king Frederick William II in 1791, the gate sits at the juncture between the Tiergarten park and the majestic promenade along Unter den Linden, which leads to the museum island and Prussian Royal Palace, now newly rebuilt. Langhans modeled the gate after the Propylaea in Athens, the monumental entry to the Acropolis. Constructed from sandstone, it features twelve Doric columns that frame five portals; the central one is wider than the others and was originally reserved for the royal family. Gottfried Schadow’s famous copper Quadriga sits atop the gate; it depicts a goddess riding a horse-drawn chariot. As Brian Ladd emphasizes, “the Brandenburg Gate, with its Quadriga, has long been Berlin’s most famous symbol rivaled only by the more ephemeral Wall.”36 The gate replaced an older one that was more practical, less ornamental, and flanked by customs houses. Originally called the

36

Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 74.

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“Gate of Peace,” it has been employed over time by rulers and politicians for differing purposes: victory marches; military parades and ceremonies; and royal processions passed through its portals. After Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, the gate was renamed “Gate of Victory,” and Karl Friedrich Schinkel made several modifications to the Quadriga to symbolize its new name.37 At the end of the Second World War, when the Allies partitioned Berlin, the Brandenburg Gate stood just inside the Soviet Sector and thus some distance behind the inner Wall when that was constructed in the 1960s.38 For this reason, the gate was visible but impassible for thirty years, a casualty of Berlin’s partition that nevertheless had a strong physical presence in the city. It therefore became a symbol of the division of the country. Since unification, the Brandenburg Gate has only gained symbolic significance; it functions as the locus of important political events, often laden with larger symbolic meaning, as well as numerous art installations to commemorate historical moments or to comment on or criticize contemporary politics. Typical events at the Gate include President Bill Clinton’s 1994 speech celebrating unity and freedom, an event that emphasized the Gate’s proximity to the Reichstag, where Ernst Reuter and John F. Kennedy delivered their famous speeches on freedom; and, more recently, the 2015 all-night vigils protesting the right-wing, reactionary party Pegida (an acronym for “Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes” or “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West [Occident]”), attended by German prime minister Angela Merkel.39 Art installations at the Gate have varied in scale and in intention. In 2015, Mexican artist Gustavo Aceves installed Lapidarium, a group of twenty-two enormous horses on Pariserplatz at the Brandenburg Gate (Figure 1.5). Aceves’ piece was rich in layered associations. The horses were fractured and broken constructions made of combinations of Italian marble, granite, bronze, and cast iron on Leonardo da Vinci’s enormous but unfinished commissioned horse sculpture, the Gran Cavallo.40 In this way, Aceves reinforced the connection between his art, the architecture of the Gate, and Europe’s echoing play of classicism and neo-classicism. A Lapidarium is a repository for stone monuments and fragments of archeological interest; with the name, Aceves connected

37 38

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40

Ladd, Ghosts of Berlin, 74. The Berlin Wall was actually two walls, an outer and an inner one, with a security space in between known as the “No Man’s Land.” Paul Richter and Mary Williams Walsh, “Clinton Hails Unity, Freedom in Berlin,” Los Angeles Times, July 13, 1994, Vol. 113, A6; Kurt Kister, “Pulling a Kennedy,” The Guardian, July 14, 1994, 17; and Ben Knight, “Merkel to Join Berlin Tolerance Rally as Pegida Tensions Rise,” The Guardian, January 13, 2015, 21. Philip Oltermann, “What the Brandenburg Gate’s Pop-Up Horses Say About the State of Berlin’s Public Art,” The Guardian, May 1, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/01/ what-the-brandenburg-gates-pop-up-horses-say-about-the-state-of-berlins-public-art [accessed February 14, 2018]; Henri Neuendorf, “Skeletal Horses by Gustavo Aceves Installed at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin,” Art News, May 1, 2015, https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/gustavoaceves-lapidarium-berlin–293453 [accessed February 14, 2018].

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Figure 1.5: Gustavo Aceves standing next to one of his horses in Lapidarium, in front of the Brandenburg Gate, 2015. © Australscope.

his installation and the site at the Brandenburg Gate, to broader histories and evoked connections ranging from the Greek Trojan horse to the vaunted Prussian cavalry that dominated European battles until its defeat by Napoleon. Not only did the horses refer to Da Vinci’s sculpture, but they were in direct conversation with the Quadriga. Yet in contrast to the horses atop the Gate, these were broken, stitched together horses, incomplete and severed. The partial structures recalled the devastation of war, particularly the separated heads, skeletal iron supports, and skulls embedded in some of the horses. In juxtaposition with the triumphal horses of the Quadriga, Aceves’ creations reminded the viewer of the mixed nature of history and the fleeting duration of victory. This work transformed the space around the Gate, thereby altering and layering meanings of the Gate itself. Installed at the peak of the Greek fiscal crisis, this piece, which drew on and highlighted the site’s deep debt to classicism, evoked Greece as the birthplace of European Culture. This reframing of the highly symbolic Brandenburg Gate thus complicated the official political relationship between Germany and Greece and subtly resisted the notion propagated by German politicians that the debt was only a Greek one. One of the most emotionally charged and controversial installations at the Brandenburg Gate was created in 2017 by Syrian artist Manaf Halbouni. The piece consisted of three twelve-meter high red-and-white buses standing upended in front of the Gate to recall the barricades erected in Aleppo as shields to protect civilian non-

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combatants against gunfire during the Syrian Civil War.41 This provocative installation was first placed in the former East German city of Dresden where it inspired heated opposition from right-wing groups like Pegida and the AfD. Halbouni intended his piece, Monument, primarily as an anti-war statement but also as one about the possibility to end war and reconstruct cities and nations, something Germans were able to do in Dresden and in Berlin. This second installation in Berlin was a forceful act of resistance against the right-wing groups that had loudly opposed the piece in Dresden—likely inspired by their opposition to Germany’s hosting of so many Syrian refugees—and their nationalist, anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Art as Resistance German artist Anne Imhof ’s installation, Faust (Fist) (Figure 1.6), installed at the 2017 German Pavilion in Venice, is a powerful example of interactive performance art in which the act of participating created the message, a myriad of interpretations dependent on each viewer, and the associations he or she brought to the work.42 A self-described painter, Imhof ’s piece combined performance, architecture, installation, painting, sound, and sculpture in a single work performed over a five-hour period each day. She used the audience and performers’ body positions in space to create changing hierarchical relationships between bodies and her installation and among the bodies themselves. For Imhof, the overt intent was to convey and embody her message of resistance to existing power structures. The piece’s name, Faust, is a double entendre that refers to the clenched human hand used to indicate resistance and the name of the famous literary figure who made a bargain with the devil, selling his soul in exchange for knowledge and power. Faust is also considered the magnum opus by the great German writer, Goethe, who is a symbol of the German bourgeois culture against which Imhof situated her work. The Venice installation transformed the 1938 German Pavilion, long a contentious piece of architecture with its ties to the National Socialist era, into an other-worldly set. With steel caging and transparent glass barriers and floor, supported by a grid of steel columns and beams suspended one meter above the actual floor, Imhof divided the historic building into discreet new spaces. Imhof ’s sleek, modern materials and large canvases printed with her screaming visage sat in contradictory juxtaposition with the

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“Bus Barricade Installed at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate in Tribute to Aleppo,” Reuters, November 10, 2017; “Controversial Anti-War Monument on Show in Berlin,” DW , http://www.dw.com/en/ controversial-anti-war-monument-on-show-in-berlin/a–41295968 [accessed February 14, 2018]. The installation can be viewed at: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-germany-art/ exhibit-at-berlins-brandenburg-gate-evokes-syrian-war-idUSKBN 1DA 2HW Naomi Smolik, “Conversations: Anne Imhof ‘Faust’ at German Pavilion, Venice Biennale,” Mousse Magazine, http://moussemagazine.it/anne-imhof-faust-german-pavilion-venice-biennale–2017/; Elizabeth Fullerton, “In London, Anne Imhof talks about her kicking, screaming, Venice Biennale hit ‘Faust’,” Art News, May 30, 2017; Justin Polera, “Review: Anne Imhof ’s ‘Faust’ at Venice Biennale,” Dansk, http://www.danskmagazine.com/attention/review-anne-imhofs-faust-at-venice-biennale

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Figure 1.6: A view from underneath the glass floor of performers, with audience above, Anne Imhof ’s Faust, 2017. © ANSA . neoclassical architecture, with its pediment, Doric pilasters, and marble floors. The new architecture recalled transparent structures emblematic of the new German democracy as well as the glass towers of neoliberal corporatism, demonstrating the positive and negative associations tied to glass.43 The glass panels also acted to circumscribe the space for viewers while its surfaces reflected light, people, and objects; it thus collapsed everything into a series of ever-changing, even at times painterly, images. Imhof ’s project was resistant to the established political order by implication, by the situations that it created. Viewers entered the pavilion a meter above the actual floor, walking on Imhof ’s transparent glass surface. This meant that viewers literally stood on top of some of the performers and tread over them, in an unsettling relationship that simultaneously recalled both the National Socialist control of the German nation with its distain and harm of certain bodies, and contemporary corporate abuses of economic power. The mise en scène called attention to problematic power relationships between people and also suggested that action was called for; if audience movement and relocations altered the power structures in the space, perhaps they could change in society as well. If Imhof ’s intentions were ever in doubt, she articulated them explicitly in a press release: “Only by forming an association of bodies, only by occupying space can resistance take hold . . . on the balustrades and fences, underground and on the

43

For more on this, see Deborah Ascher Barnstone, The Transparent State: Architecture and Politics in Postwar Germany (London: Routledge, 2005).

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roof, the performers conquer and occupy the room, the house, the pavilion, the institution, the state.”44 Built into the piece was not only horizontal movement, but vertical as well. In Imhof ’s words, performers were not restricted to the “underworld.” They also performed amongst the audience and on perches above them. Performers were dressed in everyday attire, tracksuits, jeans, sweatshirts, and T-shirts; this attire too made them clear extensions, or even mirror images, of the audience. These elements of the piece furthered the sense that audience and performers were one and the same so that audience participants could feel that they were acting together with the performers; this could enable their own sense that they were empowered to resist the status quo and effect change.

Conclusion As John Dewey recognized, “The moral prophets of humanity have always been poets even though they spoke in free verse or by parable . . .”45 Dewey suggests that, art is more effective as a form of resistance than we might expect. During the 2016 presidential campaign, cadres of Americans organized to express their support for Hilary Clinton. Some saw their actions as resistance to the male-dominated norms of American politics; others were inspired to action by what they perceived as the virulent sexism and racism central to Trump’s brand of authoritariansim. One action, called Pantsuit Nation, was a group of 170 dancers of multiple races and ethnicities, many but not all of them women, dressed in multi-colored pantsuits; they were a flash-mob performance in New York City, dancing to Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling.”46 The act of dancing in the flash mob—performing for the surprised local audience and for cameras that would be used to make a slick, upbeat video for the internet audience— was an affirmation of support of a political candidate. But it was also a strong statement about belief in the efficacy of artistic resistance in the face of a campaign by Clinton’s opponent Trump that was characterized by calculated racism, nativism, and sexism. The video’s statement was made even stronger by the context into which it emerged; it dropped on October 7, 2016, just before The Washington Post published the story and audio recording of Trump’s boasts of sexually harassing women to then “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush.47 44

45 46

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Cited in Nate Freeman, “Anne Imhof ’s Bargain Pays off with ‘Faust’ at the German Pavilion,” Art News, May 9, 2017. John Dewey, Art as Experience, 362. Sarah L. Kaufman, “Pantsuit Power Flash Mob Cideo for Hillary Clinton: Two Women, 170 Dancers and No Police,” The Washington Post, October 7, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/10/07/pantsuit-power-flashmob-video-for-hillary-clinton-twowomen–170-dancers-no-police/?utm_term=.320ac8310cb5 [accessed February 14, 2018]. David A. Fahrenthold, The Washington Post, Oct. 8, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ politics/trump-recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-women-in–2005/2016/ 10/07/3b9ce776–8cb4–11e6-bf8a–3d26847eeed4_story.html?utm_term=.15122dd72e8b [accessed, February 14, 2018].

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The efficacy of art’s power to resist is also evident in a recent example in Germany, in the small, formerly East German village of Bornhagen, where a group called the Center for Political Beauty constructed a replica of Peter Eisenman’s 2004 Berlin Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe directly adjacent to the home of right-wing politician, Bjorn Höcke.48 Eisenman’s iconic field of concrete blocks, or stelae, of varying heights is seen as grimly abstract or, to some viewers, as representative of a massive cemetery. The replica was erected in order to protest the politician’s assertion that Germans should stop feeling guilty for the Holocaust. Stelae in the new installation were rotated 180 degrees to symbolize the “180-degree turn” that Höcke called for in the way that Germans viewed their history to suggest that no change of view could alter the past. In this case, as in so many others, people believed that art could speak more effectively than plain language or more traditional forms of political protest. The arts and related forms of cultural production function on multiple levels; they engage both the imagination and the rational mind; art is non-violent yet forceful. The scholar and professor of political science Gene Sharp recognized the power of nonviolent resistance and protest and devoted his lengthy career to its study. He famously identified 198 forms of non-violent protest in The Politics of Nonviolent Action.49 On his list is every form of art discussed above and included in this edited volume, from caricatures and symbols to film and performance art. Although Sharp did not focus his work exclusively on the efficacy of art per se, he recognized its power. So should we.

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James Masters, “Holocaust Memorial Built Outside Home of Far-Right German Politician,” CNN , November 23, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/23/europe/holocaust-memorial-germanpolitician/index.html [accessed February 14, 2018]; a photograph of the installation can be seen here. Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973).

Part I

Art That Alters Worldviews

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2

Cut with the Kitchen Knife: Visualizing Politics in Berlin Dada Patrizia McBride

A picture taken at the 1920 Dada Fair in Berlin shows a self-confident Hannah Höch amusedly glancing down at a piece of paper held by Raoul Hausmann, her close collaborator and companion at the time (Figure 2.1). Leaning on a walking stick in her stylish bobbed hair and contemporary dress, Höch makes a smart-looking foil to the fashionable Hausmann, the Da-Dandy known for cultivating a sophisticated appearance in addition to a radical political agenda. The couple stand in front of a wall showcasing their posters and photomontages, which offer a vitriolic indictment of contemporary dehumanization while extolling Dada as a revolutionary force bent on transforming experience from the ground up. The pictures hanging in the backdrop include Höch’s large-scale photomontage Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (“Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands”; 1919–20), which has become one of the most iconic visual statements of Berlin Dada. The image powerfully blends references to contemporaneous political events—the sailors’ mutiny that brought about Germany’s capitulation in the First World War, the repression of the so-called Spartacus uprisings that had been organized by communists in January of 1919, the reactionary role played by the military in the early days of the republic—with a celebration of Dada’s vitalism as a force of both political resistance and existential renewal. Höch thus delivers a trenchant denunciation of the authoritarian disposition that lay behind Germany’s new republican façade while at the same time issuing an appeal to join forces with Dada in seizing the emancipatory opportunities opened by popular culture and mass society. If the collage’s scrutiny of present-day Germany has often been discussed in the scholarship, less attention has been paid to the ways its critique extends to the Dadaists’ understanding of political resistance, which led them to oppose the authoritarian structures Weimar Germany had inherited from the Kaiserreich while ignoring the progress that—especially women—had made in the new republic.1 As suggested by the 1

Hanne Bergius has offered an influential reading of Höch’s collage that treats its portrayal of Weimar Germany as an instance of cosmic life caught up in the throes of endless metamorphic

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Figure 2.1: Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann in front of their works at the First International Dada Fair, 1920. On the left is Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919–20. © 2018 Berlinische Galerie / Foto: Kai-Annett Becker / Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / ADAGP, Paris / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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tongue-twisting, syntactically ambiguous title of the collage, the image treats Dada as both a lens through which contemporary Germany is surveyed and the object of uncompromising scrutiny. As the only female artist granted admission to Berlin Dada, Höch produced a visual map of power relations in present-day Germany that eschewed Dada’s signature self-heroization, refusing to align Dadaism neatly with a righteous struggle against political oppression. Instead her collage queries how Dada’s self-image embodied by the photo described above—of thoroughly contemporary artists committed to a radical renewal involving social and sexual equality—squared with the uninspected sexism and violent swagger lurking beneath Dada’s ideological radicalism. Höch’s critical scrutiny targeted specifically Dadaism’s self-proclaimed status as an epistemological perspective that connected communism, anarchism, and political revolution in the quest for an alternate revolutionary time, and in so doing equivocated over what should count as transformative political engagement. At stake was the all-ornothing attitude that prompted Berlin Dada to vilify the new republic while neglecting the notable achievements women had made in Weimar Germany, first and foremost the introduction of comprehensive political rights for women that Höch explicitly celebrated in another collage from 1919.2 Höch’s complex relationship to Dadaism makes the question of political resistance a double-edged sword for her. On the one hand, the imperative to debunk the lingering authoritarianism of the new state aligned her with the communist-anarchic vision of her Dada peers. On the other, resistance meant for her highlighting the glaring inconsistency that marked the Dadaists’ stance on gender, which incongruously blended a radical critique of patriarchal society with the sexism rampant in their own ranks. In other words, resisting political oppression involved for Höch sorting out her difficult relation to Dadaism, as a vision whose emancipatory dimension was to be endorsed, but whose reality of unacknowledged sexism had to be called out. This critique unfolds in the medium of visual collage, specifically adopting the form of the “Querschnitt” or cross-section as an epistemological tool that visually underscores a

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transformation. Hanne Bergius, “Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser: Montage als groteske Politallegorie,” Montage und Metamechanik. Dada Berlin. Artistik von Polaritäten (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 2000), 130–59. Along similar lines see Jula Dech, Hannah Höch. Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada—Spiegel einer Bierbauchkultur (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1993) and Matthew Biro, who draws on the trope of the cyborg to emphasize Dada’s merging of the organic and mechanical world. Matthew Biro, “Hannah Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife: Photomontage, Signification, and the Mass Media,” The Dada Cyborg. Vision of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 65–103. A partially overlapping strand of scholarship focuses the image’s commentary on the situation of women in the new republic. See, besides Dech, Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius “Michelangelo beim Abwasch: Hannah Höchs Zeitschnitte der Avantgarde,” in Frauen, Kunst, Wissenschaft, 12 (1991), 59–80; Maud Lavin’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife, and Maria Makela’s “By Design: The Early Work of Hannah Höch in Context,” The Photomontages of Hannah Höch, eds Maria Makela and Peter Boswell (Minneapolis, MN : Walker Arts Center, 1996), 49–79. See Höch’s Dada Rundschau (“Dada Panorama”), a survey of contemporary Germany that makes reference to the first women who were elected to political office in Weimar Germany. For a detailed reading of the collage see Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 37. Hannah Höch, Werke und Worte, eds Herbert Remmert and Peter Barth (Berlin: Fröhlich & Kaufmann, 1982), 26. Höch was the only woman affiliated with Berlin Dada, her presence being

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specific relation of knowledge to time and thus comments directly on Dada’s concern with revolution and temporality. In what follows I will first sketch out Höch’s relation to Berlin Dada and place her collage in conversation with texts by Raoul Hausmann that are explicitly referenced by the image. After discussing the epistemological attributes of the cross-section in the wake of the sociological investigations pursued by Georg Simmel and Siegfried Kracauer, I will offer a reading of Höch’s image as a meditation on Dada’s understanding of political resistance, specifically, its contradictory vision of revolution. At stake is, on the one hand, a properly political understanding of revolution as the righteous overthrow of a corrupt regime. On the other, there is the vitalist notion of radical upheaval that enables life’s eternal renewal but does not necessarily engender political emancipation.

Political Resistance in Berlin Dada: Communism, Anarchism, Vitalism Cut with the Kitchen Knife (Figure  2.2) was one of eight works altogether with which Höch was represented at the First International Dada Fair, the Dadaists’ sardonic take on the bourgeois art exhibit.3 The event wound up marking at once the culmination and the demise of Berlin Dada, which disbanded shortly after the Fair closed its doors in August 1920.4 Its collapse was prompted by both personal rivalries and deep philosophical differences in the group’s understanding of political activism. Of its members, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Wieland Herzfelde, and Franz Jung had joined the Communist Party of Germany, the KPD, shortly after its founding in December 1918. While openly sympathizing with Communism, Richard Huelsenbeck and Raoul Hausmann kept their distance to organized politics, embracing instead a position of aesthetic anarchism shared to various extents by other members of the group, including Walter Mehring and Johannes Baader. These differences involved the very understanding of revolution. Drawing on Nietzsche’s vitalism, Hausmann

4

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tolerated by other Dadaists because of her relationship with Raoul Hausmann. Karoline Hille reports that Höch’s participation in the Dada Fair was opposed by the Dadaists close to the Malik Verlag, who believed she lacked genuine Dada talent. Hausmann reportedly threatened to cancel his participation in the exhibition to force his colleagues to include Höch. Karoline Hille, Hannah Höch und Raoul Hausmann. Eine Berliner Dada-Geschichte (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2000), 166–7. Founded in 1918 by Richard Huelsenbeck with George Grosz, John Heartfield, and the latter’s brother Wieland Herzfelde, Berlin Club Dada is best described as a decentralized network of artists radicalized by the experience of war and revolution. For Berlin Dada’s relation to Communism and institutionalized politics more generally see Richard Sheppard, Modernism, Dada, Postmodernism (Evanston, IL : Northwestern University Press, 2000), 304–50; Barbara McCloskey, George Grosz and the Communist Party. Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918–1936 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 3–103, and Brigid Doherty, “The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada,” October, vol. 105 (2003), 73–92. For a recent historical account of Berlin Dada, see Michael White, Generation Dada. The Berlin Avant-Garde and the First World War (New Haven: Yale, 2013). See for instance the Dada manifesto signed in 1919 by Richard Huelsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann, and Yefim Golyshev, “Was ist der Dadaismus und was will er in Deutschland?” (“What is Dadaism and

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and Huelsenbeck believed that the collapse of the revolutionary uprisings in 1919 raised the question of how to grasp the temporality of revolution beyond contingent historical circumstances such as the bloody suppression of the Spartacus revolt and the Munich council republic. If the violent defeat of the uprisings had anything to teach, it was that one needed to understand what makes revolutions actually succeed before engaging in subversive action. Political resistance could no longer just involve a naïve attack on the republican institutions that masked the authoritarianism still simmering in Weimar Germany but rather called for grasping what revolutions entail in the first place. Specifically, it involved understanding what can turn ordinary events into the subversive temporality of revolution. In assuming that revolutions possess a different temporal fabric than ordinary time, Huelsenbeck and Hausmann called for enacting a mode of revolutionary time they deemed more transformative than conventional political revolution. Their program was frequently glossed under the rubric “Weltrevolution,” which well exceeded the Marxian vision of a worldwide overthrow of capitalism to advocate for a planetary cataclysm to be unleashed by launching a ruthless attack on Western bourgeois subjectivity and its repressive ethical framework.5 As Hausmann put it in “What is Dada?” (“Was ist Dada”?), an unpublished text from August 1920, Dada pursues the merciless destruction of contemporary bourgeois society as a means of ushering in a new collective.6 The final goal did not lie in replacing the old social forms through more progressive ones, however, but rather in reconfiguring temporal experience altogether. In Hausmann’s words, Dadaists would “give up Dada when time becomes Dada.”7 This radical agenda was, as Hausmann recognized, ultimately at odds with the vision of socio-economic renewal outlined by ThirdInternational Communism and espoused by the KPD, whose meliorist program Hausmann critically discussed in a number of essays that appeared between 1918 and 1920. One of the most extensive commentaries is found in “Cut through the Age” (“Schnitt durch die Zeit”), an essay from October 1919 that likely provided crucial impulses for Höch’s collage. Here Hausmann applauds Communism for subverting the structures of domination that reinforce the human compulsion to possess (“Besitz”), yet also faults it for taking this compulsion at face value instead of seeing it as symptomatic of the fundamental antagonisms that simmer under established social

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what does it want in Germany?” Richard Huelsenbeck, Dada-Logik 1913–1972 (Munich: Belleville, 2012), 64–5. See also Johannes Baader, “Dada-Spiel” (Dada-Play), Der Dada 1. The text was probably penned as a response to disparaging reviews of the Dada Fair that had appeared in the pages of Die Rote Fahne, the official organ of the KPD, and Deutsche Tageszeitung, a center-right daily. Raoul Hausmann, Scharfrichter der bürgerlichen Seele. Raoul Hausmann in Berlin 1900–1933. Unveröffentlichte Briefe Texte Dokumente, ed. Eva Züchner (Ostfildern: Gerd Hatje, 1998), 107. “Dada wird von uns aufgegeben werden, wenn die Zeit dada ist.” Scharfrichter 107. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. Raoul Hausmann, “Schnitt durch die Zeit,” Bilanz der Feierlichkeit. Texte bis 1933, Bd. 1 (Munich: Text+Kritik, 1982), 71–81, here 71–2. For other essays that address the relation of communism,

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Figure 2.2: Hannah Höch, Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands, (Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany), 1919. Photomontage and collage on paper, 44.9 × 35.4 in., 114 × 90 cm. Photo: Jörg Anders. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz (Nationalgalerie, Berlin)/Art Resource, New York. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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structures. Following the influential reading of Nietzsche developed by Salomo Friedländer, Hausmann saw these antagonisms as rooted in the basic conflict between self and other that defines human subjectivity, and which the patriarchal individualism of Western bourgeois culture kept in check.8 This led him to reject Communism’s vision of social rejuvenation through economic upheaval as falling short of the comprehensive psycho-physical regeneration needed to subvert bourgeois subjectivity. Instead he pleaded for fostering a proto-Foucauldian “technology of knowledge about oneself ” (“Technik des Wissens um sich selbst”)9 that is, a mode of self-knowledge that could enable individuals to ditch the shackles of ossified social convention to pursue the unbridled amplification of personal experience, even at the price of unleashing a war of one against all. Dada offered just such a form of unrestrained (self) knowledge, according to Hausmann. Living out this self-awareness was for him the ultimate act of political resistance.

Cut with the Kitchen Knife: Montage and the Sociology of the Querschnitt Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife visually echoes Hausmann’s belief in existence as a maelstrom of anarchic fragments given provisory form by fragile social conventions and ideological constructs, while at the same time asking what forms of resistance this vision is actually able to foster. Her survey of the Weimar Republic as a beer-belly, petitbourgeois culture avoids presenting contemporary Germany as disfigured by socioeconomic decay and moral degeneration, as is the case in the graphic depictions of the war’s aftermath offered by George Grosz and Otto Dix. Instead the picture portrays the contemporary moment as an anarchic world subject to a relentless process of boundary dissolution and metamorphic transformation, a bewildering ecosystem made up of a disparate assortment of human and non-human actors—animals ranging from elephants to insects, politicians, members of the military, demonstrating workers, children, artists, philosophers, and non-Western peoples, which all share the stage with a dizzying variety of objects, including buildings and street scenes, mechanical gears, and various means of transportation. These elements are precariously held together by the impression of circular movement evoked by the round objects strewn all over the composition. It is further underscored, at the center of the composition, by the gyrating

9

anarchism, and revolution in Hausmann’s thinking, see the following texts collected in Bilanz: “Der Proletarier und die Kunst” (The Proletarian and Art, 1918), 24–6; “Zu Kommunismus und Anarchie” (“On Communism and Anarchy,” 1918), 27–30; “Der individualistische Anarchist und die Diktatur” (The Individualist Anarchist and Dictatorship, 1919), 43–5; “Zur Weltrevolution” (“On World Revolution,” 1919), 50–4; “Objektive Betrachtung der Rolle des Dadaismus” (“Objective Reflection on the Role of Dadaism,” 1920), 108–13. Hausmann, Bilanz 81.

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motions of a headless ballerina balancing the portrait of sculptress Käthe Kollwitz. This is a world that congeals around the circular dance of deep-flowing time, in the words of art historian Hanne Bergius, which renews itself through the multifarious recurrence of the ever same.10 Dada is part and parcel of this process of metamorphic becoming, as suggested by several pasted phrases extolling its deeds and by the gallery of Dadaist portraits labeled “the great Dada world” (“die große Dada-Welt”) that occupy the collage’s lower right-hand corner. To quote a statement by Hausmann that may have provided the title of Höch’s collage, Dada emerges in the picture as “the energy of intellectual sabotage performed against the technical remedy-crutch of Weimar’s potbelly culture,” that is, as the means for subverting outlived social forms and furthering life’s cosmic renewal.11 Montage offers a most appropriate aesthetic principle for visualizing such creative destruction. As made clear by the collage’s title, its operations of cutting and pasting are tantamount to slashing the present open and subjecting its forms to a ruthless mix-and-match that does not refrain from violating putatively intact existence by means of grotesque juxtapositions and the radical manipulation of scale. This creative disfiguration targets all available experience, whether desirable or deserving condemnation. Hence the two large portraits that visually anchor the right- and lefthand upper corners of the composition, depicting Dada hero Albert Einstein and Dada nemesis and former emperor Wilhelm II , grotesquely distort the countenance of both men. Wilhelm’s right eye is concealed behind a tiny cradle holding a screaming newborn, which symbolizes the revolutionary “Augen-Blick”—both the blink of an eye and the pregnant moment—through which the petrified emperor is made to stare into a (for him) adverse future.12 Einstein’s right eye is also defaced by an unorthodox monocle made of a sideways figure eight symbolizing infinity. His is a more productive way of beholding time, as suggested by the phrase “The balancer of the world” (“Der Waghalter der Welt”) pasted across the scientist’s forehead, which reprises the title of a 1915 essay by philosopher Salomo Friedländer that makes the infinity sign a cipher for the self ’s ability to reconcile polar oppositions into a desirable condition of “creative indifference.”13 Scholars have repeatedly pointed to the violence inherent in these operations of cutting and pasting, seeing the defacement of montage as a righteous act of retribution leveled at the world’s iniquity.14 Yet, in relating seeing to clairvoyance, the prosthetic eyes of Einstein and Wilhelm II also raise the question of how the image’s cutting and pasting links vision, temporality, and knowledge at both a methodological and a formal

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Bergius, Das Lachen Dadas (Giessen: Anabas, 1989), 130–1. “Dada ist die Energie der geistigen Sabotage an der technischen Nothilfe der Weimarer Bierbauchkultur” (Scharfrichter, 104). According to Timothy Benson this fragment may have given the title to Höch’s collage; see Timothy Benson, quoted in Züchner, Scharfrichter,105. The labeling of the fragment as “Augen-Blick” stems from Dech, 41. “Schöpferische Indifferenz.” Quoted in Ralf Burmeister, “Der Dada-Code,” Hannah Höch. Aller Anfang ist Dada!, ed. Ralf Burmeister (Hantje Cantz, 2007), 19. See Biro 70–9 and Bergius, Montage, 82–5, among others.

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level. What kind of perspectives or devices enable the two men to see the present as pregnant with a distinctive type of future—terrifying for Wilhelm II , desirable for Einstein? And how does the collage itself mediate a knowledge of present-day Germany that might disclose deeper trends shaping the country’s development? These issues are key to articulating proper forms of political resistance. The montage principle itself provides the kind of sociological knowledge that helps to address them. The practice of slicing through a state of affairs so as to provide insight into its constitutive relations recalls the methodological premise of the scientific cross-section or “Querschnitt,” which is directly invoked by the polyvalent noun “Schnitt” that anchors semantically both Höch’s “Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser” and Hausmann’s “Schnitt durch die Zeit.”15 Michael Cowan has compellingly discussed the remarkable appeal that the “Querschnitt” as a mode of synchronous visual organization enjoyed in Weimar Germany, drawing on Siegfried Kracauer’s 1919 essay on the sociology of Georg Simmel to tease out its methodological and ideological purchase after the Great War. As Cowan argues, Kracauer found in the “Querschnitt” a fitting principle for describing Simmel’s investigation of the surface of social life, which hinged on disentangling fragments of experience from their trusted contexts in order to insert them in new, enlightening configurations by capturing the analogies, or relations of partial resemblance, that connected phenomena generally thought to be unrelated.16

Visualizing Resistance: Political Revolution or Vitalist Renewal? Höch was especially influenced by Simmel’s preoccupation with capturing the fleeting quality of metropolitan life.17 Her survey of Weimar Germany especially evokes Simmel’s desire to grasp the present as a disparate simultaneity of elements nested on the very surface of experience. In this respect her cross-section can be seen as offering a mode of sociological knowledge about the forms of political resistance engendered by the Dadaists’ vision of revolution. Accordingly, her image visualizes a specific understanding of time, not as historical becoming driven by ironclad necessity but as a deep flow given transitory form by contingent social structures and cultural constructs. The cross-sectional image allows for arresting time’s flow, freezing it in a snapshot of pregnant contemporaneity. Yet Höch’s survey also thematizes momentous historical events, making reference to Germany’s failed uprisings and seeking to articulate Dada’s

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For a discussion of the “Querschnitt” in relation to Dada’s understanding of simultaneity and deployment of montage see Bergius, Montage, 82–5. Simmel’s emphasis on surface-level connections allowed him to jettison explanatory models based on deep historical causality, according to Kracauer, while still endowing his accounts with an inchoate sense of consistency and totality. Michael Cowan, “Cutting through the Archive: Querschnitt Montage and Images of the World in Weimar Visual Culture,” New German Critique 120, vol. 40.3 (2013): 1–40. Ellen Maurer identifies Georg Simmel as a key theoretical influence on Höch, along with Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Höch’s close friend Salomo Friedländer: Ellen Maurer, Hannah Höch: Jenseits fester Grenzen Das malerische Werk bis 1945 (Berlin, Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1995), 91–7.

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relationship to the question of revolution they posed.18 In a clear nod to the uprisings, demonstrating masses in the picture’s lower left quadrant are exhorted to join Dada by Raimund Tost, a leader of the mutinous sailors in the Kiel revolt in 1918. Gustav Noske, the Social-Democratic politician who, as Minister of the Interior, was responsible for the violent suppression of the Spartacus revolt and the Munich council republic, is shown cozily chatting with a high-ranking army official. Karl Radek, the Communist leader who was arrested in conjunction with the Spartacus revolt, is presented as part of a trio including Karl Marx and Dadaist Johannes Baader.19 Hence, while the collage registers at first as a disorderly assemblage of photographic fragments, the contemporary references it conjures soon congeal around fairly coherent thematic groupings and dramatic tableaux that directly thematize acts of political resistance. The most vivid involves urban masses that march up from the picture’s bottom left corner along the diagonal, seemingly ready to clash with a group of military officials and conservative politicians in the opposite corner headed by Wilhelm II and dubbed the “Anti-Dadaists” (“Die Anti-Dadaisten”).20 One of several phrases scattered around the collage calls on the masses to “Join Dada” (“Tretet Dada bei”). The other diagonal connects members of Berlin Dada in the bottom right corner to the large portrait of Albert Einstein at the top left, who is enjoined for the Dadaists’ cause by a large “Dada” label placed over his head. At first glance the representatives of Kaiserreich authoritarianism on the upper right seem to be destined for certain defeat at the hands of the emancipatory forces that encircle them—Einstein in the top left, the masses in the bottom left, and the members of Berlin Dada on the lower right. Yet the diagonals relating Dada to Einstein and the advancing workers to their imperial nemesis cross at the spot where the ballerina juggles the head of Kollwitz, her centrifugal motions seemingly interrupting the straight line along which the masses advance in their march toward the forces of reaction. Will the demonstrating workers become caught in the ballerina’s spinning motions and get tossed aside, perhaps even whirled back to the corner from which they came? That is, will their struggle fizzle out in an isolated flare-up that will not affect the status quo, thus confirming the pessimistic assessment of those who saw in the new republic a continuation of the authoritarian Kaiserreich? Or will the workers prevail, their victory bringing true political emancipation, as suggested by the map of Europe pasted in the image’s lower-right corner, which displays the countries in which women have gained, or are about to gain, the right to vote? These questions shine a light on the different ways historical change is portrayed by the collage. On the one hand, there is the linear movement of the demonstrating masses about to clash with the forces of reaction. On the other, there is the gyrating motion of

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It does so by representing diachronic developments as spatial figurations in the distinctive mode of presentation allowed by the cross-section, where “change appears on a line or a plane to be surveyed in a single glance,” as Cowan points out. Cowan, 11. References to the revolutionary uprisings include Dech, 32–4. Jula Dech has drawn attention to the dramatic structure of Höch’s x-shaped composition, pointing to the movement of the gathering masses in the bottom-left corner towards the representatives of the old order in the opposite corner. Jula Dech, Hannah Höch. Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada—Spiegel einer Bierbauchkultur (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1993), 25–6.

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the dancing ballerina at the center of the composition, whose whirling movements are echoed by the revolving motion of numerous wheels and other round objects scattered across the picture. The intersection of the two forms of motion at the center of the composition begs the question of how the two kinds of temporal movement—unilinear and circular—relate to each other and what larger meaning they are able to impart on the occurrences they frame. Is the face-off between the demonstrators and the reactionary forces a one-time event in a repeating temporal pattern? Or does it represent irreversible progress on a linear path to emancipation? At issue are, ultimately, two incongruous understandings of revolutionary time, namely, a vitalist-cyclical one embodied by Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence, which portrays life as a flow that incessantly renews itself by revolving onto itself, and a world-historical one variously modulated by Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers, which postulates that revolutions contribute, at least potentially, to humanity’s advancement along a straight axis of historical progress.21 Höch’s collage portrays these two vectors of historical movement—the forward thrust of emancipatory progress and the revolving motion of vitalist renewal—as two discrete forces whose crossing at the center of the picture is not an auspicious sign for the scene of political revolution unfolding along the one diagonal. Rather than endow the scene with the promise of orderly historical becoming, the ballerina’s centrifugal dance threatens to thrust the workers backwards, letting them drown in the ocean of fragments from which they emerged.

Women’s Liberation and the Blindspot of Dada’s Politics Höch’s reluctance to reconcile the divergent understandings of time her Weimar crosssection evokes at the formal level shines a light on Dada’s own equivocation vis-à-vis the question of revolution precipitated by recent political events, including the repression of the uprisings that broke out in conjunction with the republic’s founding. Many in Berlin Dada found themselves wavering between a vitalist-existential and a properly political understanding of revolution, that is, between proclaiming their radical allegiance to life’s self-actualization in the recurrence of the ever same, on the one hand, and following the emancipatory promise of a concrete political vision, on the other. This challenge was brought to a point by Hausmann’s own indecisiveness in giving specific contours to his musings about revolution so as to turn them into an

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For historian Reinhart Koselleck, modern reflection on revolution since 1800 struggled to reconcile these disparate forms of temporality, seeking to yoke the sense of order evoked by the pre-modern notion of revolution, which patterned the circular succession of forms of government on the predictable cycle of celestial bodies, to the emancipatory promise of the modern understanding of revolutionary change as a rupture that hastens history’s progress. The two forms of temporality— circular and uni-linear—were thus merged in the dynamic figure of the spiral, which suggested that history advances through a series of reoccurrences that mark ever-higher levels of development. Reinhard Koselleck, “Revolution als Begriff und als Metapher. Zur Semantik eines einst emphatischen Worts,” in Begriffsgeschichten. Studien zur Semantik und Pragmatik der politischen und sozialen Sprache (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2006), 240–51, here 249–51.

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actionable program. In “On World Revolution” (“Zur Weltrevolution”), an essay written around the same time as “Cut through the Age” and also published in 1919, Hausmann reprises his belief in world revolution as a cataclysmic event that will bring down patriarchal domination. Rather than culminating in the appeal to obliterate bourgeois subjectivity that frames “Cut through the Age,” “On World Revolution” explicitly pleads for sexual egalitarianism and the liberation of women from the shackles of patriarchy, raising the prospect that emancipated women may constitute “morality and social order in perhaps even stronger measure than men.”22 While this claim may be a sympathetic rejoinder to women’s recent enfranchisement following the introduction of the universal right to vote in Germany on November 30, 1918, one must ask how the assumption about the moral superiority of a social order shaped by women jibes with the unsettling vision of a creaturely world jolted by the liberating war of one against all that is offered at the end of “Cut through the Age.” Hausmann’s equivocation here is emblematic of a larger inconsistency that undercut Dada’s rhetoric of revolution and political resistance. How is Dada to reconcile its belief in existence as a maelstrom that rejuvenates itself through conflict with its own self-understanding as the vanguard of a world-historical development whose upheavals bring desirable change? Why engage in revolutionary change or develop any other kind of political program if life is at bottom shaped by the eruption of value-free conflict? The tension between these two positions may explain Höch’s decision, made after the Dada Fair, to remove from her collage the oversized phrase “World Revolution” (“Weltrevolution”) that dangled perpendicularly along the left side of the Dadaist portrait gallery, which she replaced with the verbal fragment “the great Dada world” (“Die große Dada-Welt”) (Figures  2.3 and 2.4). As art historian Brigid Doherty has noted, this latter phrase lacks the rousing appeal of “world revolution” and comes across as blandly descriptive. Additionally, while the earlier label associated the Dadaists directly with the world-size conflagration they sought to unleash, the new caption invites one to see “the great Dada world” as more modestly nested within the larger maelstrom of Weimar-era society. This is underscored by the small typeface in which the words “the great” have been set, as if to ironically suggest that Dada’s greatness is in reality a rather minor affair. When seen in conjunction with the map of Europe outlining women’s political achievements in 1919, the discarding of “world revolution” may further imply that Dada has little to do with the vision of women’s emancipation that Hausmann had made a precondition of planetary renewal in “On World Revolution.” This in turn begs the question of what assessment of Dada’s conjoined visions of political resistance and existential renewal is offered by the final version of Höch’s collage.23

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“Daß die Frau vielleicht stärker als der Mann befähigt ist, Sitte oder Gesellschaftsordnung zu bilden.” Hausmann, Bilanz 53. According to Hanne Bergius the substitution was made in 1921 and was suggested by Hausmann himself (Bergius, Montage 150). The suggestion reflected his disappointment that the world revolution he had advocated had failed to materialize. Brigid Doherty discusses this substitution in the context of several changes that were made to the picture after the Fair, which she however does not date. Brigid Doherty, “Berlin,” Dada. Zurich Berlin Hannover Cologne New York Paris (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2006), 108.

Figure 2.3: Detail of lower-right quadrant of Cut with the Kitchen Knife featuring the phrase “Weltrevolution” (“World Revolution”; undated picture). © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Figure 2.4: Detail of lower-right quadrant of Cut with the Kitchen Knife featuring the phrase “Die große Welt-Dada” (“The great Dada world”). 35

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To address this question in closing it will be helpful to dwell on the colorful Dada world that occupies the lower-right quadrant of the composition, where Dadaists Johannes Baader, Walter Mehring, George Grosz, Wieland Herzfelde, and Raoul Hausmann keep good company with the likes of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Karl Radek, as well as prominent women artists like the actresses Asta Nielsen and Pola Negri and the dancer Nidda Impekoven. As is often the case for Höch’s collage portraiture, the Dadaists’ physiognomies are pieced together from incongruous body parts that subvert sexual, gender, and cultural stereotypes. Baader’s, Grosz’s, and Herzfelde’s faces are implanted onto women’s bodies as if to symbolize their reliance on putatively female attributes. While Baader’s face sits upon the torso of a competitive springer, Herzfelde tops the crinoline of Empress Eugenie, and Grosz appears as a two-headed dancer in classical tutu (the second head featuring George Carpentier, a heavy-weight boxing champion that represents an allusion to Grosz’s passion for boxing). While the grotesque hybridity of these portraits is on a par with the metamorphic portrayal of other humans featured on the collage, Höch’s depiction of her fellow Dadaists subjects them to a mode of ridiculing caricature, which other figures are spared. Art historian Jula Dech especially singles out Höch’s strategy of attaching the Dadaists’ heads directly to their hybrid bodies while cutting off their necks. This endows their silhouettes with a sense of rigidity that stands in sharp contrast to the fluid motion animating the central female dancer as well as other human figures.24 Some depictions further evoke infantile regression, as is the case for John Heartfield, who is portrayed as a baby receiving a bath by a housewife featuring Impekoven’s head. The head of Raoul Hausmann appears to top a diver’s suit, making him look like an oversized doll, while the bearded face of Theodor Däubler is grafted onto the oversized body of a flabby baby.25 Perhaps most telling is a second depiction of Raoul Hausmann shown as leaning outside the window of the iconic “Balkanzug,” the luxury train that traveled the Balkan route to connect Berlin with Constantinople after the discontinuation of the Orient Express. This was likely a joking allusion to Hausmann’s nickname, “Balkan-Dada,” which was a moniker the Vienna-born artist bore in homage to his Central-European heritage.26 The train is, however, also contiguous with the map of Europe that depicts the countries in which women had gained political enfranchisement as of 1919, the two images conjoined by a small, frontal portrait of Höch herself, who also peeks out of a train window while notably leaning to the right, towards the Europe map and away from Hausmann. Taken together, the Balkan train and the 1919 map explicitly evoke the temporal bookends of the First World War, which was triggered by the assassination of the Austrian crown prince in Sarajevo and ended in a redrawn map of Europe featuring new state formations that gave women the right to vote.27 When seen against the backdrop of the European map, the Balkan train becomes a visual cipher for the

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Dech, Hannah Höch. Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada—Spiegel einer Bierbauchkultur, 43. While today associated with Expressionism, Däubler was close to Berlin Dada, especially George Grosz and Hans Richter. Bergius, Lachen, 114. His nickname of choice was, however, “Dadasoph,” the Dada philosopher. They included, besides Weimar Germany, the new Austrian Republic, Poland, and the Soviet Union.

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inexorable “Zug der Zeit,” that is, the temporal tide, that leads towards women’s emancipation, possibly in a visual allusion to Marx’s gloss on revolutions as the locomotives of world history.28 In this regard it is significant that Höch’s portrait is located in the image’s lower-right corner, that is, in the spot traditionally reserved for the artist’s signature. Its overlap with the image of Europe assigns the map the function of a caption of sorts, making it a reading key for the overall picture. That is to say, Höch’s survey of Weimar Germany is properly read in terms of the European map featuring the political rights granted to women in 1919, as explicitly endorsed by the artist’s visual moniker. It is noteworthy that none of the colorful inhabitants of “Dada world” seem to notice the map. Most of them conspicuously look away, beginning with Hausmann, who stares right in the opposite direction. “The great Dada world” thus emerges as an ambivalent phenomenon in Höch’s cross-section of Weimar Germany, as a group of men engaged in principled political resistance but also curiously oblivious to the enormous leap forward made by women in the contemporary parliamentary system— an achievement symbolized by the oversized image of a field mouse ready to take a leap, pasted on the map’s right section. Failing to reconcile the two meanings of revolution Dada mobilized in its rhetoric, and which the collage displays as incongruous vectors of motion, these Dadaists engage in a vitalist rhetoric prone to infantile regression, which distracted them from actual political achievements like the enfranchisement of women. In formulating her own stance of resistance to the status quo Höch was not inclined to espousing her colleagues’ stance of utter repudiation of the Weimar Republic and instead underlined the advancement women had made in the new state. Scholars have often pointed to Höch’s ambivalence toward her fellow Dadaists, relating it to her dismay at the sexist condescension, and occasionally the open disdain, to which she was subjected in Berlin Dada.29 It is no coincidence that her image invokes an explicitly gendered tool, namely, a kitchen knife, as a blade with which to slash the present open. While these biographical circumstances are important in assessing Höch’s relationship to Dada, it is equally important that her critique of Dada not be reduced to an instance of a female artist lashing out at her male colleagues. The critique of Dada mounted by her collage does not simply unfold as a retort to the sexist treatment Höch experienced but rather relates Dada’s gendered self-indulgence to its signature project of producing radical change via world revolution. In other words, the collage engages directly and at a most sophisticated analytical level with the question of Dada’s political resistance by scrutinizing its meditation on time and revolution. In particular, Höch asks how Dada’s vitalist valorization of revolutionary time jibed with the concrete political question of women’s enfranchisement. This engagement unfolds

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A locomotive is pasted directly above Einstein’s head, possibly signifying the significance of the scientist’s discoveries as inspiration for Dada’s revolutionary inquiry into time. “Die Revolutionen sind die Lokomotiven der Geschichte. Karl Marx, ‘Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich,’ ” 1850. MEW 7:85. Hille, 125–77.

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in a visual medium that enacts the potential of the “Querschnitt” as a sociological tool that befits the idea of time driving Dada’s inquiry into the present age. The collage thus understands itself as a sharp, gendered blade that cuts through the real in order to reveal experience as a synchronic simultaneity criss-crossed by diachronic lines that symbolize different understandings of political resistance and historical progress. Its endeavor to locate Dada on the inside of contemporaneous Germany, that is, as itself implicated in the power structures it denounces, sets it off from the more propagandistic work of other Dadaists, for whom the pressure to promote and even weaponize Dada likely outweighed the need to practice deeper reflexivity and self-critique.30 It is perhaps unsurprising that the collage thematizes the contest between Dada’s antithetical notions of time and revolution without resolving it. One can speculate that Höch herself wrestled with the question of how to square the two. Her indecisiveness has led scholars to read her image either in terms that underscore her commitment to women’s emancipation at the expense of her engagement with vitalism, or to emphasize her debt to the vitalist understanding of time while underplaying her feminist engagement. Höch’s own leaning towards the map of women’s enfranchisement, as signified by her tilting portrait on the collage, may indicate that she saw women’s attainment of political rights as a most-needed engine for life’s renewal. For her, combating oppression was not compatible with the vision of violent conflagration promoted by Dadaists like Hausmann. Rather, political resistance entailed scrutinizing this very vision, including its blindness to the new role women were called to play in political life. As her collage suggests, recognizing the difference between a vitalist and a properly political meaning of revolution might enable Dada to train its eyes on the less shiny objects that made up Germany’s post-revolutionary present, including that dull image of European countries that boasted universal voting rights in 1919. Together with the inserts depicting demonstrating masses, that map makes up the visual foundation of the collage’s survey of the Weimar Republic.

30

See in this respect Hille’s insightful comparison of Höch’s and Hausmann’s montage practices. Hille, 152–3.

3

Walter Gropius’s Dammerstock and the Possibilities of an Architectural Resistance Kevin Berry

Walter Gropius must have allowed himself to dream up utopian scenes while working on the Dammerstock housing estate in 1929. The early photographs and perspective drawings of Dammerstock, including those made by Gropius, seem designed to evoke idyllic dreams. The viewer will encounter scenes in which, for instance, a chair in a dining nook is pushed away from the table, as if just used; or a single window is left open in the bedroom, indicating a breeze; or a stool is placed in the kitchen so that the appliances and ingredients, which are neatly stored in builtin bins and drawers, are all resting within arm’s reach. These scenes, perfectly framed and draped in natural light, ask the viewer to imagine themselves having dinner in the dining nook, with its large windows opened to a soft breeze and the night sky, to imagine enjoying a deeply restorative sleep in beds perfectly sized to the human figure and resting in uncluttered rooms, or to imagine easily preparing dinner in the modern kitchen. It is easy to imagine how Dammerstock could have appeared to its architects like a “balm for factory workers returning from their labors in the hyperactive, energydraining modern metropolis,” as one art historian has said of another housing estate of the same era.1 And yet, it is exactly Dammerstock’s ceaselessly attuned functionality— that same quality which upon first glance induces utopian dreams of a liberated, restored working class, inhabiting a world of domestic labor rid of drudgery—that allowed Dammerstock to be converted so easily from an instrument of liberation into an instrument of oppression. In this essay, I examine the possibilities of an architectural resistance by looking back to Walter Gropius’s Dammerstock Siedlung, a workers’ housing settlement finished in 1929 in Karlsruhe, Germany. To Gropius, Dammerstock represented an architecture that was truly rationalized and humanized, not just economized and so made affordable for the working class. It is a dream his essay in the Dammerstock exhibition catalogue of 1929 reveals. In that essay, he says his design is “rational in the higher sense” and possesses the power to sculpt the complex and variegated “fabric of the community” 1

Joan Ockman, “Three Monuments to the Norm,” Trans 24 (February 2014), 134.

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(die Gemeinschaftsgebilde) in the modern city into a rationalized, more humanized whole.2 As such, Dammerstock stood not just as a balm to the worker of the city, but even more as an act of resistance against the irrationalities and inhumanities of the capitalist city itself. Yet as I have suggested, despite this grand vision, Dammerstock represents a failed attempt to build an architecture of resistance. Once built, it became a space that paradoxically reinforced those injustices which its architect, Walter Gropius, intended it to resist. Dammerstock offers a cautionary tale. After all, it did not fail because it lacked socio-political effect, but because it had the opposite effect to that which was intended. It still had an effect. Accordingly, Dammerstock reaffirms the fact that even if architecture cannot resist hegemonic power as well as some of its more political practitioners may have wished, it does indeed possess some degree of political power over its subjects. Recognizing this, I will conclude that Dammerstock uncovers an important political task for architects today: making the general public more aware of the political messages implicit in the architecture of their built environments.

The Setting of Dammerstock: Rationalization and Social Housing In 1926, in response to Germany’s ongoing housing shortage, the city of Karlsruhe designated a large site south of the central train station for the development of a working-class Siedlung (housing estate). It was to be partially financed through city funds.3 To popularize the project a design competition was held in 1928. The winning design was by Gropius, the modernist architect famous for having founded the Bauhaus in 1919. The final product provided Karlsruhe with 228 new dwelling units out of a projected 750.4 The seven rows of small, functionalist dwellings (Kleinwohnungen) were sized between 500 to 800 square feet, intended for families of five to eight, and held varying floorplans designed by several architects and designers alongside Gropius.5 These included Otto Haesler, who designed several other Siedlungen across Germany, Kurt Schwitters, who contributed graphic designs and advertisements, and Marianne Brandt, who contributed interior and furniture designs.6 Through this collaboration Dammerstock became a model of mass-produced dwellings, rationalized,

2

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4

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Ausstellung Karlsruhe Dammerstock-Siedlung: Die Gebrauchswohnung, Reprint (Karlsruhe: MillerGruber, 1992), 9. The financing model devised for Dammerstock was relatively successful, and came to be known as the “Karlsruhe System” among city planners. Brigitte Franzen, Die Siedlung Dammerstock in Karlsruhe 1929: zur Vermittlung des neuen Bauens (Marburg: Jonas, 1993), 11, 15, 21. Brigitte Franzen, Die Siedlung Dammerstock in Karlsruhe 1929: zur Vermittlung des neuen Bauens (Marburg: Jonas, 1993), 18, 25. Ausstellung Karlsruhe Dammerstock-Siedlung, 16. Peter Schmitt, “Was braucht der Mensch? Zur Einrichtung der ‘Gebrauchswohnung,’ ” in Neues Bauen der 20er Jahre: Gropius, Haesler, Schwitters und die Dammerstocksiedlung in Karlsruhe 1929, eds Brigitte Franzen and Peter Schmitt (Karlsruhe: Sonstige, 1997), 139–58.

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Figure 3.1: Walter Gropius. Bedroom Dwelling Group 9, Siedlung Dammerstock, Karlsruhe, 1928–9. Photographer: Atelier Bauer. Credit: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

functionalist, and sachlich (objective)—as modernist architects would have said in the 1920s.7 Even the several pieces of furniture included in the units, from beds to radios and kitchen appliances, were designed in a functionalist manner (Figure 3.1). When the Siedlung neared completion in October of 1929, the city of Karlsruhe staged an exhibition titled “Die Gebrauchswohnung” (“the dwelling as a utility”), which displayed Dammerstock to the public as modern, rationalized type of housing that guaranteed an Existenz-Minimum (minimum existence) life.8 The issue which Dammerstock promised to solve was not new. Workers’ housing had been a problem across Europe for decades by the time Dammerstock was built, as Friedrich Engels’s 1845 The Condition of the Working Class in England demonstrated.9

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On the term “sachlich,” see Harry Mallgrave, “From Realism to ‘Sachlichkeit,’” in Otto Wagner: Reflections on the Raiment of Modernity (Santa Monica, CA : Getty Research Institute, 1996), 281–322. Ausstellung Karlsruhe Dammerstock-Siedlung, 1. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, ed. David McLellan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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Since the rise of industrial capitalism, factory owners and cities had failed to provide humane, sanitary, and safe living conditions for their workers. If workers were left on their own to find housing that they could afford, they would turn to overcrowded tenements. These tenements failed to provide even an Existenz-Minimum life for their occupants, as Heinrich Zille’s photography showed in the context of early twentiethcentury Berlin, and, more famously, as Jacob Riis’s 1890 How the Other Half Lives showed in the context of New York City.10 Even within Germany, a nation late to unify and modernize, workers’ housing was an issue well before the twentieth century.11 In the early twentieth century, liberal and conservative architects alike lamented that city officials continued to allow more and more of Berlin’s notorious Mietskasernen (literally, “rental-barracks”) to be built.12 Despite the fact that article 155 of the 1919 Weimar constitution declared the right to adequate housing for all Germans, due to economic and political instability, the workers’ housing problem only worsened during the period of the Republic, and soon became a crisis.13 By 1929, overcrowded, cheaply constructed tenements had taken over much of eastern Berlin, leading one architectural critic to claim in his 1927 book Neues Wohnen, Neues Bauen (New Living, New Building), that a Mietskaserne “could kill a man as well as an axe.”14 Many cities across Germany faced the same problem. In response, and especially following an upturn in the economy after the Dawes Plan of 1924 stabilized hyperinflation, several modernist-style Siedlungen were built across Germany.15 The Siedlungen of the architect Ernst May in Frankfurt-am-Main were minimal but rationalized, hygienic, filled with sun and space, often situated in park-like settings, and built by a well-coordinated industry.16 May’s “New Frankfurt” stood in stark contrast to the old Frankfurt with its twisted, crowded streets and old housing stock.

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14 15

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Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, ed. Charles A. Madison (New York: Dover Publications, 1971). Mitchell Schwarzer, German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modern Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Eduard Führ and Daniel Stemmrich, Nach gethaner Arbeit verbleibt im Kreise der Eurigen. Arbeiterwohnen im 19. Jahrhundert (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 1987). See, for instance, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Metropolisarchitecture, ed. Richard Anderson (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2014); Karl Scheffler, Die Architektur der Grosstadt (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1913). Dan P. Silverman, “A Pledge Unredeemed: The Housing Crisis in Weimar Germany,” Central European History 3, no. 1/2 (1970), 112–39. Adolf Behne, Neues Wohnen, Neues Bauen (Leipzig: Hesse & Becker Verlag, 1927), 4. On the relation of the Dawes Plan to architecture see Manfredo Tafuri, “Sozialpolitik and the City in Weimar Germany,” in The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1995), 203. On “The New Frankfurt,” see Susan R. Henderson, Building Culture: Ernst May and the New Frankfurt Am Main Initiative, 1926–1931 (New York: Peter Lang, 2013); David H. Haney, When Modern Was Green: Life and Work of Landscape Architect Leberecht Migge (New York: Routledge, 2010).

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Similarly, Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner would construct many modernist Siedlungen in Berlin, like the “Horseshoe” Siedlung, so named because of its U-shaped plan which seemed to embrace sunlight and nature, in contrast to the dark cement courtyards and inner chambers of that city’s Mietskasernen. Karlsruhe-Dammerstock was certainly influenced by these works. Gropius followed the precedent set by Ernst May in a second way as well. May positioned the architect as the manager of a “planned state capitalism,” and in Frankfurt May succeeded in controlling policy, securing government funds, and coordinating building industries so well that he was able to produce nearly 11,650 units (by Manfredo Tafuri’s count).17 Similarly but on a much smaller scale, at Dammerstock Gropius coordinated work between building trades and cartels, and positioned the architect as designer, city planner, and overall manager of the total building process.18 Dammerstock is therefore part of a long history of social housing, and its ideal of rationalization in style, interior design, and construction process is found in several Weimar-era housing estates. But as I will show, Gropius’s interest at Dammerstock is more than reform, and rationalization more than a stylistic preference. In this project, Gropius believed he was seizing an opening provided by the housing crisis to accomplish something greater, that he and his modernist colleagues were positioning architecture to stage a resistance against the prevailing socio-political hegemony.19 Specifically, Dammerstock was intended to resist two architecturally enforced injustices: class exploitation and the subjugation of women to domestic servitude. As Gropius’s first attempt to realize this vision, Dammerstock is intended as a design that does more than make the proletariat more comfortable within the confines of the prevalent socio-political hegemony of unplanned capitalism. Gropius designed Dammerstock as an architecture capable of resisting that power structure as a whole. It was to be an architecture capable of opening a space of resistance for the working class and women, a space through which these groups could attain political agency and subject-hood. As I will show, Gropius’s architecture ultimately failed to achieve these goals, but its failings nevertheless prove to be instructive for questions of architecture and resistance today.

The Ambition of Dammerstock: Rationalization as Resistance To see Gropius’s design intention more clearly, as well as the two injustices he wished to resist, it is necessary to turn to his essay, “The Sociological Premises for the Minimum

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Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1995), 206, 222, 231. Tafuri, “Sozialpolitik and the City in Weimar Germany,” 212. For a definition of hegemony in relation to architecture, see Demetri Porphyrios, “On Critical History,” in Architecture, Criticism, Ideology, ed. Joan Ockman (Princeton, N.J: Princeton Architectural Press, 1985), 16.

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Dwelling of Urban Industrial Populations.”20 Written in 1929, the year after Gropius had stepped down from his role as director of the Bauhaus and while Dammerstock was being built, it can be read as a statement of intent for that Siedlung.21 In “The Sociological Premises,” Gropius hides his political ideals behind sociological terminology. Rather than communism, he advocates for “communal union” and “social individualism” and to avoid using the word capitalism, he argues against “egotistical individualism” and “rule by money in the industrial state.”22 Some of these terms, like “egotistical individualism,” were terms associated with Marxist theory in Gropius’s time.23 But the direct source for Gropius’s terms is a 1912 text written by the German sociologist Franz Carl Müller-Lyer.24 Like Gropius’s de-politicized theory, Müller-Lyer’s sociology conceals its broadly Marxist narrative under sociological terms. Müller-Lyer’s history of European humanity is, like Marx’s, the story of the progressive liberation of humanity through the powers of industry. From “rule by force in the warring state” (i.e., feudalism), humanity progressed to “rule by money in the industrial state,” (i.e., unplanned capitalism). Following this Marxist framework via Müller-Lyer, Gropius argues in “The Sociological Principles” that the industrial age promised to free humanity from its subjugation to nature—but only after industry has been freed from its domination by capitalists, who have selfishly bent industry to serve their own desire for individual profit. The factories, which should ease the burden of labor, have under the money economy of unplanned capitalism only intensified the burden of labor for the disenfranchised classes. Gropius’s apolitical framework is troubling in many ways.25 Nevertheless, his message is clear. When “the propertied class rules, the masses become impoverished.” Under unplanned capitalism, “The masses are trained to labor, but the rights of individuals are suppressed.”26 In his 1929 essay Gropius is advocating for the socialization of industry. Industry should not be ruled by money, nor should laborers be exploited for private profit. Industry should be placed in the service of fulfilling

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English translation taken from Walter Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture (New York: Collier Books, 1970), 91–102. Gropius’s speech was originally presented at CIAM II in Frankfurt. Sigfried Giedion read the speech in Gropius’s absence. Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2000), 35. Gropius’s contribution to the Dammerstock exhibition catalogue provides further evidence that “The Sociological Premises” essay can be read as a manifesto for Dammerstock, as the exhibition catalogue essay repeats many of its key claims. Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture, 92. Andrew Feenberg, The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács and The Frankfurt School (London: Verso, 2014), 31. Tanja Poppelreuter, “Social Individualism: Walter Gropius and His Appropriation of Franz MüllerLyer’s Idea of a New Man,” Journal of Design History 24, no. 1 (2011), 37–58. For a helpful introduction to Gropius’s relation to capitalism and politics, see Robin Schuldenfrei, “Capital Dwelling: Industrial Capitalism, Financial Crisis and the Bauhaus’s Haus am Horn,” in Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, by Peggy Deamer (New York: Routledge, 2014), 71–95. Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture, 92.

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humanity’s true needs, which can be defined to a precise degree by sociology, Gropius believes. This is the goal of “rationalization” for Gropius. Rationalization was not an architectural style alone; it was a social vision which would be achieved once industry had been made a liberating and fulfilling, rather than oppressive, force. This is why he defines “rationalization” in that essay as “a major intellectual movement in which the actions of the individual are gradually being brought into beneficial relation with the welfare of society as a whole, a concept which transcends that of economic expediency for the individual alone.”27 At the time of writing “The Sociological Premises,” Gropius’s ultimate goal, architecturally speaking, was a residential typology which would consist of a complex of Kleinwohnungen (small apartment dwellings surrounding a large central building that housed socialized domestic services). Though Gropius avoided politics and even any political terms like “socialism” or “communism” in “The Sociological Premises” as stated above, certain similarities to Russian communist housing types like the “Dom-kommuna” as it was advocated by two of Gropius’s colleagues, Karel Teige and El Lissitzky, can be detected in Gropius’s vision.28 At one point in his essay Gropius even declares, “every adult shall have his own room, small though it may be!”29 Eventually, he hoped, society would come to be built around types of institutions more capable of satisfying individuals’ desire for “social intercourse” than the private, familial home.30 This shows that Gropius was imagining Dammerstock as a first step towards a new architectural typology for Germany which would stand, as a step towards a sociopolitical rationalization, in resistance to the irrational injustices of capitalism. Specifically, Gropius imagined his design would resist two injustices perpetuated by the patriarchal-capitalist socio-political system which he describes in “The Sociological Principles” as an “egotistical individualism”: first, class exploitation, and second, the exploitation of women. First, Dammerstock was intended to resist class exploitation by socializing more of the built environment. Remnants of his intention remain in Dammerstock as it was built. For instance, in the northeast corner of the site is located a centralized building with shared utilities and space for offices. It holds the heating equipment for the housing complex as well as a shared laundry facility—a symbol of socialized domestic labor.31 Another remnant of his resistant desire is visible in aerial photography and in some renderings of the site plan, where the entire complex appears as a communal green space. The long, narrow strips of dwellings stand uninterrupted in gardens like

27 28

29 30 31

Gropius, 91–3. Karel Teige would contribute an essay for the 1930 CIAM III publication which covered the same topic as Gropius does in “The Sociological Premises.” Teige’s essay was titled “The Housing Problem of the Subsistence Level Population.” Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960, 37, 53. Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture, 99. Emphasis in original. Gropius, 94. Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1982).

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Figure 3.2: Walter Gropius. Site plan of Siedlung Dammerstock, Karlsruhe, 1928–9. Credit: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. permeable screens open on both sides, as if they were cells in a single common space rather than isolated, private instances, with their backs turned on their neighbors. Yet another remnant can be found in the fact that a church was placed in the northwest corner, if one is permitted to see in the inclusion of a religious building the expressionist dream of a “cathedral of socialism,” an idea found in Gropius’s writings around the time of the 1919 Bauhaus manifesto (Figure 3.2).32 Dammerstock not only held symbols of resistance to capitalism’s oppressions, it also promised a real change for the working class. The substandard conditions within the Mietskasernen had inhibited workers from gaining the strength to revolt. Tenements forced workers into housing with only a quasi-legal status because violations from overcrowding or unsanitary conditions could be used as excuses for eviction or demolition. Dammerstock was intended to realize a space that enabled greater autonomy and solidarity for the working class, because in theory it would socialize

32

On the cathedral of socialism idea, see Marcel Franciscono, Walter Gropius and the Creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar: The Ideals and Artistic Theories of Its Founding Years (Champaign, IL : University of Illinois Press, 1971), 113.

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domestic labor and build communally owned housing. Allowed to dwell in a space which forced the city to recognize them as legitimate and permanent members of the political community, the working class would be placed in a better position to unite and resist their oppressors. Further, the construction method at Dammerstock promised a new socialized building industry with the architect acting as its director. Positioning the architect as city planner appeared to cut out the city bureaucracy, which seemed to bend so easily to the dominant class interests. The rationalization of the domestic sphere at Dammerstock, accomplished by the architect in complete control of the design and construction, was a prefiguration of the society-wide rationalization of life which Gropius believed was occurring at the time. This is an idea he expresses in both “The Sociological Principles” and in the Dammerstock, exhibition catalogue essay. In the latter, he explicitly confirms that rationalization as something much more than an architectural or economic phenomenon. It is in his vision a “great spiritual movement” (“grossen geistigen Bewegung”) happening across society, in resistance to the irrationalities of his day’s capitalist and patriarchal hegemony.33 Architectural rationalization, like the kind at Dammerstock would serve as a catalyst in a much larger, world-historical transformation occurring in modern society as a whole. His “Sociological Principles” essay indicates his belief in this, and that if more and more housing in the Dammerstock typology were built, then a socialized, rationalized way of life could infiltrate Germany’s cities. More and more of society would be socialized and the amount under the control of private industry would continue to decrease. A socialized housing industry, Gropius theorized in the “Sociological Principles,” would lead to a progressive reformation of society as a whole, as workers and women would come to gain more and more economic, social, and political power. Gropius theorized that this was the natural path—an “evolutionary development,” in his words—for industrialized society.34 The success of Ernst May in Frankfurt-am-Main and Martin Wagner in Berlin must have made this utopian transformation of society into a more rational order through architecture seem a real possibility to Gropius. One can see how the idea of architectural rationalization—the leading design idea behind Dammerstock, as I have argued—appeared to Gropius in 1929 as a means of resistance for the working class in the face of class exploitation. Dammerstock promised to resist the patriarchal subjugation of women to domestic servitude by socializing domestic labor and ending the patriarchal family structure. The era of “communal union” would not be achieved until women also attained autonomy and subject-hood, as the patriarchy was another form of the same repressive “egotistical individualism” which exploited the working class, too. As the first prototype for a new residential typology, Dammerstock would also allow for, in Gropius’s words, “the awakening and progressive emancipation of woman.”35 Still following the sociology

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Ausstellung Karlsruhe Dammerstock-Siedlung, 9. Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture, 96. Gropius, 95.

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of Müller-Lyer, Gropius writes in “The Sociological Premises” that the patriarchal family structure, which relies on “the subjugation of woman by man,” is a residue of the “enslavement of man by the ruler” that occurred in the past epochs of feudalism.36 Traditional housing types, Gropius’s 1929 essay implies, reproduce the patriarchal family structure and its corresponding ideology, and thus perpetuate the subjugation of women to domestic servitude. The large, single-family, “ancestral” home, Gropius claims, is made to enforce a socio-political system which places the responsibility for raising the children, caring for elderly relatives, meal preparation, and cleaning, on the family. Gropius indicates that housing type itself is designed for a private economy to take place inside the home, one which the father and sons would traditionally have been excused from, due to their work in a specific trade. And so the management of the private domestic economy would fall to the responsibility of the woman. In conjunction with this economic arrangement, other architectural reinforcements of the patriarchy, such as the prevalence of social clubs and other public spaces exclusively for men, proliferated.37 According to Gropius, this patriarchal system would be prevented by smaller, Existenz-Minimum domiciles clustered around a “centralized master household” which would presumably hold communal child-rearing services, laundry facilities, businesses, and social clubs for both women and men, as is found in other utopian schemes for social palaces and condensers. Dammerstock was in Gropius’s mind a prototype of just such an architectural condition. Thus it stands as an image of the architecture he must have imagined when speaking, in “The Sociological Premises,” of a typology which would free “woman” for an equal intellectual and economic “partnership with man.”38 The patriarchal socio-political system is reinforced by architecture, Gropius has theorized; Dammerstock would resist that system—or so Gropius wished—by building an architecture which would disallow the spatial practices necessary for a patriarchal system. The aforementioned shared laundry facility at the northeast corner of the site stands as a symbol of socialized, industrialized domestic labor (see Figure  3.2). Dammerstock is also designed to have highly efficient “Frankfurt” kitchens, following the precedent set by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky working with Ernst May in the mid– 1920s.39 Such Taylorized kitchens were intended to save energy and time in food preparation and, by saving time, liberate the woman from the kitchen. As I will note below, while the intentions behind these design choices were potentially revolutionary, it quickly became apparent that this efficiency in fact only reinforced the patriarchal, sexist division of labor within the home more rigorously. Still, it should be noted, many aspects of Dammerstock lived up to the project’s modernist intentions. The use of space was more efficient: cellars were designed for

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Gropius, 92. Gropius, 94. Gropius, 92, 96. On the Frankfurt Kitchen, see Sophie Hochhäusl, “From Vienna to Frankfurt Inside Core-House Type 7: A History of Scarcity through the Modern Kitchen,” Architectural Histories 1, no. 1 (October 1, 2013).

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ease of access from the kitchen; appliances were exposed for easy maintenance and cleaning; vegetable gardens could be planted at the backdoor of most units. In terms of the floor plan, not a single inch is wasted, and flat roofs were justified as a way to prevent the waste of space under sloping eaves (see Figure 3.4). Narrow beds, nesting end tables, and lightweight chairs free more floor space (see Figure 3.1). Each unit is equipped with electric appliances, like those advertised in the back of the exhibition catalogue, and each kitchen has a gas stove. In short, Gropius believed that positive social change would follow from this design. It was the first step in a process in which, Gropius writes, “One product of domestic industry after another is wrested from the family and transferred to socialized industry.”40 With this new, social form of dwelling, marriage would continue to change from a “compulsory institution sanctioned by the state and the church,” to a “voluntary union of persons who retain their intellectual and economic independence.”41 This efficiency was intended to realize a greater degree of freedom and autonomy for women and the working class. But as will soon be seen, Gropius’s intentions went awry.

The Failure of Dammerstock: “Help, I’m Being Made to Dwell!” As explained above, rationalization was in Gropius’s mind a means of resistance. But when realized, Dammerstock accomplished just the opposite of Gropius’ intention. Gropius’s rationalized design inadvertently created an architecture that subjected its occupants to an even more potent repressive spatial regime. It became a symbol not of resistance to but of complicity with the Arbeitsideologie (work ideology) of capitalism.42 As soon as it was built, the Dammerstock Siedlung became yet another symbol of the oppressive socio-political system it was supposed to resist. For the ruling classes viewing Dammerstock from the outside, the design symbolized an economic gain; it promised a more profitable and sturdier future for capitalism, a healthier, more satiated workforce less motivated to resist. The potential for this interpretation of the project was already evident in 1929, when Dammerstock opened as an exhibition. An image of the Siedlung under construction, taken from the west end of the site facing east, shows the view across the site in the months before its opening (Figure 3.3). The exterior form is extremely restricted, with its seven rows rigorously adhering to the Zeilenbau (line-building) technique. There is no color, no ornament; the exterior is uniformly white, with thin lines of gray running along the foundation of some of the buildings. Large windows go unframed under flat roofs. These rows of solemn repetition appear like soldiers on the march, or like seven assembly lines working in tandem, poised to manufacture a healthy life among its occupants. It is more an image of a smoothly running factory floor than an image of a liberated domestic landscape.

40 41 42

Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture, 93. Gropius, 96. Tafuri, “Sozialpolitik and the City in Weimar Germany,” 197.

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Figure 3.3: Walter Gropius. Exterior view of Siedlung Dammerstock, Karlsruhe, 1928–9. Photographer: Adolf K. Fr. Supper. Credit: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Further, against Gropius’s intentions, Dammerstock could be read as the image of a sanitized working class. Combined with bands of large windows, the Zeilenbau technique allows for full sunlight, and the exhibition catalogue declares that Dammerstock has not only “Kein Raum ohne Sonne!” (“no room without sun!”) but that each room is placed so as to receive sun at the right time of day: the bedrooms face east for morning light, while living rooms are placed so as to receive midday and evening light.43 Following this idea as if it were a doctor’s order, the gardens and roof decks at Dammerstock evoke Alvar Aalto’s 1933 Paimio Sanatorium as much as Le Corbusier’s 1927 Weißenhofsiedlung roof terraces. The entire complex is like the sunbathing deck of a sanatorium, airing out the working class after what many saw as their long and degenerative tenure in the recesses of tenement buildings, cellars, and attics. To the subjugated occupants within, Dammerstock wound up enforcing an ideology of passive acceptance—again, another result very different from Gropius’s intentions. The restrictive nature of Dammerstock is visible in the Zeilenbau exterior as well as the

43

Ausstellung Karlsruhe Dammerstock-Siedlung, 11.

Walter Gropius’s Dammerstock

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Figure 3.4: Walter Gropius. Elevation, plan, and section of Dwelling Group 9, Siedlung Dammerstock, Karlsruhe, 1928–9. Credit: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Existenz-Minimum interior. The units are typically two stories, consisting of the small Frankfurt-style kitchens next to a combined living and dining room, with two bedrooms and one bathroom upstairs. Beds are sized perfectly to the human body, and rooms are furnished with machine-aesthetic, tubular-steel furniture (see Figure  3.1 and 3.4). In one unit, designed by Gropius himself, even the radio is designed to fit in one spot and one spot only, and the same seems true of the plants and bookshelves in another.44 The envelopes of the kitchen spaces are wrapped as tightly as possible around a single set of predetermined actions. The modern appliances produced by German firms such as AEG and Junkers are integral components in the spatial composition.45 In one layout—Group 11—racks are designed to fit a standardized set of dishes or, in some cases, utensils. Nothing, not even a fork or spoon, can be added or subtracted. Each dwelling is composed without any excess, without any breaks or gaps between the objects of use.

44 45

Schmitt, “Was braucht der Mensch? Zur Einrichtung der ‘Gebrauchswohnung.’ ” See advertisements in Ausstellung Karlsruhe Dammerstock-Siedlung.

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The design was supposed to yield a greater degree of autonomy and political agency to the working class. Yet the rigorously functional design turned every inch of the home into an assembly line, pre-determining how the occupants would act as they would move through their daily routines. Rather than allowing the working class to socialize domestic life and gain autonomy, the design effectively turned the inhabitants’ daily routines into private, Taylorized assembly lines and made even personal life a matter of endless production and consumption; rather than socializing domestic labor, Dammerstock only intensified the ideology of domesticity as a natural form of labor for women. One critic noticed the self-defeating nature of this vision early on. In his 1930 review of Dammerstock, Adolf Behne claimed that Gropius had turned the architect into a dictator. At Dammerstock, the human is turned into a concept, a figure. The human is to dwell and through the Wohnen become sound, and the exact Wohndiät [life-diet] is prescribed to him in detail. He must . . . go to bed facing east, eat and answer mother’s letter facing west, and the dwelling becomes so organized that he cannot in fact do it any other way. [. . .] Here in Dammerstock the human becomes an abstract dwelling-being, and over all the very well-intentioned specifications of the architects, in the end he wants to cry out, “Help . . . I’m being made to dwell!”46

Dammerstock enforces a Wohndiät, a restriction of life, by being so rigorously designed that it becomes suffocating. With the space of each room arranged so rigorously around a single particular activity, it barred the occupants from ever stepping away from a routine of production, and accordingly it stripped its subjects of what little control over their own lives that they held prior to settling into the rationalist architecture. The architecture prevents its occupants from freely occupying any space, from resisting by their own volition, from obtaining any degree of autonomy. The architecture, against Gropius’s intentions, could also speak to its occupants in such a way that it reminds them that they are subjugated to routines of production, and reinforces the subjugation of women to domestic servitude even more effectively than the Mietskaserne of Berlin were able to. It only more efficiently traps them in routines of production and converts them into more efficient consumers, even if they could not consume as much as the bourgeois classes above them. Here is another sense in which Dammerstock places its occupants on a Wohndiät: their dwellings, or Wohnungen, will never be as fully stuffed as their wealthier neighbors’.

The Possibilities of an Architectural Resistance In the end, the idea of rationalization, resistant and liberating in Gropius’s vision, was all too easily converted into an instrument for perpetuating the oppressive system it hoped to resist. By making class exploitation appear moral to the oppressors and inevitable to 46

Adolf Behne, “Dammerstock,” Die Form 5, no. 6 (1930), 164.

Walter Gropius’s Dammerstock

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the oppressed, while also making the domestic subjugation of women appear unproblematic and unburdened because it was now aided by modern appliances, Dammerstock worked against Gropius’s intentions. Dammerstock’s sachlich design only left its occupants more susceptible to exploitation and subjugated them to a Wohndiät. Dammerstock confirms the conclusion of the neo-Marxist architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri: the modernist ambitions for an architecture of resistance and social change were motivated by a naïve utopianism which was doomed to be a determinate failure socially.47 As Michael Hays explains, Tafuri has shown that architecture becomes, “when it is most itself—most pure, most rational, most attendant to its own techniques— the most efficient ideological agent of capitalist planification and unwitting victim of capitalism’s historical closure. In a certain sense . . . architecture’s utopian work ends up laying the tracks for a general movement to a totally administered world.”48 This is the first lesson of Dammerstock. Gropius believed he could act as a social engineer and attempted to build an environment which would reshape individuals’ actions and beliefs for the better. But this is a self-defeating idea, amounting to the claim that individuals can be forced to their freedom. Any attempt at resistance through functionalism, intended to act as a kind of social engineering, will backfire. The second lesson is that if Dammerstock is a reminder of the power of architecture to reinforce the status quo, despite even the best intentions, it is also a reminder of the political power of architecture. As theorists like Peggy Deamer, Keller Easterling, Nadir Lahiji, and Douglas Spencer have argued, architectural ideology remains a powerful force that reproduces submission to the socio-political injustices of neoliberalism today.49 Architectural ideology does affect the public which inhabits it, just as it did in the case of Walter Gropius’s Dammerstock nearly ninety years ago, despite his best efforts to build an architecture of resistance. Unintentionally, Dammerstock wound up symbolizing the strength of the capitalist system to the residents of Karlsruhe, Germany in 1929. Today, in the context of globalized neoliberalism, architectural symbolism seems to have become an even more powerful tool for reproducing capitalist ideology. Neoliberal architectural symbolism of today—found in skyscrapers, city design, and even border walls—reinforces injustices like the growing gap between wealthy and poor as well as socio-political exclusions along lines of class, gender, nationality, and several other means of “identitarian inscription” across the globe.50

47

48 49

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Fredric Jameson, “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology,” in Architecture, Criticism, Ideology, ed. Joan Ockman (Princeton, N.J: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), 53, 59. K. Michael Hays, Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2000), xii. Peggy Deamer, Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present (London: Routledge, 2013); Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (New York: Verso, 2016); Nadir Lahiji, ed., Can Architecture Be an Emancipatory Project? Dialogues on Architecture and the Left (Washington: Zero Books, 2016); Douglas Spencer, The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). Erik Swyngedouw, “On the Impossibility of an Emancipatory Architecture,” in Can Architecture Be an Emancipatory Project? Dialogues on Architecture and the Left, ed. Nadir Lahiji (Washington: Zero Books, 2016), 58.

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Recognizing this, it becomes clear that at least one act of resistance is possible for architects today. Architects may not be able to design socio-political change or even to build an anti-ideological architecture as Gropius had hoped. But they are among the few members of society today who specialize in discerning the ideological codes of the built environment. Gropius’s “Sociological Premises” testifies to this unique skill, as it can be read as a brilliant decoding of the architectural ideology of its time, similar to the decoding exercises found in Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas over forty years later.51 Armed with this unique skillset, architects remain in a unique position to make the general public more aware of the injustices that contemporary society’s spatial practices silently enforce. Architects today can resist by working to expose today’s architectural ideology to the subjects affected by it most—not other architects, but the general public. One final lesson from Dammerstock, then, is that even if architecture cannot turn the profession itself into a protest or a form of social engineering, architects can focus on teaching the public how to better resist the Wohndiäten (to return to Adolf Behne’s term) that architecture reinforces. Putting this idea into practice has the potential to create a public that is even more resistant to today’s ideologies of neoliberalism and nationalism than were those of the past.

51

Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1972).

4

Authority and Ambiguity: Three Sculptors in National Socialist Germany Nina Lübbren

The artistic range of responses to authoritarian regimes has varied from utter conformism, as exemplified by the New Year’s posters distributed to communities during the decade of the People’s Republic of China’s Cultural Revolution, to overt political critique, such as that found in the anti-fascist photomontages of John Heartfield, produced in exile from Germany during the 1930s.1 Those who do not emigrate are obliged to come to terms with power and authority in some form or another. Resistance is one way among others to imagine how art might relate to power in a totalitarian environment. This chapter examines three German sculptors’ creative practice under National Socialism. Continuing as a professional sculptor during the fascist regime necessitated at least a degree of accommodation to circumstances lest one be punished with Berufsverbot, that is, be prohibited from publicly exhibiting and selling work or from teaching art. From the first months after the National Socialist take-over it was clear that persons who were identified as communists or Jews were dismissed from posts and forbidden to practice; the case with regard to the formal or iconographic language of art works themselves was much less clear-cut. The careers and works of the sculptors Oda Schottmüller, Hanna Cauer, and Milly Steger allow us to trace a range of responses to the power of authoritarian art policy, from political resistance to aesthetic conformism and opportunist negotiation. The monumental, state-sponsored character of much National Socialist sculpture would seem to make it difficult to use this medium in order to “resist” the established order. Sculpture, one might say, resists resistance. Sculpture would appear to be 1

2

Craig Clunas, “The Politics of Inscription in Modern Chinese Art,” Art History 41, no.1 (2018), 132–53. The literature on Heartfield is extensive; most recently: Sabine Kriebel, Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). Jost Hermand points out that National Socialist fascism could assert itself more extensively in sculpture than in painting because sculpture could adorn squares, sports stadia, ministry and other public buildings, and because of this potential placement in public spaces always had a social dimension. Jost Hermand, Kultur in finsteren Zeiten: Nazifaschismus, Innere Emigration, Exil (Cologne: Böhlau, 2010), 87–8.

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particularly susceptible to co-optation by authoritarian systems because of its potential as propaganda in the form of monuments in public spaces.2 Ellen Schwarz-Semmelroth, editor of the official National Socialist women’s journal NS.Frauen-Warte, wrote of the 1942 Great German Art Exhibition in Munich: “Heroic demeanor, toughness and discipline have made human souls more receptive than ever to monumental form and content.”3 In its public address, sculpture differed from painting, and James van Dyke notes, sculpture in fascist Germany was in many ways treated as superior to the “hyperrefined” products of modern painting.4 In 1942, art historian Hans Weigert formulated the difference between painting and sculpture thus: “Easel painting is suited to a room, sculpture to the public square. Inside the room, there lives the individual, the square absorbs the crowd. . . . Sculpture radiates out into a space and can thereby dominate many people.”5 I take Weigert’s notion of domination not only to pertain to sculpture’s physical command of space but also to its psychological authority and emotional interpellation. Sculpture was deemed on a par with architecture in its public reach and was often conceived as part of an architectural urban environment.6 However, figurative sculpture (and there was no other in National Socialist Germany) could operate at an affective level in a way that architecture could not. National Socialist art historian Johannes Sommer wrote in 1943: Of all the visual arts, sculpture is the one medium most capable of forming an immediate and replete image of the human. Sculpture retains the essence of ephemeral being in non-perishable material and in spatial tactility. A sculptor’s

3

4

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“Heroische Haltung, Härte und Disziplin haben die Seelen der Menschen empfänglicher denn je gemacht für monumentale Form und Inhalt. Unsere heutige monumentale Bildnerei hat ihre markantesten Vertreter in Arno Breker und Josef Thorak gefunden.” Ellen SchwarzSemmelroth, “Kämpfendes Volk: Die 6. neue große Ausstellung im Haus der Deutschen Kunst in München,” NS.Frauen-Warte [sic]: Die einzige parteiamtliche Frauenzeitschrift 11, no.3 (1942), 34. Semmelroth’s husband was SS –Hauptsturmführer Franz Paul Schwarz. On Semmelroth, see Laura Bensow,“‘Frauen und Mädchen, die Juden sind Euer Verderben!’ Eine Untersuchung antisemitischer NS -Propaganda unter Anwendung der Analysekategorie Geschlecht” (PhD diss., Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, 2016, and Hamburg: Marta Press, 2016), 118 n.435. James A. van Dyke, “Zur Geschichte der Staatlichen Kunstakademie Düsseldorf zwischen den Weltkriegen in Künstler im Nationalsozialismus: Die “Deutsche Kunst,” die Kunstpolitik und die Berliner Kunsthochschule, ed. Wolfgang Ruppert (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2015), 156. “Dem Tafelbild ist ein Zimmer gemäß, der Skulptur der Platz. Im Zimmer wohnt der Einzelne, der Platz nimmt die Menge auf [. . .] Die Plastik strahlt aus in einen Raum und kann dadurch viele Menschen beherrschen.” Hans Weigert, Geschichte der deutschen Kunst von der Vorzeit bis zur Gegenwart (1942), quoted in Entmachtung der Kunst: Architektur, Bildhauerei und ihre Institutionalisierung 1920 bis 1960, eds Magdalena Bushart, Bernd Nicolai and Wolfgang Schuster (Berlin: Frölich & Kaufmann, 1985), 105. On Weigert’s checkered career during the 1930s and 1940s, see Ruth Heftrig, “Neues Bauen als deutscher ‘Nationalstil’? Modernerezeption im ‘Dritten Reich’ am Beispiel des Prozesses gegen Hans Weigert, in Kunstgeschichte im Nationalsozialismus: Beiträge zur Geschichte einer Wissenschaft zwischen 1930 und 1950”, eds Nikola Doll, Christian Fuhrmeister and Michael H. Sprenger (Weimar: VDG , 2005), 119–37. On the integration of sculpture and architecture under National Socialism, see for example Alexander Heilmeyer, “Münchener Plastik,” Die Kunst im Dritten Reich 3, no.7 (1939), 203–13.

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work reveals the force of life that is at work within humans and elevates individual existence into the greater circle of creation.7

Given the preponderant focus of the literature on public sculpture and on large monumental work in particular, it is worth recalling that the public arena is not the only space where sculpture can unfold its affective impact. Sculpture can also be located in semi-public and domestic spaces where it could elicit more intimate responses. Indeed, the majority of sculptural works produced during the fascist era were not large-scale monuments but small-scale figurines, mostly portraits or animal motifs.8 The Great German Art Exhibitions held between 1937 and 1944 may be taken as a measure of mainstream and officially sanctioned practice. In 1938, of the circa three hundred and fifteen sculptures shown at the Exhibition, only forty-seven or less than one-sixth were life-size or larger-than-life. Monumental statues were set up in the central halls near the ground-floor entrance but the overwhelming majority of three-dimensional works were statuettes, figurines, and medals, displayed in glass cases and on tables and plinths in the top-floor galleries. Well over half of the sculptures were of animals, heads, or busts rather than of full-scale nudes or draped figures.9 Partly this is a reflection of the commercial character of the Great German Art Exhibitions. All the art on show was for sale, ranging in price from under one hundred to two hundred thousand Reichsmark.10 It is to be assumed that small-scale works were affordable and appealed to a larger segment of the potential buying public than monumental statues, which were the purview of official patronage. The three artists I have chosen exemplify positions on a possible spectrum ranging from apparently absolute conformity to seeming absolute resistance. All three artists

7

8

9

10

“Ein unmittelbar und erfülltes Bild vom Menschen vermag von den bildenden Künsten am ehesten die Plastik zu formen. Sie bewahrt in unvergänglichem Stoff räumlich tastbar das Wesen des vergänglichen Seins. Das vom Bildhauer gestaltete Werk enthüllt die im Menschen wirkende Kraft des Lebens und hebt sein Einzeldasein in den großen Kreis der Schöpfung.” Johannes Sommer, Arno Breker, 2nd edn (Bonn: Ludwig Röhrscheid, 1943), 5. Sommer was professor for art history at the Hermann Göring-Meisterschule in Kronenburg; see Dieter Pesch and Martin Pesch, Werner Peiner— Verführer oder Verführter: Kunst des Dritten Reichs (Hamburg: disserta, 2014), 76. Anja Cherdron and Barbara Schrödl, “Frauen, Kunst und Karriere im Nationalsozialismus: Die Bildhauerin Hanna Cauer und der Spielfilm ‘Befreite Hände,’ ” in Deutsche Kunst 1933–1945 in Braunschweig—Kunst im Nationalsozialismus: Vorträge zur Ausstellung (1998–2000), ed. Erika Eschebach, (Braunschweig: Städtisches Museum Braunschweig, 2001), 183. In 1938, over 254 bronzes, 49 works in plaster and 12 in marble were shown. 183 works were heads, busts or animal sculptures. As regards medals and plaques, up to twelve or so works could be grouped into one catalogue entry; hence these figures are conservative. The quantities and percentages in the other Great German Art Exhibitions are comparable. I compiled these statistics from the entries and photographs available in the excellent database of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich, in associaton with Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, and Haus der Kunst, Munich, “GDK Research: Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung 1937–1944,” 2011, http://www. gdk-research.de For commercial statistics, see Sabine Brantl, “Das Haus der Deutschen Kunst als Wirtschaftsunternehmen,” Haus der Kunst, Munich, lecture October 20, 2010, https://issuu.com/ haus_der_kunst/docs/brandl_vortrag_deutsch

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remained in Germany and carried on their careers, exhibiting in private galleries or (from 1937) in the annual, state-sponsored Great German Art Exhibitions in Munich, being reviewed in the press, taking part in competitions, or bidding for commissions. These sculptors’ cultural practices span a range from official patronage and apparent conformism (Cauer) to pragmatic adaptation (Steger) and political opposition (Schottmüller). The case of Steger points to the ambivalence of National Socialist cultural policy itself, a shifting ideological field of proscriptions and pronouncements that posed a challenging terrain for any individual to negotiate. These three cases are relevant to issues of cultural resistance because they point to the parameters within which resistance could take place within a fascist context; they show that there was considerably more leeway for sculptors to work than would perhaps be expected within a so-called totalitarian state but that there were also definite and lethal limits to that leeway. Each example also opens up the issue of to what extent the work or the person’s activities could be considered as resisting, conformist, or anywhere in between.

Oda Schottmüller and the Consequences of Political Resistance Oda Schottmüller (1905–43), niece of art historian Frida Schottmüller, comes closest to having participated in a resistance movement.11 In September 1942, Schottmüller was arrested, along with 120 other persons, for illegal broadcasts to the Soviet Union and the distribution of rebel leaflets. Schottmüller was also accused of being affiliated with a communist “Red Orchestra” espionage and resistance group in Berlin.12 In August 1943, she was executed by decapitation, having been condemned to death for “assisting in the preparation of activities of high treason and favoring of the enemy.”13 Schottmüller was a sculptor, mask maker, and dancer. She studied dance at the Berlin dance school of Vera Skoronel and Berthe Trümpy, both students, among others, of Mary Wigman. Schottmüller also studied sculpture with Milly Steger in Berlin and, in the early 1930s, began to design costumes and wooden masks. She integrated these masks and outfits into her own dance performances (Figure 4.1). Her first solo performance was in 1934. The eccentric dance performances took up the legacy of 1920s Expressionist Ausdruckstanz or “expressive dance.” Throughout the 1930s, Schottmüller received favorable press reviews, including from official quarters. In 1937, dance critic Fritz Böhme of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung was asked to write a reference for the Ministry of Propaganda’s dance caucus. Böhme wrote: “I deem Oda Schottmüller to be a dancer of unusually intensive powers of experience, that is, of 11

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Frida Schottmüller was a specialist in quattrocento sculpture and assistant at the Kaiser FriedrichMuseum in Berlin. Hannelore Nützmann, “Ein Berufsleben: Frida Schottmüller,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 40, no.1/2 (1996), 236–44. On the “Red Orchestra,” see Corina L. Petrescu, Against All Odds: Models of Subversive Spaces in National Socialist Germany (Oxford, Berne, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Vienna: Peter Lang, 2010), chapter 4, “The Anti-State Activism of the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack Organisation,” 169–240. “Beihilfe zur Vorbereitung eines hochverräterischen Unternehmens und zur Feindbegünstigung.” Quoted in Geertje Andresen, Die Tänzerin, Bildhauerin und Nazigegnerin Oda Schottmüller 1905– 1943 (Berlin: Lukas Verlag, 2005), 276.

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Figure 4.1: Oda Schottmüller, Alraune (Mandrake), c. 1941. Photograph of Oda Schottmüller dancing and wearing a mask of her own making © Archiv Susanne und Dieter Kahl, Berlin. a devotion to her interior felt visions, that seem to her elementary and necessary . . .”14 Böhme recommended Schottmüller to the Ministry as of above average talent and “desirable.”15 The artist’s sculpture was likewise heir to Weimar Expressionism. During the fascist period, Schottmüller’s sculpture was positively reviewed, and her bronze Dancer was reproduced in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung in 1941 (Figure 4.2).16 14

15 16

“Ich halte Oda Schottmüller für eine Tänzerin von ungewöhnlich intensiver Erlebniskraft, das heißt Hingabefähigkeit an die innerlich erlebten Visionen, die sich ihr elementar und zwingend scheinen . . .” Quoted in Andresen, Die Tänzerin, 165–6. Andresen, Die Tänzerin, 167. Andresen, Die Tänzerin, 176, 180.

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Figure 4.2: Oda Schottmüller, Studie zu einer Gartenskulptur (Study for a Garden Sculpture), undated (c. 1941). Plaster, whereabouts unknown. © Archiv Susanne und Dieter Kahl, Berlin. In 1940, a reviewer named Nohara wrote highly of Schottmüller’s dual talent in both dance and sculpture which enabled her to “modulate the body and, vice versa, shape her sculpture according to living rhythms and impulses.”17 Only a few weeks before her arrest, a full-page spread in the women’s magazine Die junge Dame (The Young Lady) was full of praise and noted that the artist had gone on a tour of the army “to delight our fieldgrey soldiers . . . with her art.”18 Dancer represents a hybrid between a muted classicism 17

18

“. . . sie kann den Körper modulieren, die Plastik wiederum nach lebendigen Rhythmen und Impulsen formen.” Nohara writing in Die Koralle, April 1940; quoted in Andresen, Die Tänzerin, 225. “. . . um unsere Feldgrauen [. . .] mit ihrer Kunst zu erfreuen.” hz, “Mädchen hinter Masken: Oda Schottmüller ist Tänzerin und Bildhauerin zugleich,” Die junge Dame (July 28, 1942); reproduced in Andresen, Die Tänzerin, fig.134.

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and a remnant of an Expressionist idiom. It shows a female nude, seated with legs bent and tucked behind her, her torso twisted, arms angled at the elbow and bent behind shoulders and head, and an oval face with what appear to be closed eyes and chiseled features. The limbs are rounded; the surface of the material, probably plaster, roughened with punch marks. The sculpture does not conform to the stylistic mode of Cauer or Arno Breker but nor is it overtly avant-garde. Formally, it shows what was acceptable even within National Socialism. The positive press reception suggests that it was not Schottmüller’s art that ran counter to the authorities. It was her alleged political activity. The police records of Schottmüller’s interrogations after her arrest do not survive. All we have are letters from prison, and it is to be doubted if Schottmüller expressed herself frankly in them. Schottmüller claimed not to have known half of the people she was accused of consorting with, nor to have known that the rest were communists, and not to have been aware of illegal broadcasts. In a letter to her father she wrote: “I was so glad that my stupidity + cluelessness about political things was proof enough that I could not have qualified for luring other people in or anything like that. . . . I’m entirely unaware of these things.”19 Even if Schottmüller herself may or may not have participated in counter-regime activities, she was certainly associated with people who did.20 She was part of the Berlin bohemian circle around the playwright and film critic Libertas Schulze-Boysen and her husband Harro Schulze-Boysen, a circle that also included, among others, photographer Elisabeth Schumacher; her husband, the sculptor Kurt Schumacher; clerical worker Hilde Coppi and her husband, industrial worker and former member of Weimar communist groups, Hans Coppi. The SchulzeBoysen circle was associated with espionage activities: Harro Schulze-Boysen was part of Hermann Göring’s intelligence staff at the Air Force Ministry and used his position to send secret documents and photographs to Soviet contacts while Hans Coppi broadcast messages in Morse code to Moscow.21 The National Socialist secret police coined the code name “Rote Kapelle” (“Red Orchestra”) for this and other communist groups.22 After 1945, these groups were largely ignored in the West as their links with the Soviet Union were seen as problematic in the Cold War climate; as a result, the “Red Orchestra” groups have only recently even been identified as resistance groups by scholars outside of the former Eastern bloc.23 In Schottmüller’s case, resistance led to death but Schottmüller’s art seems to have played no role in her arrest. This invites the question why she should be included in a

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“Ich war so froh, daß meine Dummheit + Ahnungslosigkeit über politische Dinge zur Genüge bewies, daß ich nicht dafür in Frage kommen könnte, meinerseits etwa andere Leute zu interessieren oder dergleichen [. . .] ich bin ja darüber nicht so orientiert.” Quoted in Andresen, Die Tänzerin, 279. I thank Christopher Clark for this point. Shareen Blair Brysac, Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 235–9, 294–6. American translator and lecturer Mildred Harnack and her husband, the lawyer Arvid Harnack, were also associated with the Schulze-Boysen circle. All were executed in 1942–3. Anne Nelson, German Resistance to the Nazi State Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler (New York: Random House, 2009). Hans Mommsen, “The German Resistance against Hitler and the Restoration of Politics,” Journal of Modern History, 64 (December 1992), 112–27.

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discussion of artists and political resistance. One could argue that for Schottmüller it was almost incidental that she was a sculptor. It was, however, relevant that she was part of a politically resistant bohemian circle of artists and cultural producers. We may speculate to what extent she saw her art as an extension of her possible political affiliations, and how her aesthetic choices flew under the radar of official sanction, so to speak. She did not exhibit her work in any of the Great German Art Exhibitions and was, perhaps, not so easily categorized with her eccentric combination of dance, masks, and sculpture. Whether her art was read as subversive by audiences, whether the artist herself saw it as an effective tool of resistance to mainstream norms, or whether she regarded it as an escape from political reality, we may never know.

Hanna Cauer and the Consequences of Ideological Maneuvering Hanna Cauer is an example of a sculptor who collaborated with National Socialism and whose aesthetics made it easy to do this. She would therefore seem to be a prime case study in what it meant not to resist. Cauer (1902–89) was thirty years old when the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP ) seized power. In a letter of April 20, 1933 to the newly appointed National Socialist minister of culture, Bernhard Rust, Cauer blamed the Weimar Republic for what she claimed was her lack of professional success to date, aligning her language with the public discourse of the new regime: “After my return to Germany [in 1930, after a sojourn abroad] I could not get a foothold anywhere because the reigning Jewish-Marxist circles were absolutely hostile to my German approach to art. Therefore I now appeal with renewed hopes to our national government, firmly trusting that I will find the necessary appreciation and support.”24 Cauer’s claim that she could not get a foothold was somewhat disingenuous as she had in 1930 been awarded the Rome Prize, administered by the Prussian Academy of Arts and the Prussian Ministry of Culture; she had, as she mentioned in her letter, only recently returned from the associated sojourn at the Villa Massimo in Rome.25 The “appreciation and support” that Cauer sought in her 1933 letter was the provision of studio space free of charge at the Berlin United State Schools of Fine and Applied Arts which that school’s director Max Kutschmann had refused her. A handwritten comment scribbled onto the letter by National Socialist state secretary Hans Hinkel shows the extent of official support for Cauer: “Kutschmann! Hanna Cauer must be provided for!

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“Nach meiner Rückkehr nach Deutschland [. . .] konnte ich nirgends Fuß fassen, da die regierenden jüdisch-marxistischen Kreise meiner deutschen Kunstauffassung absolut ablehnend gegenüberstanden. Ich wende mich deswegen jetzt mit neuen Hoffnungen an unsere nationale Regierung mit dem festen Vertrauen, die nötige Anerkennung und Förderung zu finden.” Quoted in Magdalena Bushart, “Der Formsinn des Weibes: Bildhauerinnen in den zwanziger und dreissiger Jahren, in Profession ohne Tradition: 125 Jahre Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1992), 149. Jobst C. Knigge, “Die Villa Massimo in Rom 1933–1943: Kampf um künstlerische Unabhängigkeit” (PhD diss., Humboldt-Universität Berlin, 2013), 11, http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/oa/books/ re2UkmvwWB cr/PDF /20tOx8KHwYc7.pdf

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Dr. Frick once again requests this.”26 As art historian Magdalena Bushart notes, Cauer had been told that there was no room in the school, but Wilhelm Frick, National Socialist minister of the interior, lobbied actively in order to secure a studio for her.27 The references to “Jewish-Marxist circles” and to her own “German art” were a tactical move, designed to appeal to the new political authorities. The amalgam “JewishMarxist” did not necessarily refer to the entire nexus of what we now understand as the racial ideology of the regime, an ideology that in 1933 did not yet (if it ever did) represent a stable and internally consistent program. In the context of cultural production, “Jewish-Marxist” was more likely to connote “avant-garde” or “anticlassical,” a reminder of how National Socialist racist discourses mapped onto other anti-modernist discourses dating back to the Wilhelmine era. Cauer’s own practice was mostly classical in orientation. The artist drew on a heritage of classical sculpture, part of a family tradition that reached back over four generations to the early nineteenth century.28 Her work was indebted to a particular form of classicism filtered through the nineteenth-century academy, a style in sculpture much in favor in Germany before the First World War. Cauer’s relatives had carried out numerous public commissions during the Wilhelmine empire. Her father Ludwig, for example, designed statues for Wilhelm II ’s Siegesallee in Berlin between 1897 and 1900, and her uncle Emil the Younger designed the Siegfried fountain on the Rüdesheimer Platz in BerlinWilmersdorf around 1911. In 1933, it was not yet clear that classicism was to be a favored style of the new National Socialist regime. Expressionism and folk art were equally posited as candidates for a revived national German art.29 Cauer putting forward her own classically inflected

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Letter May 5, 1933; quoted in Bushart, “Der Formsinn,” 149. Bushart, “Der Formsinn,” 149. For the Cauer dynasty of sculptors, see Anne Tesch, Die Bildhauerfamilie Cauer (Bad Kreuznach: Harrach, 1977); Elke Masa, “Die Bildhauerfamilie Cauer im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Neun Bildhauer aus vier Generationen—Emil Cauer d.Ä., Carl Cauer, Robert Cauer d.Ä., Robert Cauer d.J., Hugo Cauer, Ludwig Cauer, Emil Cauer d.J., Stanislaus Cauer, Hanna Cauer” (PhD diss., Free University Berlin, 1988, and Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1989). A brief overview is given in Peter Bloch, Sibylle Einholz and Jutta von Simson, eds, Ethos und Pathos: Die Berliner Bildhauerschule 1786– 1914: Ausstellungskatalog (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1990), 67–71. Cauer was the daughter and student of sculptor Ludwig Cauer, the niece of sculptor Emil Cauer the Younger, the grand-daughter of sculptor Carl Cauer and the great-grand-daughter of sculptor Emil Cauer the Elder. Interior minister Wilhelm Frick also supported Cauer’s father, Ludwig. Writing in Kunst der Nation in November 1933, art critic Gert H. Theunissen advocated a new creativity in the spirit of Expressionism. Kirsten Baumann, Wortgefechte: Völkische und nationalsozialistische Kunstkritik 1927–1939 (Weimar: VDG , 2002), 156–7. The völkisch art journal Das Bild, edited by Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder, never embraced classicism and pointedly illustrated only folk art or mediaevalizing works. See the journal itself and also Annette Ludwig, Die nationalsozialistische Kunstzeitschrift Das Bild: “Monatsschrift für das Deutsche Kunstschaffen in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart.” Ein Beitrag zur Verlagsgeschichte (Heidelberg: C.F. Müller, 1997). See also Jonathan Petropoulos, Artists under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), and Eckhart Gillen, “Zackig . . . schmerzhaft . . . ehrlich . . .: Die Debatte um den Expressionismus als ‘deutscher Stil’ 1933/34,” in Ruppert, Künstler im Nationalsozialismus, 202–29.

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sculpture as a “German approach to art” was therefore, at this early date, a bit of a gamble; it was a gamble that paid off. By 1936, it had become evident that classicism was to be, if not the only, then certainly the most elevated of the styles to be associated with German sculpture under National Socialism. Starting in the early years of the Hitler regime, Cauer received a string of public commissions, including two statues ordered by the city of Nuremberg for their opera house in 1934–5 (Allegretto and Moderato), and a fountain to mark the 1936 Olympic Games, placed in front of Berlin’s Red Town Hall.30 In 1936, Joseph Goebbels, Reich minister for propaganda, praised the Olympia fountain as “wonderful.”31 In the following year, Goebbels noted in his diary: “Hanna Cauer has created some magnificent sculptures of female figures. She is very capable. I’m giving her a whole string of commissions. The Führer, too, who joined us a little later, is giving her commissions and financial advances. She is completely happy.”32 Cauer received a lump sum of five thousand Reichsmark from Hitler in 1937.33 Between 1938 and 1940, her works were displayed in Gallery Two of the House of German Art at the Great German Art Exhibition in Munich; this was one of the galleries that flanked the central Hall of Honor, and it was reserved for the most prestigious sculptors of Germany.34 Most other sculptures were exhibited upstairs in the smaller galleries.35 One of the two Nuremberg figures, Allegretto, was awarded a gold medal at the Paris World’s Exposition in 1937, and subsequently placed in Gallery Fifteen of the House of German Art; in this gallery, Allegretto and Arno Breker’s Decathlete (commissioned for the Reich Sports Field at the Olympic Games) flanked Heinrich Zügler’s painting of sheep going out to pasture.36 Breker was to go on to become the most state-honored artist of the late 1930s and early 1940s, and one of Zügler’s paintings was purchased by Hitler in 1939. These commissions, placements, and personal commendations all show Cauer to have been favored by official authorities at the highest level throughout the fascist period.

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Other commissions included a bust of interior minister Wilhelm Frick for the Reichstag in 1933, a fountain for the city of Posen, a marble statue of Pallas Athena for the ministry of the interior in 1938–9, and another fountain for the Prussian ministry of culture. Bushart, “Der Formsinn,” 149. Joseph Goebbels, diary entry, July 29,1936; quoted in Bushart, “Der Formsinn,” 149. “Hanna Cauer hat herrliche Frauenplastiken geschaffen. Sie kann sehr viel. Ich gebe ihr eine ganze Reihe von Aufträgen. Auch der Führer, der etwas später noch hinzukommt, gibt ihr Aufträge und Vorschüsse. Sie ist ganz glücklich.” Goebbels, diary entry, December 17, 1937; quoted in Bushart, “Der Formsinn”, 149. Bushart, “Der Formsinn,” 149. See “GDK Research.” Bushart, “Der Formsinn,” 149. Zügler’s painting was titled Ausfahrt. Another of Zügler’s landscapes, Lüneburg Heath, was purchased by Hitler in 1939. Bushart notes that Cauer’s Allegretto was placed on an honor podium next to Adolf Ziegler’s Four Elements. Photographs show that Ziegler’s painting hung on the opposite wall to the Breker-Zügler-Cauer ensemble in Gallery 15, and that Breker’s and Cauer’s statues were placed on low plinths. There is no sign of a special podium in the photographs. See “GDK Research”; and Bushart, “Der Formsinn,” 149.

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Cauer’s academic style not only fitted in well with the monumental tasks and (from the mid–1930s) the classical formal language promoted by National Socialism; it also actively shaped that language. The two bronze figures of Allegretto and Moderato were placed in niches on either side of the Führer’s box at the Nuremberg Opera (Figure 4.3 and 4.4).37 Bushart points out that the life-size female nudes were shown without attributes but evoke a narrative by way of their mannered gestural language. Bushart suggests that Cauer in fact pioneered these “gestures, emptied of meaning,” which were later taken up by Breker in his sculptures for the new Reich Chancellery.38 The wrists of Cauer’s Allegretto bend at right angles to the arms, with the fingers of the hands held languidly, thumb curled into the palm. The curved hands and arms could be taken to signify “grace”; taken together, the two statues stand for art in a feminine mode. In an appraisal published in 1936, art historian Artur Kreiner praised Cauer as an artist who had enabled the Hellenic tradition in sculpture to evolve under Germanic auspices.39 He wrote of the Nuremberg statues: “Both of them softly elated and entirely

Figure 4.3: Hanna Cauer, Allegretto, 1935–6. Bronze, whereabouts unknown © Bildstelle und Fotoarchiv Stadt Nürnberg.

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Bushart, “Der Formsinn,” 149. Artur Kreiner, “Neue Bildhauerwerke im Nürnberger Opernhaus,” Kunst und Volk, 4, no.9 (1936), 318. Kreiner, “Neue Bildhauerwerke,” 318.

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Figure 4.4: Hanna Cauer, Nischenfigur (Niche Figure, or Moderato), 1935–6, exhibited at the Great German Art Exhibition, 1937, in Gallery 15 [at right]. Plaster, dimensions unknown, location unknown © Stadtarchiv München, Fotosammlung; Photo: Georg Schödl, 1937.

balanced, they shape different emotions in similar measure. The lifted hand of Allegretto has the effect of a request, while the Moderato curbs with both hands.”40 A similar form of hand and finger shape can be detected in other sculptures of female 40

“Beide sanft beschwingt und völlig ausgewogen, gestalten sie bei gleichem Maß verschiedene Empfindungen. Wirkt die erhobene Hand des ‘Allegretto’ wie eine Aufforderung, so dämpft ‘Moderato’ mit beiden Händen.” Kreiner, “Neue Bildhauerwerke,” 318. On Artur Kreiner, albeit glossing over the National Socialist period, see the obituary by Otto Barthel, Frankenland, (September 18, 1965), 302, http://frankenland.franconica.uni-wuerzburg.de/login/data/1965_125.pdf. The periodical Kunst und Volk was edited by Walter Stang, head of the National Socialist Kulturgemeinde or cultural community and propagated a völkisch, pure German art; see Baumann, Wortgefechte.

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figures in the late 1930s and early 1940s, very different to the angular hand-and-arm formations found in Expressionist sculptures of the 1910s and 1920s.41 Cauer’s sculptures, like other classical works of the 1930s, are not dynamic in character, and they do not reach out into space but rest in themselves, embodying a kind of Winckelmannian idealism of calm innocence. In this calm demeanor it is left to the hands, nay the fingers, to perform any affective address. Art historian Max Imdahl critiqued the poses and gestures of nude fascist statues for propagating the loss of individual freedom under National Socialism.42 Arguably, however, the loosely held hands and quasi-boneless arms also came to signify “art” itself; these gestures are what animate these figures and soften the effect of what feminist art historian Silke Wenk has called “erect female bodies.”43 Contemporary critics were clear that this was art’s function: not to communicate political ideologies in any overt way but to embody the German nation’s “soul” and thereby also to transport the viewer’s “soul.”44 This is how I read Cauer’s contribution to an incipient official language of sculptural classicism. It might seem appropriate to describe Cauer’s sculpture and career as conformist. Yet this characterization would miss the point in some ways, since it implies an effortful process of self-alignment with the agenda imposed by a regime. Cauer was not obliged to invest effort in processes of accommodation or negotiation. Her invocation of the classical fitted neatly with the recently hardened political line: until 1934, it had not been evident which style would prevail as truly expressive of “German” nationhood. In working to classicist expectations, Cauer remained true to her own tradition and stylistic preference, in the footsteps of her father, uncle, and grandfather. Her strategy was mostly one of exploitation: she worked to get the most out of her environment to support something she was already doing. Jonathan Petropoulos divides “artists under Hitler” into those who emerged from a modernist background in the 1920s to pursue accommodation, and those who realized accommodation to the regime.45 An artist like Cauer did not really have a modernist background. One could argue that she neither pursued nor realized “accommodation.” In that sense she resembled those artists analyzed by historian Alan Steinweis, whose work within the remit of regime policy was not based on tactical accommodation, but on a convergence of aesthetic,

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Languidly curved arms and fingers with loosely bent thumbs can be seen, for example, in the sculptures by Lore Friedrich-Gronau, Lotte Benter-Bogdanoff, Arno Breker, and Fritz Klimsch. Contrast the angular limbs of pre–1933 works by Emy Roeder, Milly Steger, Herbert Garbe, or Katharina Heise. Max Imdahl, “Pose und Indoktrination: Zu Werken der Plastik und Malerei im Dritten Reich”, in Nazi-Kunst ins Museum? ed. Klaus Staeck (Göttingen: Steidl, 1988), 87–99. Silke Wenk,“Aufgerichtete weibliche Körper: Zur allegorischen Skulpture im deutschen Faschismus”, in Inszenierung der Macht: Ästhetische Faszination im Faschismus (Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst and Dirk Nishen Verlag, 1987), 116. See, for example, Sommer, Arno Breker; Georg Schorer, Deutsche Kunstbetrachtung (Munich: Deutscher Volksverlag, 1939), https://archive.org/stream/Schorer-Georg-Deutsche-Kunstbetrachtung/ SchorerGeorg-DeutscheKunstbetrachtung1939207S.ScanFraktur#page/n1/mode/2up; Ernst Wurm, “Bildhauerinnen der Gegenwart,” Die Kunst im Deutschen Reich, 8, no.6/7 (1944), 145–52. Petropoulos, Artists under Hitler.

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reputational, and economic interests.46 Cauer did not resist or accommodate fascist policies or aesthetic dicta. She is particularly interesting in view of the fact that it was not only sculptors such as Arno Breker and Josef Thorak with their hyper-masculine formal language who welcomed the chance to collaborate through art.

Milly Steger and the Diversity of Response Milly Steger’s career is in many ways the most typical of the three artists discussed here in that she neither overtly resisted nor overtly collaborated. Steger is an example of a sculptor who “muddled through,” of someone who tried to continue her pre–1933 artistic practice and at the same time attempted to make the most of opportunities that presented themselves to her. Steger (1881–1948) was aged fifty-one when the NSDAP seized power in January 1933.47 Unlike Cauer and Schottmüller, Steger was in 1933 already an artist with an established career who was best known for her monumental architectural sculptures, commissioned for the Municipal Theater of the Westphalian city of Hagen in 1911. A number of further commissions in Hagen followed, including two figures for the Secondary School Altenhagen (1913), a bronze male blacksmith in the Volkspark (1914), and a set of colossal panthers for the Municipal Hall (1917). Although Steger’s career began with public monuments, in the wake of the First World War and after her move to Berlin in 1917, public commissions dried up. The lack of state- and municipality-sponsored projects was partly a factor of the economic situation during the Weimar Republic, and partly a result of the changing architectural style for public buildings in the 1920s.48 After 1918, Steger’s work became smaller and more inward-turning. This may simply have been her response to the lack of large-scale commissions, though it may also have signaled an effort to address the chastened mood of a public traumatized by war, defeat, and political and economic instability. Her sculptures also started to look more Expressionist. Jephtha’s Daughter (1919, artificial stone) has an angular and semiabstract design. Art critic Max Osborn analyzed it in formalist terms: “A game of effect and counter-effect, of harmonies and dissonances of line, practiced with a high degree

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Alan E. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). I thank Christopher Clark for this reference. On Steger’s career, see Carmen Stonge, “Women and the Folkwang: Ida Gerhardi, Milly Steger, and Maria Slavona,” Woman’s Art Journal, 15, no.1 (Summer 1994), 3–10; Birgit Schulte, “Von der Skandalkünstlerin zur Stadtbildhauerin: Milly Steger in Hagen,” in Die Grenzen des Frauseins aufheben: Die Bildhauerin Milly Steger 1881–1948, ed. Birgit Schulte with Erich Ranfft, (Hagen: Neuer Folkwang Verlag im Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum, 1998), 33–44, http://www.keom02.de/KEOM %202001/ kuenstler/texte/steger_skandal.html; Birgit Schulte, “‘Die Grenzen des Frauseins aufheben’: Die Bildhauerin Milly Steger 1881–1948,” lecture for the FernUniversität Hagen, Frauenvorträge 29 (April 30, 1999), https://www.fernuni-hagen.de/imperia/md/content/gleichstellung/heft29schulte.pdf; Gora Jain, Die anthropologisch fundierte Werkidee im Oeuvre der Bildhauerin Milly Steger (1881–1948) (Herbolzheim: Centaurus, 2002). On German architecture in this period, see the brilliant analysis by Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985 [1968]).

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of artistic maturity . . .”49 Other creative and critical practitioners also positioned Steger within the cutting-edge avant-garde, if not within Expressionism itself. Steger herself remained committed to the idea of large-scale public sculpture and welcomed the renewed attention paid to monumental ensembles in fascist Germany. In a 1936 interview, Steger said: Happily, we sculptors are in recent times once again and more and more invited to contribute by architects, and it is therefore the case that we can hope that we will soon experience once again the unified, great work of art, the work of art of our time, a harmonious combination of the three sister arts: architecture, painting and sculpture.50

Sculpture historian Birgit Schulte suggests that Steger’s hope for a renewal of some form of Gesamtkunstwerk is ironically reminiscent of the policies of the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, the Workers’ Council of Art, the socialist revolutionary group active between 1918 and 1921.51 The Council championed a fusion of all the visual arts under the umbrella of architecture. Steger was a founding member of the Worker’s Council, and in 1919, she contributed a text advocating equal rights for women in art education to the Council’s publication.52 Her later appeal to the new National Socialist state to realize the erstwhile utopian hopes of the socialist state of 1919 would reveal not so much a position of resistance but one of negotiation, turning a situation to advantage, and misprision of political purpose. As it happens, during the National Socialist period, Steger did not receive the kind of large-scale, high-profile public commissions she had enjoyed before the Great War. However, the artist did receive official recognition on a smaller scale: in 1936, she was given a state commission for the statue of a stallion for the town of Insterburg in East Prussia, and she won awards for her entries to the Olympic Art Competitions of 1936 and 1940.53 Steger was also awarded the Rome Prize in 1938, the same award that Cauer had received eight years earlier.54 A figure for a fountain was illustrated in Die Kunst im Dritten Reich.55 In 1937, Steger joined two official National Socialist organizations, the

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“Ein mit hoher künstlerischer Reife geübtes Spiel von Wirkungen und Gegenwirkungen, von Linienharmonien und -dissonanzen.” Max Osborn, “Berliner Sezessionsplastik,” Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, 45 (1919–1920), 293. “Erfreulicherweise werden wir Bildhauer in letzter Zeit wieder mehr von den Architekten zur Mitarbeit herangezogen, und so können wir hoffen, dass uns bald wieder das einige, große Kunstwerk erstehen wird, das Kunstwerk unserer Zeit, eine harmonische Verbindung der drei Schwesterkünste: Architektur, Malerei und Plastik.” Interview in Koralle, 4, no.5 (1936); quoted in Schulte, “Von der Skandalkünstlerin,” 14. Schulte, “Von der Skandalkünstlerin,” 14. Steger responded to a questionnaire sent out to all artist members. Arbeitsrat für Kunst, ed., Ja? Stimmen des Arbeitsrates für Kunst in Berlin (Berlin: Photographische Gesellschaft, 1919). Anita Beloubek-Hammer, “Die schönen Gestalten der besseren Zukunft”: Die Bildhauerkunst des Expressionismus und ihr geistiges Umfeld (Cologne: LETTER Stiftung, 2007), volume 2, 682. Beloubek-Hammer, “Die schönen Gestalten”, 682; Knigge, “Die Villa Massimo.” Bushart, “Der Formsinn,” 140.

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Reich Chamber of Visual Arts and the German Women’s Welfare Organization (Deutsches Frauenwerk).56 Membership in these groups does not in and of itself indicate any degree of conformity, however, as it was very difficult to obtain art supplies or exhibition permits without such membership.57 In March 1934, Steger had asked the chair of the Reich Culture Chamber, state secretary Hans Hinkel, if Hitler would sit for a portrait bust for the German Lyceum Club in Berlin.58 It is unknown whether this bust was ever completed, but Steger’s initiative does at least demonstrate the artist’s endeavor to come to an arrangement with the new kinds of commissions on offer. All of this would seem to indicate a career that was by and large negotiated around the exigencies of the new fascist state. Yet the overall picture is more equivocal. Steger’s work was not included in the touring exhibition of “Degenerate Art” that was opened in Munich in 1937, but eight of her works were confiscated as part of the associated project to “cleanse” the German “temples of art,” carried out on behalf of the Reich Ministry of Propaganda.59 The confiscated works were six drawings and prints, and two sculptures, Kneeling Woman (confiscated from the Municipal Museum in Hagen) and Walking Girl (taken from the National Gallery in Berlin).60 Given that Steger faced no discrimination elsewhere (as far as can be ascertained), it is difficult to reconstruct what it was about these sculptures in particular that elicited the label “degenerate.” Both sculptures were lost and believed destroyed until a fragment of the Kneeling Woman was recovered as part of the Berlin archaeological sculpture find of 2010 and dated to 1914/20 (Figure 4.5).61 The reclaimed fragment is too destroyed for us to be able to make any conclusive aesthetic judgment about it but it does seem to have been similar in style to some of Steger’s sculptures of the early 1920s, such as Female Half-Figure of 1920.62 That figure is executed using an attenuated, angular formal language, with legs cropped at the thigh and sharply defined abdominal muscles. Whether the choice of torso was deemed

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Amy Dickson, “Biology, Body and Sculpture: Milly Steger and Emy Roeder in the 1930s” (MA diss., Courtauld Institute of Art, 2003), 28. I thank Elizabeth Otto for this point. Beloubek-Hammer, “Die schönen Gestalten,” 682. On the Kunsttempelsäuberungsaktion, see Peter-Klaus Schuster, ed., Die “Kunststadt” München 1937: Nationalsozialismus und “Entartete Kunst” (Munich: Prestel, 1987). See the excellent database assembled by the Freie Universität Berlin, Datenbank zum Beschlagnahmeinventar der Aktion “Entartete Kunst,” Forschungsstelle “Entartete Kunst,” Fachbereich Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, Freie Universität Berlin, “Datenbank ‘Entartete Kunst,’ ” 2010, http://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/db_entart_kunst/index.html Birgit Schulte identified the recovered fragment with 98% certainty as Steger’s lost Kneeling Woman. Birgit Schulte, “Milly Steger, Kniende, um 1914/20”, in Der Berliner Skulpturenfund: ‘Entartete Kunst’ im Bombenschutt. Entdeckung—Deutung—Perspektive, eds Matthias Wemhoff, Meike Hoffmann and Dieter Scholz (Berlin: Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, and Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2012), 113–22. Walking Girl is possibly the stone Schreitendes Mädchen, illustrated in Westermanns Monatshefte 56, no.112, part 2 (1912). Whereabouts unknown; illustrated in Birgit Schulte with Erich Ranfft, eds, Die Grenzen des Frauseins aufheben: Die Bildhauerin Milly Steger (Hagen: Neuer Folkwang Verlag im Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum, 1998).

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Figure 4.5: Milly Steger, Kniende (Kneeling Woman), cast stone, 32 in. / 81 cm high; fragment of Kniende as it was discovered as part of the Berliner Skulpturenfund of 2010. Property of the German Federal Republic © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, Berlin; Photo: Achim Kleuker. .

to violate the ideal of the “whole” human figure or whether it was an agonistic gestural idiom that contravened the calm classicism that had by 1937 become sculpturally acceptable, I can at this juncture only speculate. Adolf Ziegler, the head of the fiveperson commission that was tasked with choosing “degenerate” works to be removed from public collections said that the selection was to be made not on political but purely on artistic grounds; however, no specific guidelines as to the artistic criteria to be applied were issued.63 63

Mario-Andreas von Lüttichau, “ ‘Deutsche Kunst’ und ‘Entartete Kunst’: Die Münchner Ausstellungen 1937,” in Schuster, Die “Kunststadt,” 97.

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In the very same year, and in seeming contradiction, Steger’s Musing Woman (plaster) was chosen for exhibition in the first Great German Art Exhibition of 1937 (Figure 4.6).64 Musing Woman was shown in Gallery Nine of the House of German Art, along a wall with five other unequivocally conformist works, including Richard Klein’s portrait bust of Hitler and Franz Bernhard’s high relief of two Hitler Youth boys. Christina Threuter suggests that Steger’s oeuvre presents a continuity of style from her time in Hagen to her death in 1948, with Expressionism only a short interlude in what was otherwise a “closed, voluminous design, reduced to its simplest form.”65 Amy Dickson, by contrast, argues that Steger’s practice was in dialogue with a classicized “Nazi aesthetic.”66 Stylistically, Musing Woman represents a departure from the Expressionist phase of Steger’s career. Whether this is a purely formal development within the artist’s oeuvre or an adoption of a more realistic style thought to be amenable to National Socialist ideological preferences, is difficult to say with any certainty. It is

Figure 4.6: Milly Steger, Sinnende (Sitzende Figur) (Musing Woman [Seated Figure]), c. 1937. plaster, whereabouts unknown © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann; Photo: Heinrich Hoffmann, 1937.

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“GDK Research.” The catalogue mistakenly listed the artist as “Willy” Steger. Christina Threuter, “Die begehrten Körper der Bildhauerin Milly Steger”, in Gender-Perspektiven: interdisziplinär—transversal—aktuell, ed. Christel Baltes-Löhr and Karl Hölz (Berne, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Vienna: Peter Lang, 2004), 94. Dickson, “Biology, Body,” 28.

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the case that during the 1930s classicism came to be privileged as a sculptural style in many Western countries of the globe, including the United Kingdom and the United States.67 This circumstance alone should sound a cautionary note against attempting to equate style with politics in a direct manner. It was unusual to have works exhibited in both the Great German Art Exhibition and the “Degenerate Art Exhibition” but Steger was not the only artist so situated. The sculptors Georg Kolbe and Rudolf Belling were also represented in both exhibitions. The regime was as polycratic in its cultural policy as it was in its economic, social and political endeavors. Much depended on regional and local micro-climates and the second- and third-tier party officials who wielded power within them. This may also explain Steger’s choice of Hitler for subject matter in her application for a commission in 1934. Within a regime marked by bitter in-fighting across many policy domains, Hitler was a “safe” choice of subject, unlikely to fall foul of local potentates who were themselves often locked in a struggle for power. Within limitations, Steger found a way to work within the new framework of expectation. She was already a mature artist in 1933 and arguably accommodated her developing style to what promised success in terms of exhibition and commission opportunities. The inclusion of some of her works in the National Socialist art confiscation campaign did not imply a dissident art-political stance. Nor did it stigmatize her in the eyes of the authorities as an enemy of the regime and its policies. Artists whose work was confiscated and/or shown in the “Degenerate Art Exhibition” had not necessarily “resisted” in any way. Nearly all of the confiscated works had been produced before the National Socialist take-over in 1933, in a context where resistance meant something else entirely. Artists had no say in the matter of their work being confiscated or not; redress was not an option. Inclusion in the Great German Art Exhibition, on the other hand, was an active choice, and competition was stiff.68

Sculpture and Authority In 2002, the American cultural critic and political agitator Stephen Duncombe proposed a sliding scale of understanding cultural resistance: cultural resistance as a free space, a launch pad for political activism, a rewriting of dominant discourse, an escape from politics and, finally, non-existent because the dominant system will ultimately exert hegemony over all cultural expression.69 An authoritarian regime like that of National Socialism was arguably one such hegemonic system that placed severe

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Martin Damus,“Plastik vor und nach 1945: Kontinuität oder Bruch in der skulpturalen Auffassung,” in Bushart, Nicolai and Schuster, Entmachtung der Kunst, 119–40. In 1937, there were fifteen thousand submissions, and around one thousand five hundred or 10% were chosen by the jury for exhibition to the Great German Art Exhibition. Lüttichau, “ ‘Deutsche Kunst’ ,” 87. Stephen Duncombe, ed., Cultural Resistance Reader (London: Verson, 2002), 5–8. I thank Deborah Ascher Barnstone for this reference.

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limits on the range and diversity of sculptural expression. Idealized classical figures, like those of Cauer, were tolerated within officially sanctioned channels; indeed, an artist like Cauer could be said to have exploited the system to her own advantage. On the other hand, hegemony was not absolute and cultural policies could be contingent, even muddled, as is suggested by the case of Steger’s works being both confiscated and exhibited. The regime responded with deadly swiftness to the suspicion of actual political resistance; the question of whether Schottmüller’s artistic practice was conformist or carved out a residually avant-garde niche within an authoritarian system was rendered irrelevant in the face of accusations of political subversion. Exploring the careers of three very different sculptors in fascist Germany has, I hoped, shed some light on the nuances that were possible even within the purview of dictatorship.

Part II

Art That Inspires Action

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Teach Your Children Well: Hermynia Zur Mühlen, George Grosz, and the Art of Radical Pedagogy in Germany between the World Wars1 Barbara McCloskey

Anti-intellectualism and hostility to democracy now bear the stamp “made in America” thanks to our current regime and its open season on the role of public schools in promoting democratic values. Moments like this remind us that Hitler too had contempt for schools, teachers, and liberal education.2 But rather than dwell on our here and now, this essay instead explores the roots of the Hitler phenomenon in another perilous moment for education that occurred at a different time and under different circumstances, namely in Germany after the First World War. At that time, the country’s leaders and teachers across the political spectrum focused laser-like attention on schools and education of the young. The stakes were high and self-evident: control over young minds, how and what they learned and for what purpose, promised to shape the nature of the German Republic to come. In his recent primer On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder speaks of the anticipatory obedience that made tyranny possible under past modern dictatorships and threatens to enable current ones.3 By 1933, the German education system had become one of the main engines of such obedience, fully implicated in Hitler’s rise to power.4 Knowing how our present relates to this ignominious past should be of concern to all, whether

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I want to thank Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Libby Otto for organizing the German Studies Association session in 2017 where I delivered this paper. My thinking on this topic has benefited significantly from their comments and those of session and audience participants. Thanks too to Cherilyn Lacy of Hartwick College for inviting me to present an early version of this essay in 2016 as part of her NEH speaker series on War and Social Change. For Hitler’s negative attitude toward organized school systems and preference for youth groups as instruments of forging national and racial identity in the Third Reich, see Lisa Pine, Education in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2010), 1–4. Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017). Fritz Ringer was among the first to explore the role of intellectuals and Germany’s education system in fostering a culture of pessimism and conformity conducive to the rise of Nazism. See Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969).

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inside or outside academia and the teaching professions. Paraphrasing Snyder: history doesn’t repeat, but we certainly have to hope we can learn from it. Given this volume’s focus on visual culture and resistance to oppression, my study of pedagogy in Weimar will deal specifically with Was Peterchens Freunde Erzählen (What Little Peter’s Friends Tell Him), a children’s fairy tale written by Hermynia Zur Mühlen and illustrated by George Grosz. Published during Christmas season in 1920 by Wieland Herzfelde’s Malik-Verlag, this work has thus far gone unremarked in the literature on Grosz.5 In addition, Zur Mühlen’s publishing career in 1920s Germany has only recently begun to attract significant scholarly notice. That notice still excludes serious analysis of her collaboration with Grosz amidst the volatile debates on education in early Weimar. Motivating factors for this neglect will be explored in the following; so too will reasons why this important collaboration warrants re-examination today. The powerful entwinement of vanguard art and the values of the late nineteenthcentury education reform movement form an important prehistory for the Zur Mühlen and Grosz project and for the debates on education that marked the early Weimar years. In 1912, Grosz arrived in Berlin a jaded product of the Prussian education system bent on establishing himself as a leading figure in the expressionist movement. As such he embraced expressionist valorizations of the untutored and childlike as a dissident counter to the stifling rigidity of the conventional training he received between 1909 and 1911 as a student at the Dresden art academy.6 In this way, the Prussian discipline of his schooling proved vital for Grosz’s self-realization as a modernist artist. He, like many in his circle, rebelled against it and styled himself as part of an artistic vanguard in doing so. In truth, Grosz and his fellow artists were more of a rearguard—not a vanguard— for a reform movement that had long begun to challenge and transform the German education system.7 Since the turn of the century, rising birth rates and lower infant mortality contributed to Germany’s palpable Verjugendlichung (new youthfulness).8 This accelerating demographic shift fueled growing attention to matters of childhood socialization in the areas of psychology, education, labor practices, and politics. Important in the story of education reform were thinkers like Ellen Key and her Century of the Child (1900), which was translated from Swedish into German (Das

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The impress date for the first edition of Peterchens is 1921, though reviews of it began to appear in late 1920. For Grosz’s reflections on his academy training, see George Grosz: An Autobiography, trans. Nora Hodges (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 46–64. First published in 1946. On the nationalist authoritarianism of the German imperial educational system, its control by church and state, and its public schools that reflected class and confessional divisions, see Lisa Pine, 8ff. On the challenge to that order by Germany’s organized education reform movement founded in 1908, see Marjorie Lamberti, The Politics of Education: Teachers and School Reform in Weimar Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 11ff. Peter D. Stachura, The Weimar Republic and the Younger Proletariat (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 14.

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Jahrhundert des Kindes) in 1902 and went through thirty-six German editions by 1926.9 Century of the Child is a quixotic blend of free love, secularism, eugenics, and health reform. Above all, Key denounced corporal punishment, rote memorization, and other Prussian models of education as “soul murder” designed to crush the spirit of the child. She advocated instead creative play and the value of active learning. In addition, she was a pacifist and internationalist who rejected the nationalization of school systems and decried the threat of future war.10 During the First World War, Key’s betrayed dream of a children’s utopia lived on as a touchstone of radical critique for Grosz and others of his artistic circle. This can be discerned most vividly in works such as Grosz’s Dorfschullehrer (Country Teacher), which appeared in his Kleine Grosz-Mappe (Small Grosz Portfolio) published by Herzfelde’s Malik-Verlag in 1917 (Figure  5.1).11 Using a childlike graphic style, Grosz indicts the country teacher as an absurd figure of authority. Holding his bible and switch, the teacher gazes heavenward to the higher truths he imparts to the little girl at his side. And we can see what these higher truths are, namely a nonsense jumble that includes a hot air balloon, a floating dog, and a pipe-smoking moon. Meanwhile, the innocent little girl is firmly cinched into her dress, literally buttoned up from head to toe. The image condemns Germany’s authoritarian wartime education system for its villainous distortion of the child’s body as well as her mind. Grosz went on to produce several such works that assailed the German monarchy, the church, and the schools as a triumvirate of oppression and vestiges of a contemptible old order. During the war, these sorts of images about children were circulated first and foremost among like-minded dissidents. After the war, Grosz ventured for the first time into producing works intended explicitly for children. In addition to his work on Peterchens in 1920, Grosz also produced illustrations for a group of children’s poems written by Bruno Schönlank titled Sonniges Land (Sunny Land) and published by the Paul Cassirer Verlag that same year.12 Like Zur Mühlen, Grosz, and Herzfelde, Schönlank was radicalized by the war and joined the German Communist Party (KPD; Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) after its founding in 1918.13 Schönlank’s

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The volume also appeared in English in 1909 and was translated into some thirteen other languages. See Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor, Growing by Design, 1900–2000: Century of the Child (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 249, note 3. Ellen Key, Century of the Child (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1909), 9th printing. See Chapter V, “Soul Murder in the Schools,” 203–32. Key opens her text with the emblem of the new century as a “small naked child, descending upon the earth, but drawing himself back in terror at the sight of a world bristling with weapons” and exploitive materialism. See Key, 1–2. I discuss this work and the circumstances of its publication in Barbara McCloskey, George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918–1936 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 41–2. Bruno Schönlank, Sonniges Land: Kindergedichte (Berlin: Paul Cassirer Verlag, 1920). Jon Clark and Wilfried van der Will, “Bruno Schönlank” in Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 23 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2007): https://www.deutsche- biographie.de/gnd118758934. html#ndbcontent_leben [accessed January 29, 2017]. Schönlank abandoned the KPD in 1922 and joined instead the Social Democratic Party (SPD ; Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands), its call for a return to order, and the stabilization of a democratic republic under its leadership.

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Figure 5.1: George Grosz, Der Dorfschullehrer (The Country Teacher) in Kleine Grosz-Mappe (Small Grosz Portfolio), 1917. Transfer lithograph, 8.25 × 5.5 in., 20.9 × 13.5 cm. Art © Estate of George Grosz / Licensed by VAGA , New York, NY.

poems for Sonniges Land have the character of gentle nursery rhymes filled with expressionist nature imagery and the security of familial love. Grosz provided five text illustrations for the volume, all of them loosely based on the contents of the poems they accompany. In one example, he depicts a jaunty Bavarian hiking with his dog through a provincial town dotted by houses nestled into rolling hills (Figure 5.2). Sunshine smiles down on the scene, a windmill catches the breeze on a distant hill, and a hot air balloon hovers amidst puffy clouds. Each of Grosz’s illustrations occupies its own page like a freestanding work of art in keeping with

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Figure 5.2: George Grosz, untitled illustration in Bruno Schönlank, Sonniges Land (Sunny Land), Berlin: Paul Cassirer Verlag, 1920. Art © Estate of George Grosz / Licensed by VAGA , New York, NY.

Cassirer’s tradition of luxury graphic portfolio publications. As we shall explore, Zur Mühlen and Grosz’s Was Peterchens Freunde Erzählen departs pointedly from Sonniges Land’s high art format and reassuring content. In Peterchens, Grosz’s images are no longer freestanding but appear embedded within the text where they serve to break up blocks of Gothic typeface; moreover, his drawings are closely calibrated to the tale’s contents. These are small but important differences that serve to enliven the text and make it more approachable, less onerous,

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and conducive to text-image discussions between parent and child. Grosz’s illustrations also depart from the spatially complex and whimsical style of his earlier Expressionist work. They conform instead to the harsh line and caustic simplicity for which his satiric illustrations increasingly became known at this time. Herzfelde printed Peterchens in a large folio format, intended for children to handle and read for themselves. Equally important, he set the price at seven marks, within the range of what a worker could afford.14 In light of the high-profile attention given to his more incendiary and politically driven paintings and drawings of the early Weimar years, it is perhaps small wonder that Grosz’s collaboration on Peterchens has received so little note. There are other reasons for this neglect, however. First, it is a volume for children and thus easily dismissed as “trivial” or “kiddie lit.” Second, Peterchens was authored by a woman, Zur Mühlen, who adopted a feminist perspective in many of her writings.15 Third, Zur Mühlen died in poverty and neglect near London in 1951, after which her literary estate was destroyed. Outside of various shorter notices, the first biography of Zur Mühlen appeared in 1997, and the only serious monograph on her to date was released in 2009.16 During the First World War, she broke with her Viennese aristocratic roots, put herself in touch with the socialist left and joined the KPD shortly after the war. A talented translator, she helped to establish an audience for Upton Sinclair’s writings in Germany. And despite a more generous contract offer from the Kurt Wolff Verlag, she chose instead to translate Sinclair’s work for Malik-Verlag in an effort to help Herzfelde’s radical publishing house get off the ground in its early years.17 Zur Mühlen also became a prolific author in her own right, known for her detective stories for girls and her proletarian revolutionary fairy tales. Peterchens is the first and most famous of these. Herzfelde issued it as volume one of his Märchen der Armen (Fairy Tales of the Poor) series in 1920 with text illustrations by Grosz.18 When the

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See Frank Schulz, “Ein Märchenbuch für Arbeiterkinder,” Der Gegner 5 (1920–1), 166–7. According to Schulz: “Der Preis des Buches (7 Mark) macht den Kauf dieses Weihnachtsgeschenkes für seinen Sohn jedem Arbeiter möglich.” Quoted in Ailsa Wallace, Hermynia Zur Mühlen: The Guises of Socialist Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 34. The female-centered notion of revolution that Zur Mühlen developed in her writings of this period could well be described as feminist, though she did not identify herself as such. On this issue, see Lynda J. King, “From the Crown to the Hammer and Sickle: The Life and Works of Austrian Interwar Writer Hermynia Zur Mühlen,” Women in German Yearbook, 4 (1988), 125–54. Manfred Altner, Hermynia Zur Mühlen (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997), and Ailsa Wallace, Hermynia Zur Mühlen: The Guises of Socialist Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Her autobiographical note appeared in “Selbstbiographie,” Das Wort 2 (1937), 184–5. Wallace, 25. Others in the Märchen der Armen series include: Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Ali, der Teppichweber, illustrated by John Heartfield (1923); Eugen Lewin-Dorsch, Die Dollarmännchen, illustrated by Heinrich Maria Davringhausen (1923); and Maria Szucisch, Silavus, illustrated by Otto Schmalhausen (1923). Two of the chapters that make up Peterchens were also published individually in the journal of the Communist Youth International, Der junge Genosse in 1921: “Was die Kohle erzählt,” Der junge Genosse 1 (1921), 4–6; and “Was die Bettdecke erzählt,” Der junge Genosse 10 (1921), 4–6.

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volume was reissued in 1924, Grosz supplied the color cover illustration discussed in detail below.19 This tale launched Zur Mühlen’s career and, true to both author and publisher’s internationalist commitments, was eventually translated into eight languages and distributed worldwide.20 So what is the story about? And how did it position Zur Mühlen, Grosz, Herzfelde, and their radicalized circle in debates on education in the new German Weimar Republic? Perhaps a more important and complex question is one of audience. For whom was this tale intended? The work is indeed a fairy tale and in that sense takes its place quite pointedly in a literary tradition considered deeply Germanic, at least since the Brothers Grimm. Grimms’ fairy tales, with their combination of terror and teachable moments, were used since the early nineteenth century in German schools to impart values and socialize the young.21 In Peterchens, Zur Mühlen deliberately took that tradition and radicalized it. Grosz’s cover illustration already tells us a lot (Figure 5.3). The inner oval bounds the central image and the title of the fairy tale. We as viewers look through this oval, as though through a keyhole, from a slightly elevated vantage point and down onto a scene that depicts a young, thin, and fragile looking boy. The child lies on a bed, back resting against a pillow, wearing a simple nightshirt. An unadorned blanket covers him up to his chest and the boy clutches a small bouquet of white snowbells in his right hand. Little Peter looks with heavy-lidded eyes in the direction of several household objects, all of which seem to be leaning or running toward him. A matchbox springs

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The 1920 edition contained six drawings by Grosz. The second edition of 1924 included the color cover in addition to five drawings and six vignettes by Grosz. See Frank Hermann, Der Malik-Verlag 1916–1947: Eine Bibliographie (Kiel: Neuer Malik-Verlag, 1989), 106. Translations of Peterchens appeared in Russian: Cto rasskazyvali Pete ego druz’ja (Charkov: Put’prosvescenija, 1923) and Cto rasskazyvali Petiny ego druz’ja, trans. E.M. Levina (Charkov: Proletarij, 1925); Japanese: Chiisai piitaa, trans. Hayashi Fusao (Tokyo: Gyoseikaku, 1927); Chinese: edition translated from Japanese by Lu Xun appeared in 1929 under the title Xiao Bide [in Lu Xun, Collected Works, 20 vols (Xianggang: Jian we shu ju, 1959), 237–40]; Esperanto: Kion rakontas la amikoj de Pecjo (Leipzig: Eldona Fako kooperativa, 1928); French: Ce que racontent les amis de Pierrot, trans. from Esperanto by M. Boubon (Saumur: L’École émancipée, 1930); Spanish: Lo que cuentan los amigos de Perico, trans. Piedad de Salas (Madrid: Editorial Cenit, 1931); and SerboCroat: Sta pricaju Pertrovi prijatelji (Zagreb: Mladost, 1957). Zur Mühlen’s work was also published in the United States: Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Fairy Tales for Workers’ Children, trans. Ida Dailes (Chicago: Daily Worker, 1925), but this volume does not contain Peterchens. Her Fairy Tales for Workers’ Children did, however, inspire Helen Kay’s Battle in the Barnyard: Stories and Pictures for Workers’ Children (New York: Workers Library, 1932), the first American authored children’s book published by a Communist Press. On this and the history of radical children’s literature in the US , see Julia L. Mickenberg, Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 51. Jack Zipes, ed., Fairy Tales and Fables from the Weimar Days (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 9–11. See also Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (New York: Methuen, 1979), 1–39, on the role of the fairy tale as an instrument of bourgeois socialization.

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Figure 5.3: George Grosz, cover illustration for Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Was Peterchens Freunde Erzählen (What Little Peter’s Friends Tell Him), 2nd edition, Berlin: Malik-Verlag, 1924. Art © Estate of George Grosz / Licensed by VAGA , New York, NY.

through the air while a small stove runs on to his bedspread with one of its glowing trapdoors transformed into an open mouth. A pot teetering on top of the stove has eyes and a mouth, and its handle serves as a nose. A bottle that tips into the oval frame at the lower right also has facial features: a mouth, ears, and eyes appear on its neck. Its stopper doubles as a top hat. The frantic motion of the objects contrasts with the stillness of the young boy, who seems not at all startled to have these inanimate things come to life. Little Peter, Zur Mühlen tells us, slipped on the ice one day and broke his leg. As a result, he must remain in bed all day, cold and alone until his mother returns each evening. She then lights the stove and tends to the boy’s needs. Unlike the indeterminate es war einmal (once upon a time) temporal and spatial structure of Grimms’ fairy tales,

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time and place are quite explicit here. The mother works in a factory and the lack of a father figure in the story points to the reality of urban, working class, postwar Germany. The tale underscores the true cost of a war in which the male population was decimated and women very often continued factory labor long after the war concluded. Little Peter is therefore a proletarian child, left cold and lonely during the day without companionship or toys. One day, a lump of coal begins to speak from within the wooden scuttle, followed by another and another. Their voices become louder as the lumps of coal talk among themselves, telling from whence they came and what they have seen. The first of Grosz’s text illustrations appears where one piece of coal describes the terrible conditions of the mine (Figure 5.4). His image portrays the miners’ backbreaking work and their straining arms and torsos as they hew coal from the mine’s underground spaces and lift the heavy stones into a coal wagon. Above ground appear the factories, smoke stacks, and high-tension wires of the industries their labor fuels. The first lump of coal describes the miners’ long hours of sweat and toil in these cramped spaces, a torment they endure day in and day out just to feed their families. Another lump recounts how it witnessed an explosion and mine collapse that killed all the miners after they were ordered to continue their labor even though gas had been detected in the shaft. And yet another goes on to tell of the mine owner’s callous indifference to the plight of the dead workers’ families and his feasting in the face of this tragedy.

Figure 5.4: George Grosz, illustration for Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Was Peterchens Freunde Erzählen (What Little Peter’s Friends Tell Him), 1st edition, Berlin: MalikVerlag, 1921. Art © Estate of George Grosz / Licensed by VAGA , New York, NY.

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As they recount these stories of exploitation one after another, Peter’s animated companions try to school him in why people are so dreadful to one another. A particularly smart lump of coal begins to tell Peter that there are two types of men in the world: the poor, on the one hand, and, on the other, the rich who make their wealth by exploiting the labor of the poor. One day, the matchbox comes to life and tries to tell Peter that “the system” is to blame, but Peter falls asleep when it begins to explain what the system is. And Peter becomes frustrated and cries later when the matchbox and glass jug launch into Marxist analysis and heated discussion about the evils of capitalism. To explain the boy’s tears, the iron pot finally intervenes and tells the other objects they are being too elitist in their efforts to instruct Peter in terms he can’t understand. On successive days, various things in Peter’s meager environment thus come to life and tell similar tales of exploitation, all the while trying to both entertain and educate him. However, when Peter’s mother comes home each night, all the objects fall silent. The story concludes when she returns to Little Peter on the final day of the tale with a bouquet of blossoming snowbells as a fitting herald of spring and hope for a better day. Looking at Grosz’s cover illustration for Peterchens once again, we see that Peter’s response to his talking companions was clearly understood by Grosz, and presumably Zur Mühlen and Herzfelde as well, to be a crucial dimension of the tale. Remember that Peter is not ill, but lamed by an accident. In other words, his heavily lidded eyes do not register sickness, but rather that he is frankly bored, drowsy, and remarkably unphased by the boisterous objects that cavort around him. Indeed, despite their efforts to school him in lessons of class struggle and solidarity, our small protagonist seems altogether unreceptive to “what little Peter’s friends tell him.” In the end, we are made to puzzle over precisely what kind of radical fairy tale this is. Why does it deliberately undercut, even satirize, its own didactic function? What is its aim? To return to the question of the intended audience for Peterchens, one was surely working-class children. By reading these tales, it might be hoped that poor and deprived youth would overcome feelings of class inferiority and realize their plight was not their own fault.22 Parents, on reading these tales to their children, might also acquire class consciousness and be moved by the tale’s repeated exhortations to solidarity and the power of collective action. But there was also a third audience for this volume and that was the Communist Party itself, and specifically its sluggish move toward addressing the issue of children, education, and education reform in its revolutionary program. Indeed, concepts of childhood in general were few and far between in nineteenthcentury Marxist theory. Marxist attention to children only began to emerge in response to bourgeois education reform and growing interest in child psychology and socialization from 1900 onward. Socialist feminist and theorist Clara Zetkin was one of the earliest voices on the left to address the issue of children and the need for a children’s literature. She maintained that alternative stories were called for in order to counter the

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powerful influence of a bourgeois literary tradition that promoted the values of “militarism, chauvinism, war, and religion” among the young. In 1905, Zetkin began to publish addenda in the socialist press with stories directed toward children. Their purpose was to foster instead the ideals of brotherhood, the solidarity of labor, and the basis of a socialist worldview. 23 Zetkin’s efforts confronted a Marxist orthodoxy that insisted on the value of bourgeois culture, its literature, and its traditions of “high art.” According to Marxist doctrine, that culture, including its liberatory Enlightenment values, was to be claimed as the rightful possession of the working class following the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie. In the meantime, exposing children and workers to high art helped to guard against the corrosive effects of a growing popular culture of film, advertising, and other mass cultural entertainments that threatened to distract workers from the ultimate goal of revolutionary struggle. Gertrud Alexander, cultural editor of the KPD’s daily newspaper Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag), predictably condemned What Little Peter’s Friends Tell Him as little more than a trivial distraction after its release in late 1920. She curtly dismissed the utility of tales like Peterchens in forwarding the Party’s revolutionary aims: “If by these means class consciousness can be awakened and strengthened, which appears to be the point of these tales, and still more, if fairytales can at all fulfill this purpose, strikes us as doubtful.”24 She also condemned the character of Grosz’s illustrations as more suited to adults than children given their coarseness and lack of color and fantasy. Alexander’s Marxist orthodoxy continued to exert influence in Party debates on the didactic role of culture in the early Weimar years. But the KPD soon recognized the need to undertake “systematic and intensive” education of its members and the broader masses as part of its organizational strategy.25 It also advocated Party intervention into the full range of popular culture and entertainment and set out institutional structures in 1921 to undertake this task at the local level. Changing party attitudes can be gauged in 1923, when KPD education minister Edwin Hoernle came to a different conclusion regarding Peterchens. Unlike Alexander, he praised the work and advocated the creation of more such volumes:

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Clara Zetkin, “Sozialdemokratie und Volkserziehung” (1906) in Manfred Altner, ed., Das proletarische Kinderbuch: Dokumente zur Geschichte der sozialistischen deutschen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1988), 89–91. Gertrud Alexander, “Literatur des Malikverlags,” Die Rote Fahne (18 December 1920): “Ob auf diese Weise das Klassenbewußtsein geweckt und gestärkt werden kann, was wohl der Zweck dieser Märchen ist, und noch mehr, ob Märchen überhaupt einen solchen Zweck haben dürfen, erscheint uns zweifelhaft. . . . Auch die Illustrationen sind nicht dem kindlichen Gesichtskreis, dem Verlangen des Kinderauges angepaßt. Sie sind derb und auch ohne Phantasie und Farbe und trotz ihrer naiven Manier wirken sie unkindlich, so daß auch aus diesem Grunde das Buch mehr rein Bilderbuch für Erwachsene als für Kinder ist.” As noted by Zipes, Georg Lukács took an even more condemnatory view of fairy tales as “having initiated irrationalism and a literature of flight and fancy in the German tradition.” See Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell, 39. “Leitsätze zur Bildungsarbeit der KPD, Entwurf des Reichsbildungsausschusses (1921/22),” in Altner, Das proletarische Kinderbuch, 99–105; reprinted from Die Arbeit, 1921/22, nr. 5.

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Hoernle also heralded the incisiveness of Grosz’s radical illustrations. Not only did he deem them appropriate reflections of working class reality, but he also saw how they could shape class consciousness among proletarian children whose own drawings and writings derived from Grosz’s model: If someone wants to know how strongly the great struggles and movements of our time are reflected in the heads of workers’ children, how strongly the worker child is already immersed in the lives of adults, he need only consider the drawings and poetry of our children. Inflation rises, and so do the number of images that have hunger and deprivation as their subject. And almost always the experience of hunger is rendered as an indictment of the rich. So eat the rich, so the proletarian— so live the rich, so the worker. . . . Images by George Grosz and other political illustrators were [thus] enthusiastically copied and varied.27

While Alexander had earlier questioned the appropriateness of Grosz’s illustrations for children, Hoernle instead praised the artist’s unflinching depictions of suffering,

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Edwin Hoernle, “Spiele und Märchen,” in Die Arbeit in den kommunistischen Kindergruppen (Vienna, 1923), reprinted in Altner, Das proletarische Kinderbuch, 107–14. “Überhaupt müssen wir wieder lernen, Geschichten zu erzählen, jene phantastischen, kunstlosen Geschichten, wie sie in der vorkapitalistischen Zeit in den Spinnstuben der Bauern und in den Handwerkerwohnungen gehört wurden. Hier spiegelt sich das Denken und Sinnen der Massen am einfachsten und deshalb am klarsten. Der Kapitalismus mit seiner Zerstörung der Familie und seiner Mechanisierung des arbeitenden menschen hat diese alte, Volkskunst des Märchenerzählens vernichtet. Das Proletariat wird die neuen Märchen, in denen sich sein Kampf, sein Leben, seine Ideale spiegeln . . . und an Stelle der zerbrochenen alten neue Erziehungsgemeinschaften aufbaut. Es hat keinen Sinn, darüber zu klagen, daß wir keine passenden Märchen für unsere Kinder haben.” Edwin Hoernle, Die Arbeit in den kommunistischen Kindergruppen (Vienna 1923). “Wenn jemand wissen will, wie stark die großen Kämpfe und Bewegungen unserer Zeit sich in den Köpfen der Arbeiterkinder widerspiegeln, wie stark schon das Arbeiterkind mitten drin steht in dem Leben der Erwachsenen, so braucht er nur die Zeichnungen und Gedichte unserer Kinder zu betrachten. Die Teuerung steigt, auch die Zahl der bilder steigt, die den Hunger und die Entbehrung zum Gegenstand haben. Und fast immer wird das Erlebnis des Hungers zugleich als Anklage gestaltet gegen die Reichen. So ißt der Reiche, so der Proletarier—so wohnt der Reiche, so der Arbeiter . . . Bilder von George Grosz und anderen politischen Zeichnern wurden begeistert nachgezeichnet und variiert.” Cited in Altner, Das proletarische Kinderbuch, 482.

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violence, and oppression. For him, the harshness of Grosz’s satiric illustrations for MalikVerlag, the Party press, and other radical left venues of the period served an important revolutionary function. In Peterchens specifically, Grosz’s contributions to Zur Mühlen’s tale tacitly indicated that distinctions between the world of children and that of adults had altogether disappeared at the hands of a destructive capitalist system—a system that itself drew no such distinction when it came to exploiting the working class.28 In 1924, Herzfelde’s Malik-Verlag released a second edition of Peterchens, this time carrying on its cover the image of Little Peter and his animated friends discussed above (see Figure 5.3). In light of the anti-war demonstrations of that year, the reappearance of Zur Mühlen’s tale at this moment effectively linked the story’s message of international workers’ solidarity and hope for a better future to the struggle against Germany’s resurgent nationalism and militarism. The role of children’s socialization in Germany’s darkening political horizon at this moment was further plumbed in works such as John Heartfield’s photomontage of 1924 titled Nach zehn Jahren: Väter und Söhne (After Ten Years: Fathers and Sons). The image shows young boys in military uniform marching with toy weapons and mimicking the actions of their dead skeletal fathers. The work indicts the patriotic and militaristic socialization of the sons’ “children’s play” as nothing more than a calculated effort by the nationalist right to prepare the next generation for Germany’s war machine. Soon after Nach zehn Jahren appeared in Malik-Verlag’s storefront window, police ordered it removed in accord with the ban on public display of provocative war-related images that was instituted during the anti-war demonstrations of that year.29 When the pacifist Ernst Friedrich opened his Antiwar Museum in Berlin in 1925, he similarly addressed the role of education and socialization in acculturating Germany’s youth for yet another war. He did so by prominently displaying miniature tanks, soldiers, and other militarist children’s toys alongside First World War photographs of the war wounded and anti-war images produced by Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, and other prominent left-wing artists.30 For her part, Zur Mühlen continued to advance reform education thinking through translations she provided for leftist presses and publishing houses. In 1924, her German version of Floyd Dell’s Were You Ever a Child? appeared, as did her translation of Alexandra Kolontai’s “Golden Childhood.”31 With the publication of Peterchens, we see

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For a similar understanding of the implicit rhetorical function of Grosz’s “adult” illustrations for Peterchens, see Altner, Das proletarische Kinderbuch, 481. For more on this, see my George Grosz and the Communist Party, 116. Tommy Spree, Das Anti-Kriegs Museum (Berlin: Buchdruckerei Erich Pröh, n.d.), 11–18. Ernst Friedrich also edited Proletarischer Kindergarten: Ein Märchen- und Lesebuch für Groß und Klein (Berlin: Buchverlag der Arbeiter-Kunst-Ausstellung, Christmas 1921), with illustrations by Kollwitz, Karl Holtz, Otto Nagel, and others. Floyd Dell, Warst du je ein Kind? (Leipzig: Verlagsanstalt für proletarische Freidenker, 1924); first published in English: Were You Ever a Child? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1919). For Zur Mühlen’s translation of Kolontai, see A. Kolontai, “Goldene Kindheit,” Sozialistische Republik (March 17, 1924). Zur Mühlen also published her own essay on children: “Kinder,” Die Rote Fahne: 28 July 1922. Zur Mühlen maintained her serious interest in children and their education and upbringing throughout the Weimar years. On this, see Wallace, 28.

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her, along with Grosz and Herzfelde, drawing on the lessons of the education reform movement in their effort to take “trivial” literature seriously and to adopt strategies of child-centered pedagogy. From when the volume first appeared in 1920, their collaboration also argued against an orthodox Party leadership on the value of play and “entertainment” and their allure not just for children, but also for adults in the era of a rapidly growing mass culture industry. Grosz and Herzfelde were especially attuned to this issue given their leading roles in the German Dada movement and its critical and artistic engagement with mass media.32 In retrospect, Zur Mühlen’s Peterchens fairy tale of 1920 stands out as an early, important, and catalytic intervention against Party orthodoxy on the question of the trivial, entertainment, and revolutionary didacticism. And when Herzfelde’s publishing house reissued Peterchens in 1924, Grosz’s cover illustration of a bored Little Peter insisted all the more urgently on the need for stories that would not only compete with commercialized entertainments but also address children on their own terms and enable them to understand their world in the interest of changing it for the better.33 With the Weimar government’s decisive shift to the right after 1924, the country’s education reform movement was driven from the stage. Traditionalists condemned reform and active learning models as leftist propagandizing antithetical to “cultivation of the mind” and “the spiritual and moral purposes of education.”34 Fear of Marxist materialism, godless Bolshevism, and the reality of increasing secularism in German society further fueled demands for continued authoritarianism and religious control of the schools.35 With the passage of the Schund and Schmutz Gesetz (filth and trash law) in 1926—allegedly designed to protect children from harmful literature—Zur Mühlen’s Ali der Teppichweber (Ali, the Carpet Weaver), also published in Herzfelde’s Märchen der Armen series, faced censorship by the Hessen police. And, as testament to the

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For further information on Grosz and Herzfelde’s debates with the KPD over the value of Dada in Communist revolution and the related struggle over Grosz’s satiric illustrations for the Party press, see my George Grosz and the Communist Party, 48–103. According to Altner, Zur Mühlen expressed her hostility toward American capitalism, including the targeting of children by consumer culture, through her commitment to providing German audiences with translations of writings by Upton Sinclair and other American leftists. These works served as critical counter-examples to the growing specter of commercialized Amerikanismus in Weimar Germany. On the child as a figure of consumerism see Daniel Thomas Cook, “Children as Consumers: History and Historiography,” 283–95, in Paula S. Fass, ed., The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World (London: Routledge, 2013). The relationship of the German Communist left to the education reform movement is a complex and underexplored one. For an important exception, see Sabine Andressen, Sozialistische Kindheitskonzepte: Politische Einflüsse auf die Erziehung (Munich: Ernst Reinhardt Verlag, 2006). Andressen (p. 9ff ) discusses the confrontation between the Rousseauist orientation of bourgeois reform pedagogy that looked on childhood as a period free of politics and calls for educating children for political engagement that became increasingly more prevalent on the left in the early Weimar years. Lamberti, 158. Lamberti, 185.

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broader European reach of political censorship during this period, a journalist was also jailed in Hungary for translating Peterchens into Hungarian.36 While Peterchens thus encountered repression from the right, the gentle hopefulness of Zur Mühlen’s fairy tale was also swept aside as vestiges of a naïve idealism now to be overcome as the KPD entered its more militant phase in the late Weimar years. In 1927, she was attacked by author and KPD cultural functionary Johannes R. Becher for lack of militancy.37 In 1930, KPD artist Heinrich Vogeler reinterpreted Peterchens, rendering Little Peter as a Young Pioneer leading his exploited object comrades in demonstration (Figure  5.5).38 Indeed, across the political spectrum, the notion of “youth” became thoroughly evacuated of its earlier reform movement associations with free play and innocence. As part of the Nazi program of national revolution, youth also lost its association with any future other than one dictated by militant commitment to party vision. On Hitler’s rise to power, Zur Mühlen made her way into exile and eventually settled in England, while Herzfelde fled to Prague. Grosz ended up in New York where he assumed a teaching position at the Art Students’ League. He also witnessed from afar the unfolding catastrophe in the country and culture he had left behind. After the beginning of the Second World War, the American public too became more deeply aware of atrocities in the Third Reich, including the impact of Nazism on Germany’s educational system. An installation in Rockefeller Center sponsored by the Office of War Information in 1943 underscored that impact in vivid terms (Figure 5.6). Part of the installation addressed “The Militarization of Children.” It showed four small boys wearing gasmasks and carrying bayonets as they goose-step in military formation. The podium on which they march carries a quote from Robert Ley, leader of the Nazi labor front, on the ominous character of education in Hitler’s Germany: “We begin with the child when he is three years old. As soon as he begins to think, he gets a little flag put in his hand. Then follows the school, the Hitler Youth, the S.A., and military training. We don’t let him go until he dies, whether he likes it or not.”39

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Wallace, 40. Johannes R. Becher, “Bürgerliche und proletarisch-revolutionäre Literatur in Deutschland,” Publizistik I, reprinted in volume 15 of his Gesammelte Werke (Berlin: Aufbau, 1977), 624–6. Cited in King, 126, 150, note 6.Given there are no “heroes” in Peterchens, the tale might also have run afoul of Hoernle’s prescriptions of the later Weimar years as expressed in his Grundfragen proletarischer Erziehung of 1929. There, Hoernle insisted on the need to create proletarian heroes to counter those of bourgeois literature: “Die kommunistische Erziehungsbewegung muß neue Heldentypen schaffen, Heldentypen aus dem revolutionären Kampf der unterdrückten und ausgebeuteten Klassen und Rassen alle Zeiter und Länder” (citation here from the 1973 Fischer Taschenbuchverlag reprint, p.100). See also Walter Benjamin’s response to Hoernle’s book and his reflections on Hoernle’s critique of the “pseudorevolutionary” character of reform education: Walter Benjamin, “A Communist Pedagogy,” 273–5. In Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2. 1927–34, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Es war einmal . . . und es wird sein: Märchen (Berlin: Verlag der Jugendinternationale, 1930). Illustrated by Heinrich Vogeler. Ley established the Adolf Hitler Schools in 1937 with Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach. These were Germany’s first purely party organized schools devoted to training boys twelve years and older to be future Nazi political leaders. See Pine, 79–80.

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Figure 5.5 : Heinrich Vogeler, illustration for Was Peterchens Freunde Erzählen (What Little Peter’s Friends Tell Him) in Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Es war einmal . . . und es wird sein: Märchen (Once Upon a Time . . . and What Will Be: Fairytales), Berlin: Verlag der Jugendinternationale, 1930. Safely in American exile, Grosz took up the fairy tale genre once again. Not proletarian revolutionary fairy tales this time, but specifically Grimms’ fairy tales and their world of witches, spider webs, and vultures. He finished one of his Grimminspired paintings of this period, God of War, in 1940, not long after Hitler’s march into Poland (Figure 5.7). God of War depicts Mars adorned in feathered plumes giving the Nazi salute. An arm raised behind Mars echoes his gesture, as do the many hands that double as the cockade of his antique warrior’s helmet. Another figure, with his neck clamped in a wooden stockade, kneels before the god of war. A spider lurks at the center of its web above his head. His severed hands fold together in homage under a hovering swastika. A young boy, absorbed in the intricacies of a machine gun, crouches in the foreground of the composition, oblivious to the martial seductions of the war god behind him.

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Figure 5.6: “Militarization of Children,” part of the exhibition Nature of the Enemy, Office of War Information (OWI ), Rockefeller Plaza, New York, 1943. Photograph by Arthur S. Siegel, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.

Though separated by close to twenty years and emerging from the very different contexts of revolution on the one hand and exile on the other, Grosz’s cover illustration for Peterchens and his painting God of War share a tantalizingly similar composition and content. In both, children quietly occupy the left lower corner of the image, while the right-hand side is filled with bluster and bombast—from talking stoves and leaping matchboxes in Grosz’s Peterchens cover of 1924 to the god of war and his frenzied Nazi salute in the painting of 1940. But the crux of these comparisons rests with the children. Little Peter looks toward the objects that have filled his long days with companionship and helped him to become conscious of class society and foster his hope for a better day. He indeed becomes bored and his heavy-lidded eyes suggest from his child’s point of view a mild rebuke to the turgidness of undiluted Marxist theory. In the 1940 painting, by contrast, the child turns away from the god of war, his bluster, and outdated regalia of antique helmet and sword. An exemplar of Hitler’s Party of Youth, he is the future and that future looks just like the past—the son will repeat the sins of the father in other words—only updated in attire and with the latest in military hardware. Unlike Peter with his drowsy skepticism, the child in God of War is wholly engrossed in, indeed seduced by, the weapon of destruction he examines.

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Figure 5.7: George Grosz, God of War, 1940. Oil on canvas, 3ft. 11 in. × 2 ft. 11.5 in., 119.5 × 90 cm. Art © Estate of George Grosz / Licensed by VAGA , New York, NY.

Art history has devoted the lion’s share of its attention to progressive educational institutions like the Bauhaus. But it and schools like it lent themselves more readily to consolidating forces of capitalism and technocracy in Weimar, and ultimately collapsed in the face of Nazi tyranny. From their considerably more marginal vantage point, Zur Mühlen, Grosz, Herzfelde, and others of their radical circle fared no better, and in fact far worse in their effort to resist oppression. To explore this Zur Mühlen-Grosz collaboration is therefore to engage the counterfactual “what if?” of the road not taken. What if their hope for a better social order through education, one free of exploitation, nationalism, and war, had actually had a hearing? In addition, there is the issue of Little Peter’s boredom and impatience with “authority”—in his case, that of precocious household objects and undiluted Marxist theory. The boy’s rebuke of authority bespoke Zur Mühlen, Grosz, and Herzfelde’s call for self-reflection, skepticism, and re-evaluation

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of assumptions prevalent not only in bourgeois society, but also within a radical-left party to which they all subscribed. These “critical thinking skills,” as we teachers like to call them, were indeed praiseworthy educational values desperately needed but repressed in Germany’s too fragile democracy, and ultimately eliminated by National Socialism. If this sort of radical vision seems hopelessly naïve and outdated to us today then we may be in bigger trouble than we think.

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Parting Shots: Ella Bergmann-Michel’s Wahlkampf 1932 (Letzte Wahl) Jennifer Kapczynski

In September 1932, avant-garde artist and filmmaker Ella Bergmann-Michel took up her movie camera with the intention of gathering footage for a new documentary short. Wahlkampf 1932 (Election Campaign 1932) was supposed to capture the public climate in the lead up to the national vote, during what turned out to be the last months of Germany’s young democracy. It was a project Bergmann-Michel never completed, and one that came to epitomize the interrupted arc of Weimar leftist filmmaking in the fateful period of transition from democracy to totalitarianism. Recording political interactions on the streets of Frankfurt am Main, Bergmann-Michel documented the deadlocked character of public debate in the final days of the Weimar Republic. Her work was cut short, however, when she filmed a fistfight that took place in front of a polling station. For her actions Bergmann-Michel was arrested and briefly detained, and the police seized her camera and ruined her footage by exposing the 35mm cassette.1 Although Bergmann-Michel later declared that she ceased filming in January 1933 (that is, coinciding with Hitler’s takeover),2 my research indicates that she must have continued filming until some time after March 1933. This slight shift in timeline might be insignificant in another period, but not at a time of such rapid and drastic political change. My findings show that the film is not only, as has been commonly assumed, a final, portentous look at the collapse of the Weimar Republic, but also a bridge text that connects the moments before and after the National Socialist rise to power. This revised chronology opens up ways of thinking about how BergmannMichel’s film engages with the role of art in resistance, giving the film new meaning as a work that looks both backwards and ahead—like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, transfixed by the wreckage behind it and yet propelled forward into the future.3

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Jutta Hercher and Maria Hemmleb, “Dokument und Konstruktion: Zur Filmarbeit bei Ella Bergmann- Michel,” Frauen und Film 49 (1990), 116. Ella Bergmann-Michel, “Meine Dokumentarfilme” (1967), reprinted in: Anneli Duscha, Ella Bergmann-Michel: Fotographien und Filme, 1927–1935 (Göttingen: Steidl, 2005), 80–1. This image of the angel, inspired by Paul Klee’s 1920 monoprint “Angelus Novus,” appears in Walter Benjamin’s 1940 essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938– 1940, eds Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press), 392.

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Bergmann-Michel’s movie camera was returned to her following her release from custody, and she eventually edited what remaining material she possessed to create a dialectical reflection on the end of Germany’s first democratic republic. Although it is not clear just when she did the editing, the film was not screened publicly until 2012 (well after Bergmann-Michel’s death in 1971), and it remains classified as an unfinished work. With hindsight, Bergmann-Michel gave the thirteen-minute film a mournful new name: in place of Wahlkampf 1932, she titled it Letzte Wahl, meaning “Final Vote” but also “Last Choice.” It would, in fact, be her final film—a parting shot in the most literal sense. In the face of increasing authoritarianism and with an all-toointimate awareness of the dangers faced by those agitating against the National Socialists, Bergmann-Michel probes the possibility that critical viewing practices might constitute a final avenue for resistance, offering up her film as an illustrative example. Encouraging viewers to watch reflectively, Bergmann-Michel prompts the audience to practice the art of “reading between the lines” as a means to create a counterdiscourse, i.e., a countervailing way of looking and thinking that might support critique and even change. At the same time, the film has a mournful, even mute quality in certain moments that seems to query whether art has any remaining room to maneuver. Shot not only before, but also after the Nazi takeover, the film captures a moment in time when the space for safe resistance was disappearing at a terrifying speed, and when prospects for a politically progressive artistic practice were never more bleak. Bergmann-Michel spent most of the Second World War living in full retreat from public life at the “Schmelz,” a former paint factory in the rural outskirts of Frankfurt am Main (in Vockenhausen am Taunus) that had been inherited by her husband, fellow artist Robert Michel. There, the two had created a kind of artist colony in the 1920s (nicknamed by Robert “The Heimat Museum of Modern Art”),4 where they could engage in their own practices and also host frequent visits by friends, including many of the leading figures of the Weimar art scene: Willy Baumeister, László Moholy-Nagy, Ilse Bing, Jan Tschichold, Dziga Vertov, and Kurt Schwitters.5 After the National Socialist takeover, Robert established a fish farming business on the property, which he maintained into the postwar period. For a time, Ella managed to continue with her commercial artwork (work she devalued, but that provided useful income), spending two months a year in a London atelier between 1937–9 until the start of war made that impossible.6 She spent the remaining years at the Schmelz engaged in farming and

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Anneli Duscha, Ella Bergmann-Michel: Fotographien und Filme, 1927–1935 (Göttingen: Steidl, 2005), 7. Megan R. Luke, “Our Life Together: Collective Homemaking in the Films of Ella BergmannMichel,” Oxford Art Journal 40.1 (2017), 31. Kathrin Beiligk, “Zur Werbegraphik bei Ella Bergmann-Michel,” Ella Bergmann-Michel: 1895–1971; Collagen, Malerei, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, Druckgraphik, Fotos, Reklame, Entwürfe (Hannover: Sprengel Museum, 1990), 134–5.

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raising livestock, while also continuing to produce some art (mainly drawing).7 A bomb that struck Bergmann-Michel’s childhood home in 1945 in Paderborn destroyed much of the couple’s early works. In the postwar period, Bergmann-Michel began showing her graphic work once again, but she dedicated even more energy to promoting the revival of avant-garde film culture. She founded the “Film-Studio” (later renamed “Film-Club Frankfurt”), personally introducing or lecturing at most screenings, and later helped found the Kronsberg youth film club (near Hanover). In addition, she authored a lecture series on “50 Years of International Film,” which she brought to America House locations in Frankfurt, Heidelberg, and Marburg, and gave numerous talks on art-historical topics.8 Despite this intense engagement with cinema, Bergmann-Michel never seems to have resumed her own filmmaking endeavors. This was not for lack of desire, it appears. As she noted forcefully in a letter to close friend and art historian Hans Hildebrandt (employing playfully idiosyncratic spelling): Auch ich habe Film-Ideen—ich ich—nicht Michel—vorläufig—aber die kann ich nicht aufs Papier spuckkken, da sie erst spuuuken und nur spuckkken wenn du hier neben mir sitzt, und dafür warte ich auf die Telefon-Klingel. (I, too, have ideas for films—I, I, not [Robert] Michel—for the time being—but I can’t spittt them onto paper, since they initially just hauuunt me and only spittt forth when you sit here beside me, and for that reason I am waiting for your phone call.)9

In stuttering prose (almost as if to mimic a jammed projector), Bergmann-Michel voices not only her stalled cinematic vision, but also a certain frustration that her ambitions might be confused with those of her husband—understandable, since only she had ever undertaken any film work, and yet the two tended to be viewed as a collective entity. Until the accidental discovery in 1982 of numerous reels of her work, uncovered after a West German television station decided to clean house, most of BergmannMichel’s films were effectively lost.10 As it stands, her film work has gone almost entirely unnoticed by scholars, despite the relative rarity of avant-garde women filmmakers of the Weimar era, and the fact that Edition Filmmuseum released a DVD of the director’s documentary films in 2006. There are a couple of notable exceptions: an overview piece by Jutta Hercher and Maria Hemmleb, published in 1990 in Frauen und Film, and, from

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There are many brief biographical timelines available in catalogs of Bergmann-Michel’s work, but for a particularly thorough account see: Jutta May, “Biographie,” Ella Bergmann-Michel: 1895–1971; Collagen, Malerei, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, Druckgraphik, Fotos, Reklame, Entwürfe (Hannover: Sprengel Museum, 1990), 154–8. May, “Biographie,” 156. Ella Bergmann-Michel, letter to Hans Hildebrandt, August 27, 1958. Papers of Ella BergmannMichel and Robert Michel, c. 1922–1971, Getty Museum, Special Collections. All translations by the author. Hercher and Hemmleb, “Dokument,” 107.

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2017, an incisive article by Megan Luke on “Collective Homemaking in the Films of Ella Bergmann-Michel.” There has been more attention to Bergmann-Michel’s collage and drawing work, which is represented in a number of major museum collections, but even that is relatively scant and exists mostly in catalog form. As yet no published work treats Letzte Wahl in any detail. Bergmann-Michel took a fluid approach to her own art, which may explain partially why her work has garnered relatively little scholarly interest, or the fact that from the beginning, her work was paired with that of her husband. Treated both in their lifetimes and after death as a “Künstlerpaar” or “artist couple,” Robert and Ella frequently exhibited as a team, and although more recent work has begun to recognize her particular contributions, it seems indicative that even their archive is jointly named: the Getty Museum’s partial collection is named the “Papers of Ella Bergmann-Michel and Robert Michel.” Ella Bergmann and Robert Michel first met in the avant-garde art hub of Weimar, where she had gone to study art (although the independent-minded Ella soon chafed at the culture of the academy and quit in 1918.)11 After the Bauhaus established itself in the city, the couple enjoyed an initially friendly relationship with the movement, with Walter Gropius even borrowing examples of their artwork in order to showcase pathbreaking practices on the walls of the newly opened school.12 Although the precise reasons for the couple’s departure from Weimar and break with Bauhaus are somewhat unclear, Jutta Hercher suggests that it was Robert who pushed for the move after growing frustrated with the movement’s dogmatism.13 The pair relocated to the Frankfurt area in 1920 and by mid-decade had joined the neue frankfurt movement, which was heavily engaged in promoting progressive architecture and art in the reformation of urban life, and where Bergmann-Michel, as a co-founder of the “Arbeitsgemeinschaft für neuen Film/Liga für unabhängigen Film” (Working Collective for New Film/League for Independent Film), began her first serious engagement with film.14 Much of Bergmann-Michel’s photographic and film work reflects the broader concerns of the movement. As a photographer, she often worked serially, as Luke describes, in order “to visualize patterns of tonal contrast and, above all, movement,” and she used photo series as preliminary studies for her films.15 In both media, Bergmann-Michel explored how architecture shaped daily life, from her photo series “Frankfurter Siedlungen” to her first film, Wo wohnen alte Leute (1932), which contrasted traditional with progressive housing for the elderly and was intended to “articulate a ‘social demand’ and make an argument for a reconsideration of housing more generally.”16 It was part and parcel of what Luke describes as a concern with the

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Duscha, Ella Bergmann-Michel, 6. Duscha, Ella Bergmann-Michel, 6. Herta Wescher, “Die Michels, Pioniere der Bildcollage,” Ella Bergmann-Michel, Robert Michel: Collagen (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1970), 9. Herchner and Hemmleb, “Dokument,” 107, 109. It seems to have been common practice in the neue frankfurt movement to abandon capitalization as inefficient. Luke, “Our Life,” 32. Luke, “Our Life,” 41.

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“quality of community in the modern city.”17 In Letzte Wahl, too, the director seeks to probe this quality of community, if on a rather different axis. As I argue in what follows, Bergmann-Michel uses the documentary form to examine the state of public discourse—not only the interplay of written text and image, but also the conversational dead ends of 1932/33, the literal word on the street. At the very moment when German commercial filmmaking truly and finally converted to sound and Weimar democracy was taking its last breaths, Ella Bergmann-Michel crafts a silent film about speech. Consider the dynamic that unfolds in just the film’s first half minute. BergmannMichel opens her film at eye level, with a long shot approximately ten seconds in duration. A tilt pan of a city streetscape slowly swings upward to reveal a small vista in the Frankfurt Altstadt. From almost every window hangs a flag—for the most part, bearing either the KPD’s familiar hammer and sickle or the triple thrusting arrows of the SPD. There is an airless quality to the footage: the ubiquitous flags flap softly in the breeze, and the pace of Bergmann-Michel’s camerawork is tempered, steady. At the same time, the warring symbols signal from the film’s opening moments to a city embroiled in divisive political battle. Bergmann-Michel evokes a basic puzzle that will shape the remainder of her thirteen-minute film, between stasis and conflict, between warring words and lack of movement. The feeling is one of entrenched and irreconcilable oppositions. Cut to a medium shot of a Litfaβsäule (an advertising column commonly found in German public spaces) plastered with political posters. Framed at an extreme canted angle, the column thrusts sharply toward the right of the frame, resembling a megaphone or even the mouth of a cannon, as if positioned to launch forth a volley of propaganda. The posters adorning the column are extremely text-heavy and, at this remove, mostly indecipherable except for their large graphics, which call upon voters to support this or that list—all with the urgency of the imperative: Wählt 8! 1! 4! (Figure 6.1). What follows are three shots that move ever closer toward the textual display: first, a canted close-up of a poster for Liste 4-Zentrum, its lettering partially obscured by Bergmann-Michel’s framing, now tilted to the left as if to mirror in reverse the trajectory of the leaning column in the preceding shot (Figure 6.2). As with Bergmann-Michel’s earlier architectural work, we find a play here between the abstract and concrete, surface and depth. As viewers, we attempt to piece together the text, but the truncation of word and image draws our attention to the graphic tonalities of the composition as much as its communicative function.18 At the same time, the camera’s

17 18

Luke, “Our Life,” 47. Although we cannot know whether Ella and Robert discussed the issue, it is clear that they shared a deep sensitivity to the impact of advertising, and particularly the effects of certain text arrangements. Robert penned a fascinating short piece (which appears to be a rebuttal to a meddlesome client) regarding rules for “Verkehrsreklame” (or “advertising for public transportation”) in which he insisted on the importance of employing the largest possible vertical text and positioning it asymmetrically on the advertising column, so as to maximize its viewability for oncoming traffic and to the particular gazing habits of passengers, who he declared tended to read up and down as much as left to right. Undated memo by Robert Michel, “Erklaärungen: Reklame Säule,” in: “Papers of Ella Bergmann-Michel and Robert Michel, c. 1922–1971,” Getty Museum, Special Collections.

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Figure 6.1: Ella Bergmann-Michel, Wahlkampf 1932 (Letzte Wahl), 1932 (Figures 6.1–6.2 and 6.4–6.8). A Litfaßsäule plastered with campaign posters vies for voters ahead of the November 1932 national vote. Screenshot.

Figure 6.2: A close-up of a poster for the Center Party list for the November 1932 elections. Screenshot.

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proximity to its subject reveals a series of wrinkles and small air bubbles underneath the paper, a reminder of the poster’s materiality. Cut still closer, as segments of text from yet another advertisement shimmer before our eyes, the slight shaking of Bergmann-Michel’s handheld Kinamo camera is palpable. Although this shot is now level rather than canted, the extreme close-up eliminates the larger framework for the poster’s words, which swim to the surface randomly as our eyes scan and attempt to make meaning from them: Großherzogin, Mecklenburg, 100,000RM , 185,000RM (“archduchess, Mecklenburg, 100,000 Reichsmark, 185,000 Reichsmark”). Cut, and the camera zeroes in on a new set of words: Kriegerwaise, letzte Not, keinen Pfennig, Unterschenkel (“war orphan, emergency, not a penny, lower leg”). As viewers, we can imagine the thread of a dialogue about war and class inequities, but we never learn just how or for what purpose this curious assemblage of words comes together. Instead, cut to a medium shot of the top of the column, slanting sharply leftwards and now revealing the upper half of the Zentrum poster. Center Party candidate Heinrich Brüning (and chancellor of Germany from March 1930 to May 1932) gazes down sternly; bordering him to the right, on a separate poster, is a faceless uniformed officer of the Sicherheitsdienst. And then comes the first image confirming, front and center, what, at least as contemporary viewers, we know must be there among the propaganda images: a head-on shot of a swastika-emblazoned campaign poster for the Nazi Party, followed almost immediately by a visual rebuttal—an appeal (by which party, we cannot yet tell) to all women and children decrying the “Gefühlsrohheit der Nazis,” the “Nazis’ emotional brutality.” As the camerawork, framing and editing of Letzte Wahl pull us backwards and forwards, side to side, Bergmann-Michel draws the viewer into a discursive maelstrom characterized by intense yet strikingly amorphous oppositions. Barraged by text and images stripped of their full setting, the spectator struggles to make sense of their interrelationship—forced to fill in the blanks, either from memory or via the imagination, and at the same time made acutely aware through the film’s provocative juxtapositions that a profound struggle underlies these warring words. In essence, Bergmann-Michel’s cinematography and editing conjure a sense of “shouting,” of visual and verbal volleys grown to such a crescendo that clear communication and conversation have become impossible—a literal form of Papierkrieg. She evinces a world of political non-sense, cleverly highlighting the very breakdown of dialogue by deploying the principles of dialectical montage (a style of editing that uses contrasting images in order to generate provocative associations, employed most famously by Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in works such as Strike [1925]). Letzte Wahl is a silent work, and the film relies entirely on the relationship between images to generate its sense of discordance. The film evokes a striking duality: like the opening image of the city’s languidly waving flags, we find a tension here between the film’s visual clash and its acoustic stillness, giving rise to an image of Frankfurt as both riven by conflict and at the same time stifling, as if lacking the air for real debate. In this respect, Bergmann-Michel’s preoccupation with the space of and around the Littfaßsäule cannot be coincidental. Not only were the columns a key site for political advertising and public engagement—a world with which Ella Bergmann-Michel was

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well acquainted through her own and Robert’s commercial work—and as such constituted an obvious location on which to train her camera, they also featured prominently in one of the most sensational feature films of the Weimar era: Fritz Lang’s M, released the year before Bergmann made her study.19 As a director with a general interest in avant-garde work, Bergmann-Michel certainly would have known Lang’s film, which drew on the case of a notorious child murderer to explore, on the one hand, the breakdown of civil discourse in communities in crisis, and on the other hand, the rise of authoritarianism. In the fictional work, the Littfaßsäule serves to disseminate information about the search for the serial killer, but it also becomes a crime scene in and of itself: the murderer lures his child victim while standing in front of a poster announcing a hefty reward for tips leading to his capture (Figure 6.3). The Littfaßsäule, linked to a sensationalizing press that publicizes the murders in “extra editions” in order to maximize the amount of copy sold, becomes another instrument in a media

Figure 6.3: On a Berlin Litfaßsäule, the profile of the murderer in Fritz Lang’s M (1931) casts a shadow on the wanted poster describing his own crimes. Screenshot.

19

Thanks to Brad Prager for first suggesting the connection between Lang’s and Bergmann-Michel’s deployment of the image of the Litfaßsäule. For more on Lang’s film, see: Anton Kaes, M (London: BFI , 2000).

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network fomenting collective hysteria and suspicion in the general public while yielding little of value for the investigation. Notably, in Lang’s film, sound rather than image provides the critical clue that leads to the apprehension of the suspect. Lang— and like him, Bergmann-Michel—reflects on both the disseminative power of the printed word and its limits. Echoing Lang’s earlier work, Bergmann-Michel suggests that the Littfaßsäule leads to more social discord than communication, and points toward the manner in which the general excess of media messaging around the election has contributed to the breakdown of public discourse. Strikingly, Letzte Wahl does not exploit the camera’s exceptional capacity for rendering mobility (in contrast to Bergmann-Michel’s other films, such as Fliegende Händler in Frankfurt am Main of the same year, or to the astonishing dynamism found in Joris Ivens’s De Brug, Arnold Fanck’s mountain films, or Walter Ruttmann’s Sinfonie der Großstadt—all of which were made with the same type of Kinamo camera that Bergmann-Michel employed).20 Indeed, although Bergmann-Michel creates a clear sense of rhythm with her editing, her emphasis on static shots seems deliberate—a gesture intended to communicate the political blockages of 1932/33 at the level of film form. There is a sense of clash but little movement, except for one notable moment of aerial footage showing the snaking lines of brownshirts marching through the city (apparently shot from the window of the director’s centrally located atelier).21 Instead, through her focus on the materials of advertising, Bergmann-Michel presents an image of political debate now literally fixed in place. As the film wends on, we find the senseless shouting effect of this opening segment echoed in numerous shots of actual public debate. Bergmann-Michel observes as pedestrians mill about, stopping to read the ubiquitous political posters and to confront one another with wagging fingers. In part, this reflects the extent to which Letzte Wahl is an exploration of community—a point of continuity, as mentioned before, with Bergmann-Michel’s earlier films, although here we remain confined to its forms as engendered in the narrow spaces of the city center, with no glimmer of architectural progressivism. Bergmann-Michel is not simply an observer of this community, though. Indeed, Bergmann-Michel herself stands at the heart of the film, as she repeatedly elicits curious and sometimes angry stares from her subjects. This was partly a feature of her equipment: the Kinamo was remarkably compact and spring-loaded, which meant it could be operated without a tripod, a veritable extension of the body behind the lens. (After his own first experiments with the camera, Joris Ivens raved “that the camera was an eye,” and declared “if it is a gaze, it ought to be a living one.”)22 As a rare female filmmaker, Bergmann-Michel would have drawn particular attention as she captured Frankfurt street life, especially in such a politically volatile time. Indeed, even though Bergman-Michel adopts mostly static shots, there is—as I mentioned earlier—a

20

21 22

Michael K. Buckland, “The Kinamo Movie Camera, Emanuel Goldberg and Joris Ivens,” Film History 20.1 (2008), 56. Hercher and Hemmleb, “Dokument,” 116. Buckland, “The Kinamo,” 55.

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slight vibration to her camerawork that, coupled with so many shots of subjects looking back, conjures in the film a sense of immediacy and intimacy, vulnerability, even (Figure 6.4 and 6.5). As an archival document concerning one of her earlier works makes clear, the dangers she faced were quite real. In a memo from April 6, 1932 detailing a call with a certain Dr. Frey concerning Bergman-Michel’s request to film in the courtyard of the unemployment office for her documentary Erwerbslose kochen für Erwerbslose (Unemployed Cook for the Unemployed, 1932), it was noted that “Zusicherungen, dass Frau Bergmann-Michel durch die Arbeitslosen unbehelligt bleibt, können nicht gemacht werden. Es sei vorgekommen, dass die Arbeitslosen den Filmoperateur bedroht hätten und ihm beinahe die Jacke vollgehauen hätten.” (“No assurances could be made that Mrs. Bergmann-Michel would not be molested by the unemployed. In the past, some of them had threatened a camera operator and had nearly torn his coat clean off.”)23 Although she never turns the camera on herself in Letzte Wahl (a neat feature that would have been possible with the Kinamo), Bergmann-Michel is omnipresent in the film—part of its query, I contend, concerning the place of the artist in a moment of

Figure 6.4: Pedestrians gathered before a Frankfurt NSDAP outfitting shop stare sternly at Ella Bergmann-Michel as she films. Screenshot. 23

Memo of 6 April 1932, “Telephonanruf von Dr. Frey, Arbeitsamy Gallusgasse,” in: “Papers of Ella Bergmann-Michel and Robert Michel, c. 1922–1971,” Getty Museum, Special Collections.

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Figure 6.5: A rally attendee heckles the filmmaker while she works. Screenshot. political crisis. This question is presented most succinctly in the film’s final shot, a slow diagonal scan of a cluster of rare non-partisan posters advertising a talk by novelist Alfred Döblin, held almost exactly one year before he fled Nazi Germany (Figure 6.6). The topic was “The Spiritual Condition of our Day and the Role of Literature,” sponsored by das neue frankfurt. Resting on this image, the film provides no further answers, but ends by placing the figure of the artist at the center of social inquiry. This is not all that Bergmann-Michel undertakes in this powerful little film, however. Inserted in the midst of the visual tumult of political propaganda that literally tilts left, right, and center are two brief companion shots that offer a powerful reflection on the paralyzed state of debate, and that introduce an entirely new mood into the work. The first occurs at approximately minute 1:58 and lasts around eighteen seconds: in a medium close-up, the camera trains our eyes on a tattered posted of Hitler and Paul von Hindenburg. The texture of the thin poster and the many layers of older materials that lie beneath it collectively render the candidate grotesquely wrinkled, the light and shadow of the image conspiring to make his face look skeletal as his signature mustache is reduced to a black gash (Figure 6.7). Although documentary, Bergmann-Michel’s shot here recalls certain aspects of John Heartfield’s photomontage Adolf der Übermensch: Schluckt Gold und redet Blech (Adolf the Superman: Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk), which famously features an x-ray image of the despot, his spine constructed from a column of gold coins and a swastika in place of a heart. It is possible the filmmaker knew Heartfield’s image: it first circulated in July 1932 on the cover of the magazine AIZ, and

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Figure 6.6: A frame from the final shot of Letzte Wahl, of a poster advertising for a February 1932 lecture by novelist Alfred Döblin for neue frankfurt. Screenshot.

Figure 6.7: Hitler and Hindenburg stare down from a tattered poster appealing to voters before the March 1933 election that completed the Nazi takeover. Screenshot. 108

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then later as a mass-produced poster, so around the time when Bergmann-Michel was shooting Letzte Wahl. In either case, Bergmann-Michel, much like Heartfield, captures the National Socialist leader as a haunting specter. Indeed, a sense of decrepitude characterizes the shot, as Bergmann-Michel trains our eye on the movement of the poster’s fluttering edge peeling away from the surface just at the level of Hitler’s cheek, threatening to eliminate the bombast’s main weapon, his mouth. Above the tear, Hitler’s domineering gaze appears, below it, the remnants of at least two previous advertisements. Although much of the text of these older posters is unreadable, two words pop out: the National Socialist buzzword “Tributpolitik” (“politics of tribute”), a term used to castigate the system of postwar reparations as a kind of modern slavery, and in larger print just below that, “die Macht,” “power.” Bergmann-Michel offers viewers a visual-verbal puzzle, the strident tone of the poster’s language and look at odds with the sensation created by her focus on the peeling of the posters, which bespeaks not only decay or decline, but also the weathering caused by the force of the elements and the various human hands that have intervened to apply each of the many layers. Training our eyes on the image for a full eighteen seconds, Bergmann-Michel also compels us to slow down and take full stock of the horror that Hitler represents. Following two separate brief scenes of pedestrians engaged in street-corner arguments, the companion shot comes just twenty seconds later, running for roughly forty-two seconds (2:35–3:17). Bergmann-Michel returns to the very same location, but presents the image of the poster from a slightly different perspective. The shot begins with the camera directed in an upward angle that captures the top of the column of posters, then tilts downward, traveling smoothly past the image of Hitler and Hindenburg, and finally comes to rest on the area immediately below the poster. Only the detritus of bygone advertisements is visible, as the remains of torn posters frame a dark zigzag of blank space, its shape echoing the jagged lines of a lightning bolt or even a swastika. We can now discern a bit more of the image’s setting as well. The column on which the poster is mounted no longer has the traditional cylindrical shape of the Littfaßsäule, but rather is slightly squared, perhaps a utility pole, and stands in a space that looks far less urban, with trees, wide swaths of grass, and a gravel footpath, giving the impression that we are now at the edge of the city space. Using a curious holding pattern, Bergmann-Michel then trains the camera on this bared section of the column for a full twenty-five seconds, or more than half of the entire shot duration (Figure 6.8). Even in a film characterized by a contemplative tempo, the decision to pause for almost half a minute (considerable time in a film that lasts only thirteen minutes in toto) on the curious image of emptiness creates a disconcerting pause for viewers, compelling us to ask, what are we looking at, or for? Bergmann-Michel offers us a palimpsest with layers that we are asked to read but are unable to—a challenge to look below the surface and imagine what might have been, or what could yet fill this space. Certainly, these remarkable shots take aim at the figures of Hitler and Hindenburg, who appear both frightening and rather shabby. More strikingly, although these shots focus on yet another example of political propaganda, in contrast to the warring flags or the political posters described earlier, they lack a discernible counterpoint; instead, they are stand-alone moments that, I argue, are designed to engender a more

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Figure 6.8: Below the poster of Hitler and Hindenburg, a provocative blank space that Bergmann-Michel compels us to contemplate. Screenshot. contemplative mode of spectatorship. With their deliberately slow pacing and ambiguity, with the absence of clearly identifiable opposing opinions, these shots invite the viewer to stop, look, and reflect—to go deep, that is, and in so doing, to step away from the back-and-forth volley of debate. In the process, these shots suggest an alternative mode of discourse, one that eschews stark polarities and instead encourages the kinds of critical insight and dialogue essential for a healthy deliberative democracy. They point toward film as a medium especially suited to encouraging serious looking, as they direct our eyes to slow down and take the time to take in the image, to consider its significance, and perhaps even to project into the future. In this manner, the film articulates at the level of form something about the significance of art in times of cultural upheaval: it is the work of art, Bergmann-Michel seems to suggest, that may encourage us to perceive the world differently, and so perhaps to envision alternative political outcomes. In other words, she suggests that the act of reading—and more crucially, those artistic practices that make alternative interpretations possible—might constitute a form of resistance. At this point, however, the question of timing arises with particular poignancy: the poster on which Bergmann-Michel trains her camera—and our eyes—was not created for the November 1932 national election that first prompted her to capture Frankfurt street culture. In March 1932, Hitler and Hindenburg had run against each other for the position of president; the latter won. In Fall 1932, when Bergmann-Michel began

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her work, President Hindenburg was still seeking ways—however ineffectual—to mitigate Hitler’s power, governing by decree together with a politically weakened Chancellor von Papen. In Fall 1932, in other words, the situation was dire but not yet hopeless. The final blow to Weimar democracy would come a few months later, on January 30, 1933, when Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor, and, a day later, dissolved the Reichstag at Hitler’s behest. This poster—of Hitler now flanked by Hindenburg to his rear—derives from an even later moment. As a dated image from the bpk-Agentur notes, it was printed for the occasion of the March 1933 elections—i.e., post-takeover, when the relationship between Hitler and Hindenburg could now be pictured as here, with the latter appearing in the role of a supporting figure (Figure 6.9). The poster is credited to Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s personal photographer and a central figure for the Nazi propaganda machine. It is not clear how long before the election the poster was printed, but it cannot have been before February. Moreover, the weathered look of the poster suggests that BergmannMichel probably filmed her footage even after the March election—that is, after the burning of the Reichstag, the emergency decrees that demolished remaining civil liberties, and after Hitler’s consolidation of power. The trees in the background look as though they are just beginning to bud, suggesting that the season is early spring, perhaps April. There is no way to be certain of the date, except that it was almost certainly after the fateful turn from democracy to totalitarianism that followed the March 1933 election. In other words, the poster signals the beginning of the film’s “after” moment, that is, when the tipping point in the crisis of the republic has been passed and the country finds itself in full slide toward dictatorship. It is the moment when Ella Bergmann-Michel would have been able to recognize that recent election as “final.” This truth has been obscured until now by Bergmann-Michel’s own flawed recollections of the period. In a biographical essay drafted in 1967, she noted: Der letzte Film blieb ein Fragment. Es waren Aufnahmen von Wahlplakaten, von lebhaften Straßen-Diskussione, von typische, den jeweiligen Parteien zugehörigen Anhängern. Die Frankfurter Straßen und Gassen bereits mit Hakenkreuz-Fahnen sowie Hammer und Sichel, und der bekannte Flagge mi den drei Pfeilen geschmückt wurden dokumentarisch festgehalten. Dann musste ich die Aufnahmen aus politischen Gründen abbrechen. —Es was Januar 1933. Filmstreifen, Fotos und Bericht brachte das vorletzte Heft 10, Jg. 6, die neue stadt, vom “bund das neue frankfurt.” (The last film remained a fragment. There was footage of campaign posters, of lively conversations on the street, of the typical adherents of each of the parties. It documented the Frankfurt streets and alleyways already decked out with swastika flags as well as the hammer and sickle, and the famous flag with the three arrows [of the SPD ]. Then I had to stop shooting for political reasons. —It was January 1933. Film strips, photos and a report were published in the next-to-last issue— 10/6—of the new city, by the “league of the new frankfurt.”)24 24

Ella Bergmann-Michel, “Meine Dokumentarfilme” 81. My italics. I have been unable to determine the accuracy of Bergmann-Michel’s account of the publication of her material.

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Figure 6.9: The complete campaign poster featuring Hitler and Hindenburg, created for the March 1932 election. The poster reads: “Never shall the Reich be destroyed if you are united and faithful.” Reprinted courtesy of Art Resource. Credit: bpk Bildagentur / Heinrich Hoffmann (1885–1957).

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Certainly, it is easy to understand how Bergmann-Michel might recall ending her work in January 1933—that date, more than any other, has come to be viewed as the final caesura dividing Germany’s first democracy from Hitler’s dictatorship, and she was reconstructing her account thirty-four years later. The fact that Ella Bergmann-Michel continued to film for a brief period after the takeover sheds new light on her work in Letzte Wahl: it points toward the historical reality that the transition from democracy to totalitarianism was not, as is sometimes remembered, instantaneous, but rather occurred unevenly and over time; and it also explains the new tone that enters the film with these two remarkable sequences. For along with the feeling that Bergmann-Michel is urging her audience to slow down and contemplate the specter of Hitler, there is a certain mute dread that characterizes these images. That is, they not only point toward an alternative mode of seeing and critical reflection that is specifically tied to avant-garde artistic practices, but these startling companion shots also do this in a fashion that evokes a kind of horrorstricken and mournful gaze—a Benjaminian stare directed at the destruction behind it. Training our attention on the grim visage of the man at the helm of the project to destroy Weimar democracy, the film seems to ponder the dreadful consequence of the deadlocked climate first captured in the opening scenes of the film, and to probe whether the project of avant-garde art even has a future. The setting alone makes one curious: had Bergmann-Michel taken her camera out of the densely populated Frankfurt streets in order to document political culture on the margins, or was she perhaps seeking to avoid trouble with the police? Although it is not a literal companion to these shots, I would like to suggest that Bergmann-Michel constructs a subtle triptych when she ends her film with the panning footage of the flyer announcing Döblin’s talk. (To picture this, imagine a sequence composed of figures 6.7, 6.8, and 6.6 from this article.—i.e., the correct order in which they appear in the actual film.) Might we not imagine that advertisement occupying the blank space beneath Hitler’s fierce gaze? Not as an “answer” perhaps but a comment, a question even. If you allow this flight of fancy, the film opens up once more as a rumination on the critical role that art must play in times of political crisis, as a force that asks us to consider more fully the cultural, intellectual, and spiritual impasses of our age and—instead of shouting—think. By the time that Ella Bergmann-Michel finished shooting her film, Döblin had already departed Germany for exile: triply imperiled as a leftist critic of the regime, a German-Jew, and an avant-garde author, he made the decision to leave immediately following the Reichstag fire of February 26–27, 1933—almost exactly one year to the day after his Frankfurt lecture. It is uncertain when Bergmann-Michel filmed this footage of the poster, and so we cannot say whether she knew of Döblin’s departure. Could she have shot it later, as she did in the case of the poster of Hitler and Hindenburg? Certainly there is a noticeable resemblance in her framing and camera movement. Either way, there is a distinct poetic balance she creates in choosing the Döblin announcement as the concluding image for Letzte Wahl. She obviously took an interest in the novelist’s work, and the poster announcing his lecture is emblematic, moreover, for the larger impetus of the neue frankfurt movement. If that is the case, thinking of

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the film’s ending image as the final installment in a figurative triptych takes on an even more poignant meaning, doubly annunciating the significance of the jagged blank space of the column. Confronting us with the image of an advertisement for an event by a major intellectual who, just a year after offering a public talk on the state of German intellectual life, was forced to flee the country or face likely imprisonment, deportation, and even death (so that, from the standpoint of at least the latest historical phase represented in the film, that original event has now become impossible), BergmannMichel marks the dark space as both a site of potential and a marker of painful loss—at once a blank slate and a void. Working in the dark final moments of Weimar democracy, Bergmann-Michel seems to hold out some scant hope for an alternative world created through the imaginative labor of the artist, but she also records the terrible fissures already caused by the rise of Hitler’s regime. Her film offers a resistant view of the state of politics on the eve of the demise of Weimar democracy, focusing the viewer’s attention on the need to look and speak about the crises of the present with measured critical insight while also acknowledging the extent to which other, more tangible forms of resistance have become impossible. Hers is a resistance based on the work of reading between the lines—between lines of text, into the splices that connect her carefully composed cinematic images, and reading into the imaginative space that is created by the exchange of looks between the intrepid camerawoman and her subjects. In the fateful span between Fall 1932 and Spring 1933, Bergmann-Michel suggests that, however imperfect, these dual practices of critical looking and reflection may offer the only viable remaining measures for resistance, for negotiating and navigating the terms of that final choice between authoritarianism and its alternatives—and that even these limited means may now have been exhausted.

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“War Feeds its People Better”: Mother Courage and the Limits of Revolutionary Theater Noah Soltau

On January 8, 2017, Meryl Streep walked onto the stage at the Seventy-Fourth Annual Golden Globe awards in her glittering black gown to accept a Lifetime Achievement Award. Before attendees and the public, Streep criticized then-President-Elect Donald Trump. She made a hopeful and democratic overture to the American people by imploring viewers to resist Trump’s vulgar and demeaning tendencies and to protect the free press from his authoritarian and anti-democratic attacks.1 Streep used her platform as a celebrity to protest the injustice of dominant social and political structures, and the ensuing furor across digital and social media platforms continued for days, if not weeks. One month later, during Streep’s acceptance of an award from the gay-rights advocacy group, Human Rights Campaign, she continued her critique of the new president. Streep admitted the danger of stepping into the political arena, saying: “It’s terrifying to put the target on your forehead, and it sets you up for all sorts of attacks and armies of Brownshirts and bots and worse, and the only way you can do it is to feel you have to.”2 Streep’s guerilla take-over of the Golden Globes for political means and subsequent cautionary speech at the Human Rights Campaign awards was not her first attempt at using her celebrity for political ends. Additionally, Streep’s allusion to the “Brownshirts,” the Nazi SA paramilitary force, was not the first time she has used German history and culture, in conjunction with her celebrity status, to inspire change. In August 2006, at the height of the Iraq war, Streep participated in a much larger, though ultimately less successful, cooperative effort at political resistance when she took the titular role in Oskar Eustis’ and Tony Kushner’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and her Children), which was staged

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Daniel Victor and Giovanni Russonello, “Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes Speech,” The New York Times, January 8, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/08/arts/television/meryl-streep-goldenglobes-speech.html [accessed March 5, 2018]. Sopan Deb, “Meryl Streep Pledges to Stand Up,” The New York Times, February 12, 2017, https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/02/12/movies/meryl-streep-brownshirts-trump-golden-globes.html [accessed March 5, 2018].

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for free at the Delacort Theater in Central Park.3 The production was a political and artistic attempt to resist the apparent public capitulation to mainstream narratives of both the political necessity and moral rightness of the invasion of Iraq.4 Mother Courage was one point in a constellation of Broadway productions that I have elsewhere described as “insurgent spectacles,” which attempted to confront reactionary and oppressive political and economic forces with art and encourage direct public responses, using the very trappings of the reactionary and neoliberal spectacles they undermined.5 First appearing as a response to the United States’ wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and rising domestic religious and social intolerance, the insurgent spectacles used the trappings of Broadway theater to confront audiences with politics and ideologies that ostensibly resisted those of the George W. Bush administration. Arguably the best known and successful of these insurgent spectacles to come to Broadway was another revolutionary German drama: Steven Sater’s adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen: Eine Kindertragödie (Spring Awakening). Producers staged adaptations like Spring Awakening and Mother Courage in part to oppose the neoliberal Disney-fication of Broadway, and to demonstrate an alternative purpose to theater. Broadway adaptations of popular Disney films, such as Tarzan and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, were, they believed, the equivalent of cultural fast food: easy to consume, appealing to the widest possible market, and guaranteed to make a profit. In contrast, the insurgent spectacles offered political and ideological resistance to prevailing neoconservative social and political attitudes and policies. Unlike those Disney-inspired productions or the financially successful films they attempted to emulate, several of the insurgent spectacles offered moments of real political resistance to Bush-era policies and cultural trends.6 Mother Courage, in particular, provided an alternative to the “spectacle of terrorism,” even while co-opting the trappings of popular Broadway theater.7 However, it was less effective than many of the other insurgent spectacles, because, while the producers and actors attempted to retain their political autonomy and engage with the audience, the aura of celebrity surrounding the production pulled the audiences into the illusion of the spectacle, much like Siegfried Kracauer argues happens in the movie theater.8 Mother Courage was designed to promote citizen engagement but largely resulted in political fantasy.

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I was able to see the August 19, 2006 production of Mother Courage. In the interest of clarity, “Mutter Courage” will refer to Brecht’s 1939 play, while “Mother Courage” will indicate Tony Kushner’s 2006 adaptation. Noah Soltau, “Insurgent Spectacles: Spring Awakening, Woyzeck, Mother Courage and the ‘New’ Broadway Spectacle” (PhD. diss. University of Tennessee, 2014), 5–7, 26. Soltau, “Insurgent Spectacles,” 97, and Siegfried Kracauer, trans. Thomas Levin, “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1995), 291–2. Henry Giroux, Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism: Global Uncertainty and the Challenge of the New Media (Boulder, CO : Paradigm Publishers, 2006). Kracauer, 293–4, 297, 303.

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Speak Truth to Power: Theater as an Alternative to the Spectacle of Terrorism Critical theorist Henry Giroux argues that the spectacle of terrorism—the images of war, militarism, and violence that inundate television and new media—has sown chaos into our social and political lives and hobbled our democracy (Figure 7.1).This spectacle relies on marketing fear and anxiety to promote authoritarian causes and reinforce flaws and inequalities in our social structures.9 One of the most obvious ways the spectacle of terrorism influenced public discourse was the visibility of the military and veterans of the so-called War on Terror at seemingly apolitical sporting events, where the popularity of the spectacle guaranteed large audiences. From the military tributes and fly-overs at professional sporting events that began increasing in the early 2000s, to the current imbroglio surrounding National Football League (NFL ) players protesting police brutality and that protest’s connection to patriotism, the spectacle of terrorism is a way to remind audiences of the state’s monopoly on violence. It uses the threat of violence from terrorists as a way of demonstrating the violence the state can enact on its enemies. Any resistance, then, to the state’s monopoly on violence (including even the appearance of anything but full-throated support for said government and its actions) is taken as an implied threat to democracy, freedom, and the American way.

Figure 7.1: The Airforce Thunderbirds aerial demonstration team flies over the opening of a Minnesota Twins game. © Department of Defense, July, 2009.

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The spectacle of terrorism was so pervasive in the midst of the wars in the Middle East, that in 2004 even The New York Times was actively engaged in pushing an agenda of public fear and occupation when they argued for the existence of Iraqi chemical weapons and the invasion of Iraq even in the face of controversial and insufficient evidence.10 Under George W. Bush, the Defense Department paid professional sports teams to drum up support for the War on Terror by creating spectacles of televised flag waving and tributes to troops and veterans.11 Largely because of the public support of so many institutions for the policies of the administration, in 2006, Eustis, Kushner, and Streep found it necessary to resist outside the mainstream, in a place where the lighted screens of digital media could not reach: the theater. Much like the spectacle of terrorism imbued sporting events and cable television programming with political messaging, the stage production of Mother Courage blurred the lines between cultural and political realms. Mother Courage occupied a liminal zone in mass culture, neither an exemplary piece of radical political theater, nor an entirely co-opted cultural product. The ways Eustis and Kushner conceived and indeed misconstrued radical—in this case, Brechtian—theater, how Kushner and Streep executed that vision, and how the mainstream press interpreted Streep’s performance contributed to an understanding of the ways both celebrity and radical theater can (and cannot) resist reactionary politics within the culture industry. Eustis, Kushner, and Streep, as well as the producers of other insurgent spectacles, like Spring Awakening, were waging ideological war on an uneven battlefield. With the co-optive power of neoliberalism taking over both the mainstream press and the Broadway theater, insurgent theater-makers were trying, as cultural critic and activist Stephen Duncombe would categorize their efforts, to “survive.”12 Extending the metaphor of “insurgent spectacles,” small, relatively powerless groups of theater-makers were using the tactics of insurgent warfare—guerrilla tactics, ambushes, training, and organizing away from surveillance by dominant powers—not to fight the prevailing cultural narrative but to merely survive as cultural producers against the spectacle of terrorism being proffered by the state. The fight waged in Mother Courage offers instructive lessons about the limits of resistance to entrenched political and economic power in this particular artistic milieu precisely because of its failure to achieve anything beyond increasing Streep’s fame or reinforcing audiences’ political attitudes.13

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“From the Editors; The Times and Iraq,” May 26, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/ from-the-editors-the-times-and-iraq.html, and Tim Arango, “Advocating a War in Iraq, and Offering an Apology for What Came After,” May 13, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/14/ world/middleeast/iraq-war-kanan-makiya.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=9A14E88D4F19 C87BFFE 42C9FC 9EB 4FF 2&gwt=pay [accessed March 25, 2018]. “NFL Kickoff Live from the National Mall Presented by Pepsi Vanilla,” August 5, 2003, https://www. businesswire.com/news/home/20030805005482/en/NFL -Kickoff-Live-National-Mall-Presented-, and “Pepsi and Pentagon Paid Sports Teams Millions For ‘Paid Patriotism’ Events,” November 5, 2015, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/11/05/454834662/pentagon-paid-sportsteams-millions-for-paid-patriotism-events [both accessed March 25, 2018]. Stephen Duncombe, ed. Cultural Resistance Reader (London: Verso, 2002), 8. Soltau, “Insurgent Spectacles,” 57–9.

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Eustis and Kushner took the political impetus for adapting Mother Courage from Brecht himself. In 1939, Brecht wrote Mutter Courage in a little over a month in resistance to the rise of Fascism and Nazism in Europe. Set during the Thirty Years’ War of 1618– 48, the play follows the enterprising canteen woman Anna Fierling, nicknamed “Mother Courage,” who is determined not only to survive, but to profit from the war. In twelve scenes spanning twelve years, Courage hangs her fortune on the warring armies by following them with her cart of wares. Struggling, negotiating, and scrapping to survive, she loses all three of her children to the machinations of war. From the beginning of the play, Courage foreshadows the virtues that will kill her children in the war: Swiss Cheese will die for his honesty, Eilif for his bravery, and Kattrin for her kindness. Swiss Cheese is caught (badly) lying about the army to which he is loyal (while trying to save his mother’s cash box) and is shot eleven times. During a lull in the war, Eilif tries to steal some peasants’ cattle (something for which he was previously rewarded by his commanding officer) and is hanged. Kattrin rouses sleeping villagers to warn them of an attack (by the army she and her mother have been following) and is shot to death by a soldier. Courage picks up her cart and continues on. The play is not an anti-war play, but it does reveal the broken social and political institutions that grind up the virtuous and the evil alike. These institutions are corrupt and thus pay back virtue with death, and cause and reproduce suffering for its own sake—or in the service of capital. Kushner’s adaptation follows the narrative structure of Brecht’s play, with the notable addition, in an attempt to capture Brecht’s colloquial style, of profanity, jokes, puns, and rhymes (Figure 7.2). The staging, too, starts with Brecht: a timeline removed

Figure 7.2: Meryl Streep as Mother Courage in the Delacort Theater production. © Kino Lorber/Kanopy, 2008.

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from contemporary events, intertitles, scene breaks announced in a flat voice regardless of the drama on stage. Kushner then departs from Brecht and lays on the spectacle with cannon fire, whole squads of troops dying in exploding ruins, the stage machinery whirring, and jeeps rolling on and off the stage. The final departure from Brecht is the music, scored by Jeanine Tesori, and Streep’s energetic singing, which take the play out of a bombed-out Berlin in 1949 (the first time it was staged) and sets it firmly down on Broadway. Eustis included Kushner and Streep in an attempt to give Brecht, and more importantly his subversive politics, renewed mass appeal in the US . Yet the ploy backfired: Streep’s emotionally moving performance in Kushner’s adaptation eclipsed and undermined the aesthetic tools of politically conscious theater. Theater critic Ben Brantley picked up this fault in the production when he reviewed the show, writing, “Mother Courage should open for Ms. Streep the same future in advertising endorsements that awaits grand-slam sports champions. I, for one, would love to know what vitamins she takes and how to get them.”14 The popularity of Streep-doing-Brecht was not in doubt; in fact, it was the problem. Similar to the time McDonald’s famously co-opted Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife”—a murder ballad from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera about class-politics—in advertisements during the 1980s to sell cheeseburgers and Coca-Cola products,15 Mother Courage underscores the difficulty of resistance within the culture industry.16 In an interview with The New York Times in 2007, Eustis foreshadowed the power of neoliberal capitalism to co-opt even the most revolutionary voices, when he used a Meissen china plate decorated with Brecht’s smiling face to illustrate the difficulty of being a celebrity trying to engage in cultural resistance.17 Eustis recognized that there is something deceptive about an image of a clean-shaven, smiling Brecht (neither attribute for which the cantankerous Brecht was particularly well-known) applied to such obvious kitsch.18 He found humor and a hint of warning in this image of Brecht— someone both so politically engaged and averse to the habits and trappings of bourgeois existence—immortalized and smiling on a knick-knack. However, Eustis was also convinced that the best response he could mount to the horror of the Iraq war was to

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Ben Brantley, “Mother Courage, Grief and Song,” The New York Times, August 26, 2006. https:// www.nytimes.com/2006/08/22/theater/reviews/22moth.html [accessed March 26, 2018]. See Mathew Sheffield’s piece for Salon from October 25, 2016, https://www.salon.com/2016/10/25 /meet-moon-man-the-alt-rights-new-racist-rap-sensation-borrowed-from–1980s-mcdonaldsads/ [accessed March 13, 2018]. “Mack Tonight,” as the McDonald’s figure is known, has also recently been co-opted by the so-called alt-right to disseminate racist raps. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment ed. Gunzelin Schmid, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 2002), 107. Horkheimer and Adorno conceive of popular culture in terms of a factory, wherein standardized products of mass culture are produced to manipulate and pacify the population. The schema of mass culture would be the means of and techniques whereby the culture industry exerted its influence. David Colman, “Citizen Brecht Puts on His Happy Face,” The New York Times, April 15, 2007, http:// www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/fashion/15POSS .html [accessed March 3, 2018]. David Colman, “Citizen Brecht.”

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have Tony Kushner adapt a Brecht play performed by celebrities in Central Park, merchandizing be damned.

Building the Bomb: Theater as Training Ground for Political Action As part of an aesthetic and political insurgency into Broadway theater, Eustis and Kushner had one chance for their play to go off like a bomb. Conscious of the Iraq war as a motivator of the production, at a time when reports of casualties from Improvised Explosive Devices (IED s) were constant, the dramaturgical approach to political content as explosive was timely. The components of the bomb—crude language, humor, music, and star power—were intended to react and effect political change among theater viewers and broader American society alike. This should have been an explosive production. Instead, if the insurgent spectacle can be described as a kind of IED, then Mother Courage was a dud. The producers’ misapprehension of Brechtian theatrical technique as well as the social circumstances surrounding the production meant Mother Courage became the deterrent rather than the impetus for political change. The celebrities themselves, Streep and Kushner, actively opposed the political inaction to which their efforts would fall victim. They were horrified by the apparent public acceptance of the invasion of Iraq and the War on Terror and frustrated with the way the mainstream media were in lockstep with the political goals of the administration. In response, they tried to use their fame and Brecht’s drama to inspire political action from people who felt the same. In Voicing Dissent, Violaine Roussel and Bluewenn Lechaux outline the perceived power that celebrities have in political arenas. The “figure of the ‘engaged celebrity’ defines his/her civic role as the result of a direct relation with a public: the symbolic coup at work is based on the equivalence stated between ‘having audiences’ and ‘having constituencies,’ justifying the self-assignation of an ability/legitimacy to speak for others, especially for voiceless people, here against the war.”19 The false equivalence between audiences and constituencies; Eustis’s over-estimation of the extent to which celebrity leveraged into radical theater could help him resist the spectacle of terrorism; and Kushner and Streep’s own misjudgment of how their celebrity would be used, divorced from the politics of the play, all worked against the play’s efficacy as an act of cultural resistance. Because the play’s producers misread both Brecht and the social conditions into which they adapted the play, Mother Courage did not achieve its potential political or critical resonance. As the critic Robert Brustein noted, Brecht “helped turn our Pepsodent smile into a Weimar sneer.”20 When Brecht wrote Mutter Courage, he did so

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Violaine Roussel and Bluewenn Lechaux, Voicing Dissent: American Artists and the War on Iraq (New York: Routledge, 2010), 22. Jonathan Kalb, “Still Fearsome, Mother Courage Gets a Makeover,” The New York Times, August 6, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/theater/still-fearsome-mother-courage-gets-a-makeover. html [accessed March 1, 2018].

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under the rubric of Epic Theater and made extensive use of Verfremdungseffekte (alienation effects). He conceived that the mechanics of Epic Theater, including colloquial language, humor, and extradiegetic songs, would detach audiences from the action of the play and arouse them intellectually rather than emotionally. Epic Theater would thereby transform them from spectators into engaged observers and encourage them to take political action.21 Brecht knew that disrupting emotional connections with the characters would be difficult, which is why he made use of so many alienating techniques. But in Eustis and Kushner’s adaptation, there was tension between the content of the text, its staging, and popular response to the production that may have defined the limits of theater-as-politics, in particular when the driving force of that theater is celebrity, as critic Georg Monbiot argues, is the “smiling face of the corporate machine.”22 Brecht thought that the artist could harness the trappings of popular culture to inspire the proletariat to effect social and economic change, but his mid-twentiethcentury theories about European society were an anachronism on twenty-first-century Broadway that undercut his intent.23 Whereas Brecht, in the 1940s, tried to rouse audiences to political consciousness through appeals to their ethics and intellect, in 2006 Kushner appealed to their passion and emotional bewilderment. He placed Mother Courage at the epicenter of the terrible effects of war, which set the tone for the political critique she attempted to make as part of the spectacle. For instance, at the beginning of the fourth scene, after Courage’s son Swiss Cheese has been killed and she refuses to claim his body out of fear of reprisal, Kushner inserts her as an engaged observer of a dispute between an aggrieved soldier and his guilty commander. The soldier storms onto the stage, shouting: “I’m not letting myself get fucked like this. You come outside right now and let me cut your fucking head off!”24 This violent outburst sets the stage for a confrontation, but as the scene plays out and Courage encourages him to be reasonable, the obscenity and passion lessen, the soldier’s conviction fades, and the expected conflict and resolution never come. Both the soldier and Courage slink away, beaten and embittered, before either gets the justice that they both deserve— justice they ultimately realize they cannot expect or even fight for. Mother Courage underlines the central problem with Broadway theater and perhaps all commercial art as a means of resistance to political crisis. Art cannot respond to war in kind. Art or an individual artist can only produce representations of social and political positions and perspectives. Describing his sense of frustration over the political situation, Kushner wrote, “I can’t get out of bed and it’s fucking horrible and

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Ekkehard Schall, The Craft of Theatre: Seminars and Discussions in Brechtian Theater (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 205. George Monbiot, “Celebrity isn’t just harmless fun,” The Guardian, December 20, 2016, https://www .theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/20/celebrity-corporate-machine-fame-big-businessdonald-trump-kim-kardashian [accessed January 15, 2018]. Philip Glahn, “21st-Century Brecht,” Afterimage 38:6 (2011), 12–15. Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and her Children: A Chronicle of the Thirty Years’ War, translated by Tony Kushner, (London: Methuen Drama, 2009), 53.

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I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. And nobody knows what to do.”25 Instead of direct action—which he admitted is the most effective way to resist authoritarianism and crisis—he adapted a play. Eustis and Kushner’s political theater, in which entertainment replaces social engagement, falls into the same trap of which Theodor Adorno wrote decades earlier, namely, it “treats conflict but in fact proceeds without conflict.”26 And this was not the only ideological or theoretical problem of using Brecht to resist the broad cultural support for an unjust war of occupation. Kushner seems to read Brecht as if the social structures and the material history that Brecht engaged were still in place. However, even shortly after the Second World War, the renowned East German playwright Heiner Müller recognized that Brechtian techniques could no longer create democratic spaces within the theater, even under the political and economic framework of socialism.27 But, on Broadway, Brecht still retains some ideological and political currency, if only in the form of nostalgia and with a whiff of high culture.28 Kushner recognized this and tried to leverage it into resisting, or at the very least protesting, the effects of the War on Terror. Kushner uses a slightly modified Brechtian technique, crude language, to reckon explicitly with the way that war reorders and flattens our collective life. It comes early on in the play, when a soldier remarks on the state of the civilians, “The problem with these people is they haven’t had enough of war. . . . Everything rots in peacetime. People turn into carefree rutting animals and nobody fucking cares.”29 Kushner’s use of crude language heres draw attention to the paradox of war (which is inimical to life) as a projection of strength, when in fact it is ultimately an expression of moral and human failure. The spectacle of terrorism, like Brecht’s Thirty Years’ War, projects strength while promoting weakness. The false projection of strength, both in war and under the aesthetic regime of the spectacle of terrorism, is also seductive. Ultimately, Kushner’s Mother Courage could not respond in kind, either aesthetically or ideologically, to the spectacle of terrorism. Its media dominance and “pedagogy of fear” are simply too effective at creating “the conditions for transforming a weak American democracy into a dangerous authoritarian state.”30 As Brecht tried to warn audiences in Mutter Courage, the political institutions grind up the virtuous and the evil alike. Kushner, like Brecht, weaves this metaphor of the seeming futility—and yet necessity—of resisting overwhelming systems of power into the play with the Epic

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John Walters, Theater of War, DVD, 2008. Adorno, “Schema of Mass Culture,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, (New York: Routledge, 1991), 71. Michael Wood, Heiner Müller’s Democratic Theater: The Politics of Making the Audience Work, (Rochester, New York: Boydell and Brewer, 2017), 14. Kalb, “Still Fearsome.” Brecht’s relatively far-reaching influence on American theatrical culture is often taken for granted. Marc Bilstein’s 1954 Production of The Threepenny Opera ran for seven years on Broadway, and many of Brecht’s other works are staples among avant-garde and university theaters, popularized in particular during the Vietnam era. Brecht, Mother Courage, 7. Giroux, Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism, 18.

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Theatrical device of humor. First, he has the Chaplain (played by Austin Pendleton) tell a joke about Martin Luther that underscores the longevity of giant systems of inequality and avarice: “Martin Luther met a priest who was begging for alms by the side of the road. Luther said to the beggar priest, ‘After I turn the world inside out we won’t need priests!’ ‘Maybe not,’ said the priest, ‘but you’ll still need beggars,’ and he went on his way.”31 At the end of the same scene, Courage herself weighs in on the predicament: “We’re prisoners, but so are head lice.”32 Here Courage concisely sums up her role and those of her family in the world: to feed off the lives (and deaths) of those around them. These moments are laconic and might even elicit a chuckle, but they also lay bare the vast powers arrayed against anyone (the audience) who wants to escape the exploitative system. The recognition of the collective response of laughter in the face of those powers to which Mother Courage refers can create solidarity among audience members even as they are confronted by their dire political circumstances. Kushner claimed his spectacle aimed to remind people that “[we] make and are made by history. . . . [Like] all great plays Courage demands that its audience think, and think hard, about what it’s seeing and hearing, but no one watching Mother Courage can watch it cold or remain unmoved.”33 For example, Kushner has Courage and the Cook (Courage’s erstwhile companion, played by Kevin Kline) engage in a darkly comic political debate that lays out the stakes of war for them and for the audience. The Cook points out to Courage the necessary but problematic nature of torture, a clear allusion to Abu Ghraib and another instance where Kushner ties the aesthetic devices of the insurgent spectacle to the particular historical moment of the Iraq war. Torture, the Cook quips, “adds to the cost of the war, since contrary to expectations the Poles have preferred to remain unliberated, the King’s tried everything, the rack and the screw and the prisons are expensive, and when the King discovered they didn’t want to be free, even after torture, he stopped having any fun. . . .”34 Courage quickly rejoins that the Poles thoughts on liberation are irrelevant: “The King will never be defeated, and why, his people believe in him, and why? Precisely because everyone knows he’s in the war to make a profit. . . . If it’s business, it makes sense.”35 This political conversation is very clearly meant to parallel the audience’s own condition, as well as implicate them in the war. Kushner’s text contains the potential to motivate political action, but audiences were left overwhelmingly with the sense of how entertaining political theater could be. While Brecht did indeed intend his plays to move his audiences, it was to move them out into the streets and their social circles, to motivate political and social change, not to bewilder them or have them empathize with Courage. Kushner’s seems to suggest that he wanted the audience to be moved emotionally, which undermines the play’s fierce criticism of war, religion, and capitalism.

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Brecht, Mother Courage, 39. Brecht, Mother Courage, 39. Jonathan Kalb, “Interview with Tony Kushner,” in Communications from the International Brecht Society, ed. Norman Roessler, Volume 35 (Fall 2006), 99. Brecht, Mother Courage, 34. Brecht, Mother Courage, 34.

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Brecht designed the aforementioned alienation effect and other Epic Theatrical techniques to disrupt emotional connection. Brecht wanted audiences to engage in a kind of dialectical relationship even with their own empathy, not to be forced into it.36 Empathizing with a war-profiteer like Courage does not fit into a political program designed to resist the acceptance of the neoliberal economy of war in which Kushner saw the US engaged.37 Interrogating that empathy and recognizing that even Courage, “one of those lower-class Capitalists” and “hyena of the battlefield,” loses everything but her life in the war she profits from should make audiences and critics interrogate their own social systems that duplicate that suffering, not feel badly for or even admire Courage.38 Streep’s charisma as Courage, as well as the moving and emotional score from Tesori, also caused the potentially revolutionary work to misfire. Rather than disrupt the narrative and diegetic space of the play and draw the audience’s attention to politics, the music as sung by Streep unified the performance and created a decidedly unBrechtian illusionism. In arguably the defining musical moment of the production, Courage sings “The Song of Great Capitulation.” Spare piano accompaniment joins Courage’s voice, sometimes slightly ahead, sometimes behind, to create an awkward dissonance as Courage gives in to the despair of having to deny knowing her dead child in order to keep her business. (Singing.) I’d accepted that I’d only got the shit that I deserved. On my ass, or on my knees, I took it with a grin. (Speaking.) You have to learn to make deals with people, one hand washes the other one, your head’s not hard enough to knock over a wall. (Singing.) Birdsong from above: Push comes to shove. Soon you fall down from your grandstand And join the players in the band Who tootle out that melody: Wait, wait and see. And then: it’s all downhill. Your fall was God’s will. Better let it be. Many folk I’ve known planned to scale the highest peak. Off they go, the starry sky high overhead. (Speaking.) To the victor go the spoils, where there’s a will there’s a way, at least act like you own the store.39

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Anne Beggs, Brecht and the Culture Industry: Political Comedy on Broadway and the West End, 1960–1965, dissertation, (Cornell University, 2009), 71. Kushner, Communications. Robert Brustein, The Theater of Revolt: An Approach to Modern Drama (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 272. Brecht, Mother Courage, 56–7.

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The moment should have engaged audiences to consider their responsibility for the war, but instead it leaves audiences heartbroken at Courage’s tribulation and loss.40 This gap between the stimulus (war) and the response to it (the production of theater) is a space created by the culture industry, one of politics-as-entertainment, rather than politics-as-action. By atomizing the body politic and by treating politics and war as spectacle, mass culture encourages passivity and the consumption of outrage and emotion rather than promoting organized political action in the public sphere. Kushner may have tried to hedge his bets and create the space for audiences to achieve emotional distance with other musical numbers. Toward the end of the play, a starving Cook sings “The Song of Solomon.” In the song, the Cook attempts to get an innkeeper to open his doors to him and Courage not out of virtue, but under threat of theft and violence, critiquing virtue and showing how useless it is in this world.41 Kline’s delivery of the song—complete with “jazz hands” and awkward looks out into the audience—underlined at once the scene’s silliness (he is literally singing for his supper) and served as a foil for the despair and desperation of the interstitial spoken lines. Audience members laughed and nodded their heads with the melody, but there remained tense stillness and recognition, at least among some critics, that this part of Courage’s world was an uncanny proxy of their own.42 This montage of unsettling techniques was meant to promote, if not political action, then at least political awareness. But outside of the theater, particularly in the popular press that covered the production, that political awareness, much less a discussion of political action, was largely absent.

The Big Fizzle: Theater as a Vehicle of Celebrity It was political awareness and an understanding of the fraught historical moment out of which Brecht wrote, that convinced Streep to leverage her star power for a political purpose and take on the role of Courage. The potential of Mother Courage to effect political and social change was not lost on other artists at the time either, as John Walter’s 2008 documentary about the production, Theater of War, demonstrated. The film explores the creation of the production and in it, Streep said of her role in the spectacle: I’m the voice of dead people. So . . . I’m the interpreter of lost songs, and I’m the person who, you know, filtered through the sensibility of right now, 2006, with everything we know, I’m the interpreter. I’m between the audience that’s going to

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Kalb, “Still Fearsome.” Brecht, Mother Courage, 89–91. Jeremy McCarter, “The Courage of their Convictions,” New York Magazine, August 22, 2006, http:// nymag.com/arts/theater/reviews/19669/ [accessed January 20, 2018].

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hear it and my sense of what language they understand and the person who wrote it years ago and conceived it—Brecht.43

Assuming this almost metaphysical role of mediator between the dead, Brecht, and the audience, Streep sought to leverage her celebrity to fulfill what she perceived as a political need, while concurrently shedding that celebrity to fulfill an artistic function.44 She also understood very well the emotional and intellectual platform that music gives to the actor, beyond speech. She said, “I wanted to make [the play]—it’s because of the lullaby, [which] we see over and over and over and over on television, Lebanon, Srebrenica, women, just going ‘Why?!’ over the body of their children. ‘Why?!’ That’s what it was. That’s the whole thing. For me. . . . What’s the end result? Bones in the landscape.”45 Streep’s insight into the potential of this work of art is both enlightening and infuriating to her political allies. The bones in the landscape have piled up, unceasingly, in the intervening twelve years. Mother Courage is off the stage, but Streep is still an enormously accomplished actor. The subtlety of the continuing effects of Streep’s celebrity is compelling. Unlike the majority of women in Hollywood who are sold and marketed as sex symbols, Streep is marketed for her skill as an actor.46 Audiences line up to see her in whatever medium, not to be titillated, but to be “cultured” and to witness her craft. Like classical music performances for Adorno, Streep represents the commodity of high culture.47 She is the sign of serious art, and of liberal social and aesthetic sensibilities. And now, as then, in the age of tribal politics, anti-elite sentiment, disenfranchisement, disaffection, and anti-intellectualism, those signs heavily circumscribe her audience. Streep’s available audience then consumes that image, embracing her role as purveyor of middle-class commodity culture. That perceived cultural and social power was exactly what Kushner and Streep were trying to use for their own political ends, but their spectacle’s lack of self-reflexivity on its use of stardom and its self-selecting audience ultimately contributed to the play’s equivocal critical reception. The reification of Brecht and Mother Courage and the lack of engagement with its politics and the concomitant critique of power, fame, and spectacle compromised the production’s political efficacy and trickled down to the way Streep as Courage was treated in the public sphere. Hilton Als wrote for the New Yorker: “It’s difficult to see Meryl Streep the actress without being dazzled by Meryl Streep the legend.”48 In perhaps the only indication that the gears of the culture industry faltered a little because of Streep’s performance in Mother Courage, Als ends his critique of her as

43 44

45 46

47 48

John Walter, Theater of War, Alive Mind, 2008, DVD. Hilton Als, “Wagon Train,” The New Yorker, September 6, 2006, https://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2006/09/04/wagon-train [accessed October 4, 2017]. John Walters, Theater of War. Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, 21st-Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of Transformation (New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, 2011), 159. Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” 68. Als, “Wagon Train.”

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Courage by noting, “Her grandeur is merely a façade, she seems to be telling us, and she is as committed to the job at hand as any other conscientious working actress.”49 The appeal to a workman-like performance, of sacrificing her glamor on the altar of art, is attractive and useful to the program of establishing theater as an effective response to dominant forms of spectacle and political agendas. However, almost all the other voices from the audience undermined Als’ observation. Jeremy McCarter (though he is one of the rare critics that gestures to the techniques and politics of Mother Courage) put it succinctly when he noted: “Of course, it’s not the prospect of seeing unforgiving German drama that has people camping out for tickets. However equivocal the result, Streep in ‘Mother Courage’ represents a genuine episode in New York stage history.”50 The equivocal result, timely political theater undermined by spectacle and stardom, is the legacy of Mother Courage. Mother Courage was neither simple spectacle nor subversive political theater. It did not draw the same audiences or critical regard as either Tarzan or The Gay Slave Handbook, to cite examples of other spectacles on offer in New York in 2006, from two ends of the theater spectrum. This alloy of conflicting politics and ideology can only be partially attributed to the context surrounding the production, the actors and celebrities involved, and the media coverage. The conflict is also essential to the text; it is the problem constantly posed by Brecht’s work, and is something Kushner achieves in his adaptation: the inability to reduce its conflicts to specific political functions. For example, in a conversation with Courage about the (terrifying) possibility of peace, the Chaplain elucidates the problem both of effective political theater and seemingly intractable global conflict in a moment of drunken clarity. He is optimistic about the certainty of perpetual war: Wars get stuck in ruts, no one saw it coming, no one can think of everything, maybe there’s been short-sighted planning and all at once your war’s a big mess. But the Emperor or the King or the Pope reliably provides what’s necessary to get it going again. This war’s got no significant worries as far as I can see, a long life lies ahead of it.51

Ultimately, Kushner’s Mother Courage became a story about the struggle for survival and a challenge to change the social circumstances in which that struggle occurred. The play’s call to consider the sources and causes of the US ’s wealth were inimical to the smooth function of the culture industry. As a result, the culture industry adapted itself to Mother Courage’s mode of spectacle, requiring potential elements of opposition to fight merely to exist, rather than to resist, because, as Courage notes, “war feeds its people better.”52

49 50 51 52

Als, “Wagon Train.” McCarter, “The Courage of their Convictions.” Brecht, Mother Courage, 63. Brecht, Mother Courage, 70.

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However, artistic resistance to political regimes and existential threats from the culture industry are never wasted efforts. In reading Ben Brantley’s critical review of the production, the effects of the schema of mass culture, both on this production and the aesthetic sensibilities of members of the audience, become vivid. He argues that the elements of the spectacle do not form a “fully integrated and affecting portrait” except, ironically, “when Ms. Streep sings the Brechtian songs that have been newly (and effectively) scored by Jeanine Tesori.”53 In fact, Brantley is so impressed by Streep-thegreatest-living-actress when he should be the most alienated by her Brechtian performance, that—due to her athletic dramatic performance—he ironically suggests a future in advertising for her and then seriously hints at a possible future for her as “queen of the Broadway musical.”54 The nexus of celebrity, commodity, and entertainment that Brantley saw in Streep’s performance shows precisely how theater that uses the tactics of asymmetric warfare has the potential to function (though it failed in this case) and how the schema of mass culture co-opts those tools to fulfill its own ends. One of celebrity’s primary functions is to sell, not just products, but ideology.55 Brantley’s invocation of Brecht without any apparent understanding of how “Brechtian” songs should function (certainly not as a “seamless, astonishing whole”), the comparison of Streep to a sports figure (with the implied advertising opportunities), and the insistence on a monolithic, consistent spectacle all betray the deleterious effects that fetishized celebrity and the schema of mass culture can have on political theater, and more broadly, commercial art. As other recent scholarship on the reception and production of theater has shown, Mother Courage was compromised because the assumed audience turned out to expect a “fully integrated,” “astonishing” production that makes full use of Streep’s celebrity capital.56 That celebrity capital, in fact, is all that many critics could focus on. Reviews from the Washington Post, USA Today, New York Daily News, and the New York Observer focused solely on Streep on stage and made no mention of the techniques of the production or its politics.57 Streep’s interviews in Walter’s Theater of War demonstrate that she cannot simply remove her mantle of celebrity when she chooses, nor can she choose how her celebrity affects or is perceived by her audience.58 Even in the way she is sometimes costumed, like at the 2012 Oscars, she appears both as herself and as an image of something else (Figure 7.3).59 The fetishizing of celebrity happens not only in relation to the stars of

53 54 55

56 57

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Brantley, “Mother, Courage, Grief and Song.” Brantley, “Mother, Courage, Grief and Song.” Christopher Bell, American Idolatry: Celebrity, Commodity, and Reality Television, (Jefferson, NC : McFarland, 2010), 73. Wood, Heiner Müller, 155–7. http://www.simplystreep.com/content/career/stage/2006mothercourage.html [accessed January 9, 2017]. Of additional interest (or as additional evidence of the hegemony of the schema of mass culture), these reviews are in a Meryl Streep fan site collection. Christopher Bell, American Idolatry, 73. Jack Shepherd,“Oscars 2017: Meryl Streep hits out at dress designer who ‘defamed’ her,” The Independent, February 26, 2017, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/oscars–2017-merylstreep-designer-channel-dress-defamed-a7600936.html [accessed March 4, 2018].

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Figure 7.3: Meryl Streep at the 2012 Academy Awards. © Associated Press, 2012.

the production and the audience, but also in relation to Brecht and to the participants in this particular performance. To quote Kushner’s soldier, the political goals of the play were “fucked” from the start.60 As a painful irony, Brecht’s own celebrity also compromised this production from the outset. Brecht is famous with theatergoers because he wrote compelling, cantankerous political theater that criticized Nazis, Western capitalism, and bureaucratic socialism 60

Brecht, Mother Courage, 53.

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with equal vigor. He made a laughing-stock of Joseph McCarthy and helped shape dramatic theory and dramaturgy in Germany, the UK , and the US .61 But it was his reputation and his fame from which Eustis and Kushner were trying to draw their political agency, rather than from a critical negotiation with his theory, politics, and critique of social structures and conditions. As Streep put in in her now-famous Golden Globes acceptance speech: “An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like.”62 By her own understanding, Streep succeeded as an actor, but in Mother Courage, she failed to produce the political activity she so clearly desired. The primary lesson critics and artists can learn both from Mother Courage and the current climate in Washington is that celebrity generally offers pyrrhic victory in the political arena. Even radical political statements in a spectacular format are susceptible to co-option. The volatile mixture of celebrity and politics in the US (but also throughout Western Europe, Russia and the former Soviet Republics, and East Asia) reveals the consequences of mediated social relationships and the political colonization of almost every aspect of public life. Kushner’s scripted ideological response to the horrors of war and late neoliberal capitalism, the mediated sparring between celebrity activists and celebrity politicians, the New York and Beltway-centered reception to both: all reveal a lack of authenticity and historical consciousness. This undermines public discourse and public trust in the figures and systems upon which the politically and socially conscious public has traditionally relied to reduce the chaotic influence of personality cults and irresponsible politics. The difficult solution, and one toward which it seems both Streep and Kushner were striving, would be to de-colonize our public, artistic, and intellectual spaces from the political and social forces that are preying upon and destabilizing them. US Americans’ attention, politics, histories, and daily lives are for sale to a myriad of interests with an equally wide array of political, social, and economic goals. These same US Americans have been complicit with and passive in the face of that selloff. Because of this, these decades-old problems of freedom, art, and robust public life have only compounded.63 It remains to be seen whether the current trends in Western democracies toward nativism, nationalism, and jingoism (with Brexit, Alternative für Deutschland [AfD, the right-wing “Alternative for Germany”], and France’s Le Front national party, for example) will spur the reexamination of the power of celebrity in the public sphere, but Mother Courage’s lessons and Streep’s recent public sparring with Trump offer a possible solution: reveal the wielders and structures of power, reveal their weaknesses, and promote solidarity and political action in the public.

61

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Chris Westgate, Brecht, Broadway, and United States Theater (Newcastle, UK : Cambridge Scholar’s Publishing, 2007), xv–xvi. Victor and Russonello, “Meryl Streep’s Speech.” Lena Partzsch, “The Power of Celebrities in Global Politics,” Celebrity Studies 6:2 (2015), 178–91.

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Art That Critiques Symbols

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Montage as Meme: Learning from the Radical Avant-Gardes Sabine Kriebel

Critical photomontage—reconfigured photographs deployed for cultural resistance— seems to be making a comeback in the public sphere as meme (Figure  8.1). Though occasionally visible in the opening decades of the twenty-first century as protest or mockery (Figure  8.2), photomontage has largely been in the service of advertising, reinforcing the values of capitalist consumerism rather than functioning, as it once did, as a resistant aesthetic within media culture. The series of Tanqueray Gin ads featuring a certain Mr. Jenkins, whose disjunctive marionette body not only recollects Dadaist corporeality but also alcoholic disinhibition, is but one prominent example. Other campaigns, such as Puma’s Superstructure ads of 2009, flagrantly invert radical politics for capitalist ends (Figure 8.3). This global sportswear corporation literally capitalized on Gustavs Klucis’ avant-garde Soviet montage aesthetics in 2009, refunctioning the destabilizations of oblique angles, Marxist terminology, and a counter-capitalist

Figure 8.1: Anonymous, Portrait of Donald Trump, 2016, retweeted by chelsanity. 135

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Figure 8.2: Anonymous, Appropriation of John Heartfield’s Self Portrait with President Zörgiebel, 1929 for use in the London student protests. Mona Lisa beheads George Osborne, British Conservative Party politician and Chancellor of the Exchequer, 2014, internet meme.

imaginary to launch Puma footwear. Though most likely lost on the passer-by, the ad makes the very definition of Marxist superstructure manifest: the glossy photographic advertisement for exalted sport shoes embodies the institutions and culture that result from the underlying capitalist economic base. Montage here is in the service of the Marxist fetish, marketing exchange value in an appropriated Communist idiom. It turns out that the startling disjunctures of photographic re-contextualization remain tried and true tactics for soliciting the consumer gaze and interest, both optically and haptically. However, since the US elections of 2016, reconfigured photographic appropriations explicitly designed to subvert systems of power have returned with a vengeance. They have done so primarily in social media, where they can be posted, re-circulated, and commented upon by a broad public. Largely anonymous, these pictures amalgamate image excerpts sourced from the Web into cohesive symbolic units with suggestive potential (Figure 8.4). Amalgamate, meaning “formed into a soft mass,” seems to be an apt formulation here, suggesting something pliable and reconfigurable, in contrast to the machine metaphors recruited to characterize montage of the twentieth century. Moreover, it is no longer necessary to violently transgress the pictorial host for image fragments as in the previous century, excising the desired unit with a sharp blade. Digital technologies allow for traceless abduction from the source, facilitating an offshoot from the host, and suggesting biological rather than industrial rhetoric. Montage, it has been argued, represented the symbolic form of the modern; its disjunctive cut-and-paste appropriations have, more effectively than any other medium, materialized the accelerated, mechanized, technologized, polysemic, and

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Figure 8.3: Puma Superstructure advertisement, Bus Stop in Berlin, Germany, 2009. Photograph by Author. disjointed experience of modern life under industrial capitalism.1 It was precisely in response to various crises in the twentieth century—world war, revolution, crisis of

1

Klaus Honnef, “Die Montage als ästhetisches Prinzip und als Modell der Alltagserfahrung,” in Montage als Kunstprinzip, Hilmar Frank, ed., (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1991); Annegret Jürgens-Kirchhoff, Technik und Tendenz der Montage (Lahn-Giessen: Anabas Verlag, 1978); Matthew Teitelbaum, ed., Montage and Modern Life, (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press, 1992).

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Figure 8.4: Anonymous, Portrait of Donald Trump, 2016, internet meme.

authority, capitalist instability, the advent of fascism—that photomontage emerged as a medium of critique and destabilization, its formal tactics and its targets adjusting to the very conditions that spawned its critique. As such, it proved to be a flexible, highly versatile medium whose contemporaneity changed with context, but whose basic premise remained the critical re-contextualization of disparate signs. The materially disjunctive photomontage aesthetic of rips, seams, and fissures, a byproduct of the process of making, was allied with an affect of shock, violence, and agitation. That affect was usefully wielded as a stimulus for resistance, opposition, confrontation, and change.2 It was not an aesthetic that melded easily with consumer or popular culture, though advertisers certainly did try.3 Rupture was disquieting. As photographic reproductive technology became increasingly sophisticated in the late 1920s and early 1930s, able to summon more powerfully seductive visual experiences on the printed page for an ever-widening audience, photomontage practitioners too

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For both contemporary and historical accounts of montage’s shock effects, see Brigid Doherty, “ ‘See: We Are All Neurasthenics!’ or, The Trauma of Dada Montage,” Critical Inquiry, Autumn 1997, 82–132. Dr. Walter F. Schubert, “René Ahrlé,” Die Reklame, July, 500–5 and Carl F. Ronsdorf, “Die Photographie in der Technischen Werbung,” Die Reklame, February 1932, 105–7.

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availed of available technological complexity, moving from scissors, paste, and a collection of picture magazines to a photojournalistic apparatus that included darkrooms, professional re-touchers, photo agencies, as well as the benefits of artistic training that cultivated composition and construction.4 Photomontages infiltrated the public sphere as hallucinatory complements to photographs, offering a parallel reality as a self-consciously artificial, ludic, and phantasmic experience or tailoring existing pictorial evidence to the requirements of political ideology or commercial commissions, generating what we might now call a visual archive of “alternative facts.” Importantly, and unlike today, photomontage’s pictorial artifice was manifest, as picture technology still could not suture together a perfect likeness of a photograph; it could only simulate it imperfectly. The potential deceptions of contemporary photomontage, by contrast, are considerable, thanks to the instantaneity and scope of social media and the imperceptible interventions of digital replication, which in spite of the craft metaphor of “cut and paste” lifts visual information stealthily. Equally considerable is contemporary photomontage’s potential for intervention, subversion, and resistance, should the medium —or perhaps it is more apt in the digital age to call it a technique, keeping intact its etymological roots in art—find a proper renaissance in the twenty-first century.5 Certainly, since the economic crash of 2008, North America and Europe have witnessed upheavals similar to those of the early twentieth century, though crucially, war on home territory is not one of them. (War abroad is another matter when it comes to public perceptions, for the violence to human bodies and minds, as well as to the landscape, is distant and easily disavowed.) Nevertheless, increasing political radicalization, galvanized by capitalist destabilization, has spawned a resurgence of far-right groups, mounting racism and jingoism, the re-emergence of patriotic populism, and the increasing delegitimation of established political parties. We are privy to a mind-bogglingly vast and swift onslaught of visual information proliferated through the internet and social media, to a degree that the anxieties voiced in the 1920s about the “blizzard,” “flood,” “inundation,” and even “pestilence” of mass-reproduced photographs seem charmingly quaint.6 Perhaps because of the unprecedented amount of information in circulation, we also observe a

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See for example Raoul Hausmann’s call for thoughtfully composed montages in Michael Erlhoff, ed., Raoul Hausmann: Sieg Triump Tabak mit Bohnen, Texte bis 1933, vol. 2 (Frühe Texte der Moderne: Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 1982), 130–2. In 2009, in the wake of the financial meltdown, Charlie White revisited the aesthetics of collage in a contemporary culture dense with information layers, “remixes, mash-ups, and reshuffles” similarly anticipatory of a resurgence of a recombinatory aesthetic, though ultimately noted its similarity to late-capitalist adolescent culture. “Cut and Paste: The Collage Impulse Today,” ArtForum, March 2009, 210–15. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” The Mass Ornament, Thomas Y. Levin, ed., trans., (Harvard University Press, 1995), 47; Rudolf Arnheim, “Die Bilder in der Zeitung” Die Weltbühne April 9, 1929, 564; Edlef Köppen, “The Magazine as a Sign of the Times,” Der Hellweg 5, no. 24, (June 17, 1925); reprinted in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, Anton Kaes, et al., eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 644.

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widespread distrust of information sources, giving the term “Fake News” critical power in certain circles. The inequities of capitalism are even more manifest, with the chasm between the one percent and the rest ever growing, and natural catastrophes propelled by global warming are increasingly apocalyptic. If the relation between form and history is concomitant, then we might well expect a resurgence of critical photomontage in the public sphere. Photography, as its critics have long charged, is a malleable, superficial, deceptive medium capable of mass delusion. Though the photograph seems to offer up a reliable reproduction of reality—a document of the world out there—and though it still functions in discourses of veracity, it is, as Roland Barthes has phrased it, a “message without a code,” an empty sign reliant on supplemental discourse.7 Change the supplement, and you can change the photograph’s meaning. Already in 1929, the critic Ernst Kállai called photography “The most corruptible, pliable medium of orientation, but also disorientation, for all.”8 Moreover, as Walter Benjamin famously argued, photography can show us material surfaces in detail and lend mundane objects “cosmic” significance simply by being photographically framed, but cannot illuminate the social or material relations—that is, the relations between things or among people— behind these detail-rich façades.9 Benjamin asserts that, for the production of knowledge, “something must in fact be built up, something artificial, posed.”10 Montage, in its photographic and filmic forms, is a synthetic “build up” of multiple image units and words—signs that can reframe pictorial meaning and context—and steer knowledge production of knowledge. The more varied the amalgamation of signs, the more complex becomes meaning. Ranging from the symbolic to the allegorical, from the easily legible to the impenetrable, montage serves a variety of ideological functions, from cultural reinforcement to political resistance. Arguably the most ambitious use of photomontage as political opposition was the work of the German artist John Heartfield (pseudonym of Helmut Herzfeld), not only in terms of scale but also tactics. His work rethought the role of photographic mimesis as a category of resistance. His mass-circulation photomontages from the 1920s and 1930s, which ranged from the immediately legible to the conceptually complex, agitated on behalf of the communist Left and against the fascist Right, which Marxist theory understood to be the inevitable extension of imperialist capitalism. In his eightyear production for the communist Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ ), Heartfield’s sophisticated response to the 1930s experience of capitalist crisis, political polarization, mounting authoritarianism, disintegrating democratic process, and a widespread distrust of information was, paradoxically, to embed his montages in the very material

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8 9

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Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” Image, Music, Text, Stephen Heath, ed. and trans., (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 17. Ernst Kállai, “Schöne Photos, billige Photos,” Die Weltbühne, November 12, 1929, 736–8. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol.  2 (London and Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 526. Benjamin, 526.

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and cognitive conditions they sought to illuminate. That is, he immersed his critique of the information economy of the mass press in the mass press, employing its visual tactics to subvert it, just as he used the speech and propaganda tactics of his opponents to sabotage them. Heartfield’s subversive montages, in other words, fed on the matter they maligned, operating in dangerous proximity to the realm of appearances that are their target. They take, to paraphrase T.J. Clark, the forms of the present deeply inside, at the risk of ventriloquism, in the hopes that such mimicry could offer the possibility of true destabilization—to “teach the petrified forms how to dance by singing them their own song.”11 Instead of visibly deconstructing mass-media images, laying bare the device and declaring its artificiality, as did his earlier photomontage practices within Dada, Heartfield constructed seamlessly manufactured montages that imitate, indeed ventriloquize, photographic illusionism and its reinforcement of a certain reality in the mass press. These montages emulate the hallucinatory pictorial field that they critique, conjuring both illusionism and disillusionment within the same picture frame. Herein, I argue, lies the potential of digital montage.12 One classic example of Heartfield’s critical incursion in press tactics is a 1930 montage captioned “Whoever reads bourgeois newspapers becomes blind and deaf.”13 (Figure 8.5). Itself embedded in the radical Left picture magazine AIZ , the photomontage challenges the viewer with a suffocating image of media-induced myopia—what today we would call a media bubble. We are confronted by a coal carrier, identifiable by the leather harness that cinches his torso, whose head is wrapped in the newspapers Vorwärts and Tempo. These papers were affiliated with the Social Democratic Party, the other key leftist party in the Weimar Republic which the communists considered to be a sell-out of working class ideals and in collusion with the dominant values of bourgeois capitalist society. This manual laborer cannot see, hear, or speak; he is mummified by the newspapers that hegemonize his perception. The reader holding the AIZ in his hands would be faced with the illusion of a life-sized portrait of a man trapped by the press, appearing to be so real, so present (the rough texture of his shirt is almost tangible in the right foreground) so as to be psychologically unsettling. And that disturbance is the whole point: the beholder is meant to feel troubled by this image of perceptual entrapment at the same time that he is made dialectically aware of his own liberated critical insight, as a reader of the politically incisive AIZ . The montage seeks to produce an active beholder, antithetical to the submissive coal carrier. In its seamless construction, with all traces of manufacture painstakingly concealed, the montage mimics the holism of a unified photograph, “as if ” this portrait were real, continuous

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13

T.J. Clark, “Modernism, Postmodernism, and Steam,” October 100, Spring 2002: 161. I argue the case of John Heartfield’s political critique most extensively in Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2014). An extensive analysis of this montage in its media, political, and aesthetic contexts can be found in Kriebel, Revolutionary Beauty, Chapter  2. Refer also to Judith Brodie, ed., Shock of the News (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.: Lund Humphries, 2012).

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Figure 8.5: John Heartfield, Wer Bürgerblätter liest wird blind und taub! Weg mit den Verdummungsbandagen! (Whoever reads bourgeois newspapers becomes blind and deaf. Away with the stultifying bandages!), AIZ 9, no. 6, 1930. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-S194). with the world beyond the journal. The picture’s devices imitate photography to intervene in its very processes of mechanically reproduced illusionism, which had in the 1920s become the dominant mode of ideological production, reproduction, and subject construction. Consider another photomontage that inhabited existing codes in order to upend them. Using National Socialist slogans and gestures against themselves, Heartfield inverts Hitler’s claim to a popular mandate in a 1932 photomontage called “The Meaning of the Hitler Salute.” (Figure  8.6). Excised from a publicity photograph of Hitler saluting the SA (the Sturmabteilung), Hitler pays homage to a fat capitalist with

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Figure 8.6: John Heartfield, Der Sinn des Hitlergrusses (The Meaning of the Hitler Salute), AIZ 11, no. 42, 1932. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-S194).

a gleaming diamond ring who deposits a wad of cash into Hitler’s outstretched hand.14 “Millions stand behind me!” declares the caption, while the photomontage illuminates the nature of those millions. Importantly, this montage circulated on the front cover of the AIZ two weeks before national elections and as a cover picture, was designed to

14

The pre-publication mock-up of the montage as well as the originary publicity photograph are reproduced in Roland März, Heartfield Montiert, 1930–1938 (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1993), 64–5. More than any other publication, März’s volume reprints sources and prepatory maquettes of Heartfield’s photomontages.

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elucidate the nature of Hitler’s support for a broad audience, summoning not only habitual readers of the journal but anyone encountering it at a newspaper kiosk or elsewhere in the public sphere. The pictorial seamlessness in photomontage—arrived at with laborious means in the 1930s, involving hours of careful photographing, retouching, re-photographing, tonal adjustments, not to mention the legwork of assembling a paper photo archive—is conjured quite easily today. With a Google image search, a swift digital cut and paste, and some retouching with the electronic brush, it is possible to create hallucinatory montages rooted in the real. Take, for instance, Texas-based artist Phillip Kremer, who produces distorted images with his iPhone and posts them on Instagram (Figure 8.7). His “[q]uick and dirty facelifts,” as one writer dubbed them, have thousands of followers including celebrities Katy Perry and John Mayer, but have also garnered corporate censorship.15 He was blocked from Instagram twice, Facebook once, and operates a Tumblr Archive, a platform known for its comparably tolerant content policy. With no formal training as artist or photographer—he works as a warehouse foreman for a chemical storage company in Houston—Kremer’s impetus is consolation, not radical politics. “I changed someone’s portrait and my mood got better. I can take a soul away with the swipe of a finger. . . . Better than drugs.”16 His motivation is the frisson of surprise, revivifying the petrified corporate or celebrity face through repulsion. [T]he feeling I am most thrilled with . . . [is] not knowing how I feel . . . I don’t think the process really matters as much as the feeling we get when viewing the images. Whether the image is cut and paste, shopped or painted doesn’t matter to me as much as the giggle or creep I get from the old businessman staring back at me.17

We might say this is a worker’s expression of anomie under capitalism, reviving the self by reconfiguring the faces of power into horror. But what is at stake in such grotesque morphologies? While they bear the potential for subversion, pleasure not politics is their aim. These are not the dialectical juxtapositions of re-contextualized, semioticallyladen fragments that Marxist theorists hoped would illuminate repressed conditions. Nor do they aspire to be. They are reconfigured pixels that produce a shiver, a laugh, some comic relief. While the potency of laughter is never to be underestimated, for it can reshape our inner lives and social bonds thus helping us to cope, as modern montages these pictures sooner represent Georg Lukács’ suspicions that photomontage amounted to a good joke.18 Nor do Kremer’s pictures stem from “holy hate”—the term that a younger Lukács gave to righteous satirical humor that, through its hyperbole and

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Jon Feinstein, “Phillip Kremer Might be the most Terrifying Artist on the Web,” March 3, 2015, http://hafny.org/blog/2015/2/phillip-kremer-might-be-the-most-terrifying-artist [accessed January 11, 2018]. Feinstein. Feinstein. Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance,” in Fredric Jameson, ed., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1990), 43.

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Figure 8.7: Phil Kremer, Portrait of Donald Trump, n.d. Reprinted with permission of the artist. excess, reveals some aspect of disenchanted reality.19 While Kremer certainly mines excess and hyperbole—indeed the repellent affect of bodily fluids, mucus, sweat are part of the shocking charge of these pictures, making his lampoons laughable and deeply repellent at once—their crude corporeality signifies disaffection with aspects of established culture, writ large. Kremer’s grotesques offer temporary psychic relief, not only to the maker but to his viewership of thousands, not necessarily profound insight into social and political conditions that might be reconfigured once laid bare, as cultural theorists of the 1920s and 1930s preferred. Arguably, more overtly political montages such as that represented in Figure  8.1 conflate visage and orifice in such a way as to illuminate the character of power. Such juxtapositions have a long history in the critique of power, but other than the frank, repellent, and uncanny fusion of orifices, offered in close-up, what does this digital montage contribute to our knowledge, other than reinforcement of a certain character type? So too with a similar photomontage fusing male potency and speech, though at least its setting refers obliquely to its critical context (Fig.  8.4). Imported from the second presidential debate, judging from the backdrop, this montage incorporates the lighting, staging, and effect of the media spectacle that made Trump in the first place. The debate took place two days after Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” revelations and

19

Georg Lukács, “Zur Frage der Satire,” (1932) in Georg Lukács. Essays über Realismus, Bd. 4 (Neuwied und Berlin: Luchterhand, 1971), 83–107.

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during the televised event that the Irish Times Washington Correspondent Simon Carswell characterized as having “raked new putrid depths that are being plumbed almost daily in this grotesque election campaign.”20 The grotesque and the vulgar, it seems, is a hallmark of the present age, and is resurfacing as critique in the pictures of the moment. Examples such as these may well be a page from the rulebook of the communist Left, which repeatedly warned its constituency in 1930 that not everyone can manufacture powerful photomontages. An article from the Arbeiter Fotograf, in 1930, a Münzenberg journal designed to educate and train a cadre of proletarian photo-reporters, noted that amateur efforts to recombine photographs sooner approximated kitsch than craft.21 Mass-circulation montage of the twentieth century has become in the digital age a “meme,” a term coined by scientist Richard Dawkins in the 1970s to describe phenomena that convey and transmit cultural practices, and like the meme, montage has transformed into a phenomenon that is related to but different from its original framework.22 The meme’s key characteristics are mobility and mutability. It is a sign that replicates ideas through mimesis but also is modified with varying human contexts, the repetition of transmission enabling a viral phenomenon. Analogous to genes, memes replicate, mutate, and react to selective pressures; and as analogs, they correspond to their referent yet differ. Returning to the context at stake here, the pictorial phenomenon of photography, variously called referential, mimetic, or analogous, is imitated yet transformed in the medium of seamless montage, generating images that simulate the real but are decisively virtual. They do not exist as material form as emphatically as their targets do exist as corporeal matter, in this instance Donald Trump. And ironically, it is precisely that raw corporeality that is most often their subject. Many of these montages seem to have no author, no origin, but are shared from media platform to media platform, radical in their absolute anonymity and immateriality, propelled through the matrix of the virtual. Materially speaking, we are a very long way from hand-made photomontages circulating in a picture magazine, though the conceptual origins of these images reside here. Pointing the way to more complex political and conceptual interventions in contemporary discourse are the following three examples. A memorial to the Bowling Green Massacre, for instance, is coded as a documentary photo of a material marker designed to concretize an ephemeral past (Figure  8.8). The Massacre was cited by Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway in January 2017 as a justification for the travel and immigration ban. Generated in a context of “alternative facts,” this montage of photograph and text memorializes an event that never happened. A hallucination of a hallucination, cloaked as material fact and durable marker, this picture is a testimony not just to false events but their construction. It inhabits the very critical field it aims to undermine. 20

21 22

Simon Carswell, The Irish Times, October 10, 2016, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/us/ analysis-second-presidential-debate-rakes-new-putrid-depths–1.2823544 [accessed September 25, 2017]. Anonymous, “Bilderkritik. Fotomontage,” Der Arbeiter Fotograf, no. 10, 1930, 239. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

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Figure 8.8: Creator unknown, Memorial Plaque of The Bowling Green Massacre, 2016, internet meme.

Or, consider a quietly effective fusion of physiognomies that uses the past to implicate the present (Figure 8.9). Trump’s features merged imperceptibly with those of Richard Nixon when the investigations into the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s server made headline news, suggesting parallels to the Watergate Scandal of the early 1970s. Similarly invoking the lessons of history as a warning to the present, another anonymous meme makes mockery of Trump’s midnight Twitter neologism covfefe (see Figure 0.1). A clever joke on the face of it, the montage imitates the cover design of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but through implication links Trump’s political program to Hitler’s right-wing, racist, authoritarian, narcissistic text. Divesting Trump of substantive gravitas, this imaginary construction recalls Karl Marx’s observation that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce. What, then, are the conditions in which critical montage could occur in the digital age? What are the central stakes? Certainly, the capacity to change a photograph—and potentially to lie or hyperbolize—without any traces of intervention is one prominent

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Figure 8.9: Creator unknown, Fusion of Donald Trump and Richard Nixon, 2017, internet meme.

hazard. So too is the lightning speed with which misinformation can be circulated on the internet. What follow are six points of departure, in no particular order, that the example of historical avant-garde tactics can offer to current cultures of resistance: 1.

2.

3.

4.

Given the proliferating mass-media landscape, an embedded critique within the terms, codes, and aesthetics of the internet is elemental. More specifically, critical projects that invoke but subvert the aesthetic and dialogic conventions of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc., offer a platform for immanent critique. The current culture of sensationalism, self-promotion, and underlying malignancy begs for a critical ventriloquism that reveals its operations. In this culture of lies, alternative facts, fake news, trolls, avatars, and invisible virtual malignancies, develop practices rooted in a dialectics of illusionism and disclosure. Resistant montage cannot simply be a “surface phenomenon”—a play with mobile digital surfaces—but needs to reveal something more profound about the systems in operation. Effective critique must know its audience. What are its dreams, nightmares, and fears? How does a viewership stay attuned to resistant images in a visual matrix

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that is so fast, ubiquitous, ephemeral, and yet lodged in a system with deep, indelible memory? Effective critique understands its distribution system. How does the digital world work in terms of attention, sensation, staying power, systems of proliferation and production, and data archiving? Photomontage, I have argued elsewhere, is at its most vital between despair and desire, pessimism and longing. The contemporary images I have discussed here remain largely superficial in their inquiry because their impetus is rooted in variations of fear and loathing, that is, a one-sided motivation not galvanized by an underlying alternative. Desire and longing are often missing. For all of its faults, the Marxist analytical “system”—some called it a science, others an illusion23—that underpinned Heartfield’s works at least rooted them in a critical dialectics lending them a tension that differentiated them from straightforward grotesques of an enemy. And here, contemporary imagery reveals one of the often-observed lacunae in current political discourses, which is the absence of a well-formulated leftist desire.

A March 2016 article in the Guardian already stated its desire in the title: “Warhol demonized Nixon. Heartfield took on Hitler. Where is Trump’s artistic mauling?” The author, Jonathan Jones, writes: “If Trump’s assault on democracy is as dangerous as it seems . . . then America needs a Heartfield and quick. Or does it? There is just one problem with Warhol’s mockery of Nixon and Heartfield’s visceral images of Hitler. Neither made much impact. [I]t would take a lot more than photomontage to stop the Nazis.”24 The argument about art’s ineffectiveness is an old and rather tired one. Photomontage stopped neither Hitler nor Trump. But silence, fueled by cynicism, did not either.

23

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Accounts by adherents who later disavowed communism include François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals (London: Secker and Warburg, 1957), and Wolfgang Leonhard, Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder (Cologne: Kiepenhauer und Witsch, 2010). Jonathan Jones, “Warhol demonised Nixon. Heartfield took on Hitler. Where is Trump’s artistic mauling?” The Guardian, March 3, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2016/mar/03/donald-trump-where-is-political-art-satire [accessed January 11, 2018].

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On the Possibility of Resistance in Two Silverpoints by Otto Dix James van Dyke

What would qualify as an act of resistance for a German artist in the first two years of Hitler’s dictatorship? That is the question that this essay, about two drawings made in 1934 by the famous painter Otto Dix, considers. It is prompted by the visibility of words like “resist” and “resistance” in the contemporary political culture, and by their frequent and sometimes imprecise or inflated use by art historians.1 It is based in the voluminous work of numerous historians who have sought to develop an analytical framework to distinguish between various forms of resistance (from aristocratic to Communist, for instance), on the one hand, and between resistance and other, lesser forms of nonconformist behavior in Nazi Germany, on the other. Thirty years ago, Detlef J.K. Peukert, to name one, established a useful scale of dissidence from “nonconformist behavior” through refusal and protest to resistance. While he acknowledged that the totalitarian aspirations of the Nazi regime politicized areas of behavior that would “normally lie below the threshold of police intervention,” he distinguished resistance from the rest.2 Resistance was reserved for “those forms of behavior which were rejections of the Nazi regime as a whole and were attempts, varying with the opportunities available to the individuals concerned, to help bring about the regime’s overthrow.”3 Ian Kershaw argued similarly when he distinguished between popular opposition and organized resistance, “in the narrow sense of the political underground or conspiracies against the regime.”4 It is important to maintain such analytical distinctions in art historical writing about the 1930s. Were the modern

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For instance, at the 2018 annual conference of the College Art Association, Molly Nesbit read a paper entitled “Duchamp’s Resistance” in a session entitled “Avant-Gardes and Varieties of Fascism.” Yet in her paper, she never stated that Duchamp joined the Résistance, unlike some of his friends and associates, in particular Mary Douglas. He engaged instead in a series of withdrawals that might be described as non-conformist acts or acts of refusal, but not as resistance in any strong sense. Detlev J.K. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life, transl. Richard Deveson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 83. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, 84. Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria, 1933–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 3.

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artists written about most by art historians engaged in resistance, as it is defined by such historians? Or did they dissent while others, today largely forgotten by art history, resisted?

Otto Dix, 1933–5 The formation of Hitler’s government on January 30, 1933 and the events of the following weeks and months had disastrous effects on the career of Otto Dix, as they did for many prominent modern artists who had secured positions in state institutions since 1919. In April 1933, Dix was dismissed by new Nazi authorities in Saxony from his professorship because his pictures had allegedly weakened Germany’s military preparedness and because his political loyalty was doubtful. In May 1933, he complied with an official request to resign from the prestigious, representative Prussian Academy of the Arts, to which he had been admitted in 1931, though he stated for the record that he had never been a member of a political party. In September, War Cripples, which in 1920 had been shown in the First International Dada Fair, and Trench, the controversial monumental painting that had done much to establish Dix’s national and international reputation as an important artist, were dragged out of the storerooms of public art collections in Dresden and became centerpieces of “Degenerate Art,” one of many anti-modernist exhibitions organized in 1933 by local Party activists in German cities.5 The market for modern art in general and for Dix’s work in particular, always fragile and strongly suppressed by the world economic crisis since 1929, seems to have withered almost completely.6 By early 1934, the painter was in despair.7 The effects of these events on Dix’s productivity were predictably severe. The appointment to the Dresden academy in 1926 had emancipated the artist from the dictates of the market. He had certainly continued to show his work in private commercial galleries, but on his own terms. After the appointment, one of the first

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Christoph Zuschlag, “Entartete Kunst”: Ausstellungsstrategien im Nazi-Deutschland (Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1995). Many have written about the political events of 1933, the Nazi dictatorship, and their effects on Dix’s work and career. Publications by leading scholars are, for example: Dietrich Schubert, Otto Dix mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, 7th edition (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2008 [1980]); Lothar Fischer, Otto Dix: Ein Malerleben in Deutchland (Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1981); Birgit Schwarz, “‘Das zeitlose Grauen der Welt packen’: Methodenkritische Überlegungen zu den ‘Widerstandsbildern’ der dreißiger Jahre,” in Otto Dix (1891–1969): Bilder Bibel und andere christliche Themen, exh. cat. (Albstadt: Städtische Galerie, 1995), 41–62; Rainer Beck, “ ‘Flucht ist immer falsch’—Inneres Exil als Emigration: Otto Dix im ‘Dritten Reich,’ ” in Otto Dix in Chemnitz, ed. Thomas Bauer-Friedrich and Ingrid Mössinger, exh. cat. Kunstsammlung Chemnitz (Munich: Hirmer, 2011), 15–30 (originally published in Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte, 34 [2009]: 149–78); and Olaf Peters, Otto Dix—Der unerschrockene Blick: Eine Biographie (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2013). See, for instance, Dix’s letter to I.B. Neumann, written shortly after his dismissal from the Dresden art academy and quoted in Schubert, Otto Dix, 110.

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things that he had done was to cancel his exclusive contract with his long-time dealer Karl Nierendorf. Furthermore, in the seven years of his tenure Dix had been able to produce, among many other things, a set of extraordinarily labor-intensive, unmarketable, monumental works that reprised the themes of his scandalous avantgarde successes: the public attention generated by his large collage Barricade in 1920 and 1921, the police seizure of Woman Before a Mirror and ensuing obscenity trial in 1923 (Dix was acquitted), and the heated public debate over Trench in 1924. Conversely, the events in 1933 resulted in an almost total collapse in the number of paintings he completed. That year, Dix managed to finish only two portraits, one landscape, and one large allegory, The Seven Deadly Sins.8 The last has usually been described either as an immediate and robust critical response to the Nazi assumption of power in general, or as a caricature of several of Dix’s conservative colleagues in the academy and new art-political authorities in Dresden.9 It is only the earliest of several paintings that are generally viewed as evidence of Dix’s dissidence. Chief among them are The Triumph of Death of 1934, Jewish Cemetery in Randegg of 1935, Flanders of 1936, and the series of depictions of the popular Catholic Saint Christopher that he began to make in 1938. Dix’s production as a painter temporarily collapsed during the first year of Hitler’s regime, but, like Paul Klee in Düsseldorf, he continued to draw in the face of acute political and professional crisis.10 The drawings that he had made since Hitler became Reich Chancellor—mostly self-portraits, portraits, and landscapes—were well represented in his important exhibition with the prominent painter Franz Lenk in Karl Nierendorf’s private gallery in Berlin in early 1935.11 Two of them, Ephraim the Dairyman (Der Senn Ephraim) and Joseph the Dairyman (Der Senn Joseph) are the subject of this essay (Figures 9.1 and 9.2). Though the scholarly focus on Dix’s ambitious paintings and prints is understandable, given his public professional self-definition and prevalent artistic hierarchies, it is rather surprising that these drawings have received no extended scholarly attention.12 On the one hand, Dix was a prolific draftsman, making thousands of drawings over the course of his career in the form of sketches and caricatures,

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Fritz Löffler, Otto Dix (1891–1969): Oeuvre der Gemälde (Recklinghausen: Verlag Aurel Bongers, 1981), 44–6. Heidrun Ehrke-Rotermund, “Camoufliertes Malen im ‘Dritten Reich’: Otto Dix zwischen Widerstand und Innerer Emigration,” Exilforschung 12 (1994), 126–55; Schwarz, “‘Das zeitlose Grauen der Welt packen’ ”; Dietrich Schubert, “Otto Dix: 1933—‘Die Sieben Todsünden,’ ” in Architektur im Museum, 1977–2012: Festschrift Winfried Nerdinger, ed. Uwe Kiessler (Munich: Technische Universität, 2012), 232–45; Birgit Schwarz, “‘Long life (occasionally) tendency in art!’: Dix and the Dialectics of Modernism,” in Otto Dix and the New Objectivity, exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 62–71; and James A. van Dyke, “Otto Dix’s Folk Culture,” in Ibid., 84–97. Wolfgang Kersten, ed., Paul Klee als Zeichner, 1921–1933, exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, 1985); Pamela Kort, ed., Paul Klee 1933, exh. cat. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2003). Christina von Elm, “Otto Dix und Franz Lenk—‘Zwei deutsche Maler’: Geschichte und Hintergründe der Lanschaftsausstellung von 1935,” Wissenschaftliches Jahrbuch (Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen) (1999), 30–67. They are only mentioned in Elm, “Otto Dix und Franz Lenk—‘zwei deutsche Maler,’ ” 31, 49–50.

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preparatory studies, and independent works of art.13 This pair in particular exemplifies an important development in Dix’s technique in the late years of the Weimar Republic and early years of the Nazi dictatorship. On the other hand, the two drawings are not quite unique but certainly very unusual in Dix’s art, in terms of their subject matter. Examining their technique, iconography, and the circumstances of their production, this essay argues that Ephraim the Dairyman and Joseph the Dairyman testify to the continuation of Dix’s ability, even at a time when most critics believed him long since to have lost his artistic vitality and radical edge, to produce critical, subversive pictures, despite his consistent refusal to commit himself to partisan politics and to the manufacture of the propaganda and tendentious art expected of Communist artists in

Figure 9.1: Otto Dix, Der Senn Joseph (Joseph the Dairyman), 1934. Silverpoint and pencil on cardboard. 11.7 × 5.8 in., 32.2 × 24.8 cm. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Inv SZ Dix 12. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche Museen Berlin / Art Resource, NY. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

13

Ulrike Lorenz, Otto Dix: Das Werkverzeichnis der Zeichnungen und Pastelle, 8 vols. (Bonn: VDG , 2003).

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Figure 9.2: Otto Dix, Der Senn Ephraim (Ephraim the Dairyman), 1934. Silverpoint and pencil on primed paper. 11.7 × 6 in., 32.5 × 25 cm. Private Collection. Photo: Courtesy of Otto Dix Estate, Bevaix, Switzerland. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. particular. In particular, this essay intends to show that these two drawings undermined widespread stereotypes about Jews that played a fundamental role in Nazi ideology. Yet they are not unequivocal or agitational. They were not produced in the context of organized resistance, like John Heartfield’s collages for the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, Karl Schwesig’s print series on his torture at the hands of the SA , or more instrumental, ephemeral images that circulated in the underground press or were inscribed onto the walls of German cities.14 They are not even like George Grosz’s drawings of 14

Relatively little attention has been paid to the ephemeral imagery of various resistance groups in Nazi Germany, with the exception of the White Rose’s use of flyers and graffiti in Munich in 1942 and 1943. For a few further examples of Communist graffiti and stickers, and discussions of images made for the underground Communist press, see: Karl-Ludwig Hofmann, “Antifaschistische Kunst in Deutschland: Bilder, Dokumente, Kommentare,” in Widerstand statt Anpassung: Deutsche Kunst im Widerstand gegen den Faschismus, 1933–1945, exh. cat. (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1980), 34–77, esp. 40–6; Peter Ludwigs: Malerei, Grafik, Dokumente, exh. cat. (Düsseldorf: Stadtmuseum, 1982), 17–18, 27–31; Allan Merson, Communist Resistance in Nazi Germany (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), 65, 104, 241.

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Nazi torture, a few of which found their way in 1936 into the print portfolio Interregnum, which he published while in New York exile.15 Hence, it is problematic to describe them as an art of resistance, if we follow the definitions of resistance advanced by Peukert and Kershaw. It is more accurate to argue that Ephraim the Dairyman and Joseph the Dairyman may have functioned as signs of individual nonconformity, dissent, or refusal in the first phase of Hitler’s dictatorship, even as they were ambiguous enough to be publicly exhibited and institutionally absorbed. They thus point to the complex, or at least unclear, reality of the first months and years of Hitler’s regime for an artist like Dix, and indicate the need for terminological precision.

Silverpoint and German Art Ephraim the Dairyman and Joseph the Dairyman are silverpoint drawings. This is an old, demanding technique, in which a metal wire or stylus is drawn across a sheet of paper prepared with an abrasive ground, that Dix first tried in 1931. He was perhaps encouraged by a colleague at the Dresden art academy, Kurt Wehlte, who specialized in research into artistic techniques and materials; in 1935, Wehlte published an article on silverpoint in the journal of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts.16 In any case, the technique became an important part of Dix’s output of works on paper in the 1930s. In 1933, at least twenty-nine silverpoint self-portraits, portraits, and landscapes constituted the bulk of his overall production. In 1934, that number grew to about forty-five drawings, including Joseph the Dairyman and Ephraim the Dairyman. Between 1931 and 1944, Dix made over two hundred silverpoint drawings.17 For this reason, recent books and exhibition catalogues on metalpoint techniques invariably mention him as one of its most important practitioners in the twentieth century.18 Dix’s silverpoints are much more loosely, energetically gestural than contemporaneous silverpoint drawings by Christian Schad, which, like fifteenth- and sixteenth-century

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On Grosz and Schwesig, see: Karl Schwesig, Schlegelkeller (Düsseldorf: Galerie Remmert und Barth, 1983); Annette Baumeister, “Verfolgung und Widerstand, 1933–1945,” in Karl Schwesig: Leben und Werk (Berlin: Fröhlich und Kaufmann, 1984), 61–75; Alexander Dückers, George Grosz: The Graphic Work. Das druckgaphische Werk. A Catalogue Raisonné (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1995); and James A. van Dyke, “Torture and Masculinity in George Grosz’s Interregnum,” New German Critique 119, vol. 40, no. 2 (2013), 137–65. Kurt Wehlte, “Silberstift,” Die Kunstkammer 10 (August 1935), 20–2. On Dix’s presumable contact with Wehlte, see Bruce Weber, “Modern and Contemporary Drawing in Metalpoint,” in Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns, eds Stacy Sell and Hugo Chapman, exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 229. Weber, “Modern and Contemporary Drawing in Metalpoint,” 229. In addition to Sell and Chapman, eds, Drawing in Silver and Gold, see Thea Burns, The Luminous Trace: Drawing and Writing in Metalpoint (London: Archetype, 2012), 170.

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examples, were built of lines so fine and tightly controlled that they are scarcely discernible to the naked eye.19 Nonetheless, it is not hard to understand the appeal of the crisply linear technique, which had been used for centuries to make durable drawings of extraordinary verisimilitude and subtle precision, to an artist associated with an uncompromising realism. Furthermore, the special demands of silverpoint were also clear. The stylus might glide with exhilarating, supple smoothness across the ground, according to the American artist John Storrs, another artist who adopted the technique in the 1920s, but once a line was made, it was difficult or impossible to erase (or to smudge).20 In this respect, silverpoint was akin to the translucent oil glazes of Northern Renaissance painting, another old, difficult technique to the revival of which Dix had contributed in the 1920s. It too could be used to produce pictures of uncommonly vivid verisimilitude and was resistant to alteration or correction. Using silverpoint thus supported the professor’s claim to consummate craftsmanship and artistic mastery even as accusations by National Socialists that Dix was “degenerate” or an “Art Bolshevist” were in the ascendant. It should come as no surprise that one of Dix’s largest silverpoints of 1933 was a self-portrait showing the artist with stylus and paper in hand (Figure 9.3). Dix depicted himself in a posture of sober yet defiant self-affirmation, reminding one of the self-portrait with palette and brush that Jacques-Louis David painted at an earlier historical moment of extreme political and professional crisis, the fall of Robespierre and the radical painter’s ensuing imprisonment.21 Dix’s silverpoints of the 1930s not only conveyed a message about his skill as a draftsman in general, but also contributed in particular to his ongoing critical artistic dialogue with the work of Old Masters whose names were frequently invoked in discussions of national identity and the essence of German art.22 Though metalpoints were made by artists all over Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the technique is closely associated with Northern Europe, and in particular with artists who later became canonical figures in Germany. Among them was Hans Baldung-Grien, to whose work “Hans Baldung Dix,” as George Grosz nicknamed his friend and colleague in 1934, felt a strong affinity.23 Indeed, since 1922 commentators and scholars had described Baldung-Grien as a powerfully imaginative, wildly expressive, vitally erotic, radically realistic, emphatically German artist, terms that could have been and were

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See, for instance, Schad’s Liebende Knaben (1929), in the collection of the Museen der Stadt Aschaffenburg and reproduced in Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann, eds, New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919–1933, exh. cat. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Munich: Prestel, 2015), 282. Weber, “Modern and Contemporary Drawing in Metalpoint,” 228. On David’s painting, see T.J. Clark, “The Look of Self-Portraiture,” in Self Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary, eds Anthony Bond and Joanna Woodall, exh. cat. (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2005), 57–65. On this affinity in general, see Birgit Schwarz, “ ‘Kunsthistoriker sagen Grünewald . . .’ Das Altdeutsche bei Otto Dix in den zwanziger Jahren,” Jahrbuch der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen in Baden-Württemberg 28 (1991), 143–63. George Grosz, Briefe, 1913–1959, ed. Herbert Knust (Reinbek bei Hamburg; Rowohlt, 1979), 202, 324. See also Schwarz, “Das Altdeutsche bei Otto Dix,” 143, 146.

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Figure 9.3: Otto Dix, Selbstbildnis als Zeichner (Self-Portrait Drawing), 1933. Silverpoint and pencil on primed paper. 12.8 × 18.6 in., 58.3 × 47.2 cm. Inv. SZ Dix 10. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche Museen Berlin / Jörg P. Anders / Art Resource, NY. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. applied equally well to Dix.24 In late 1934, this view was reiterated in two publications. The first was an essay in the brochure that accompanied an exhibition at the KaiserFriedrich-Museum in Berlin, which wanted to “bring to life the treasures of the German people’s painting (dem deutschen Volk die Schätze seiner Malerei . . . lebendig

24

See, for example, Hermann Schmitz, Hans Baldung gen. Grien (Künstler-Monographien, 113) (Bielefeld und Leipzig: Velhagen & Klasing, 1922); and Hans Curjel, Hans Baldung Grien (München: O.C. Recht, 1923). In 1934, the prominent critic Bruno E. Werner asserted an identity between the work of Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, Albrecht Altdorfer, and Hans Holbein d.J. and that of Barlach, Nolde, Lehmbruck, Kolbe, Klee, Feininger, Marc, Macke, Beckmann, and Dix (he did not, admittedly, discuss Baldung-Grien): “Wir sehen das Revolutionäre, Protestierende, wie wir ihm mit pamphletischen Zügen im 14. Jahrhundert, in der Reformationszeit und am Anfang des 17. Jahrhunderts begegnet sind, welches das Häßlich-Unmenschliche, ja Grauenvolle, das Radikal- Realistische zum Thema nimmt, um den Dualismus in der Welt zwischen der ursprünglichen göttlichen Idee und dem tatsächlichen menschlichen Sein erschütternd ins Bewußtsein zu rufen.” See Bruno E. Werner, Vom bleibenden Gesicht der deutschen Kunst (Berlin: Verlag die Runde, 1934), 125–6.

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werden zu lassen)”.25 The second was an article in Kunst der Nation, best known for its support of Expressionism as an authentically national, revolutionary art.26 While focused on Baldung-Grien’s painting, both also drew attention to his drawings. BaldungGrien, they wrote, was second only to Albrecht Dürer in the number of drawings he had made, and he had been the first to see them as marketable works of art in their own right. The delicate lines of his silverpoints expressed an “affectionate devotion to the object” and testified to his “artisanal-artistic skill.” Large or small, they were “fully realized” works.27 His Karlsruhe Sketchbook, a pocket-sized codex made in the first half of the sixteenth century, equipped with a stylus, and filled with tiny silverpoint drawings, was a “delicacy [Köstlichkeit]”28 (Figure 9.4). It was an opportune moment for an artist like Dix to remind people of his longstanding engagement with the Old Masters of the national art-historical tradition, and to make and market drawings that emulated such widely admired things. Such work might well serve to support the claim to be a “prototype of a German painter in the best sense,” as Dix described himself in his letter of April 12, 1933 to Ludwig Justi, the national-conservative director of the Nationalgalerie who since 1919 had been instrumental in opening that most representative of German museums to modern art.29 Such drawings as Ephraim the Dairyman and Joseph the Dairyman were certainly produced in the context of an ever more pronounced critical and curatorial alignment of contemporary art and literature with national tradition and identity— perhaps most clearly articulated in the early 1930s by the reframing as “New Romantics” of certain artists formerly associated with the “New Objectivity.” Even Grosz, long associated with the Communist Party, asserted the value of German tradition in a prominent essay of 1931, rejecting the international cultural hegemony of Paris even as he reiterated his intransigently materialist, anti-authoritarian critique of capitalism and state power.30 References to national tradition after the First World War tend to be seen by modernist art history simply as reactionary, even proto-fascist cultural phenomena, but in the last years of the Weimar Republic this was not necessarily always the case.

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26 27 28 29 30

H. Möhle, introduction to Hans Baldung Grien 1484/1485 bis 1545: Gedächtnisausstellung zur 450. Wiederkehr seines Geburtsjahres, exh. cat. Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum (Berlin: Ausstellungssaal der Generalverwaltung der Staatlichen Museen, November 1934), 8. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are mine. Hermann Hieber, “Hans Baldung, gen. Grien,” Kunst der Nation 2, Nr. 23 (December 1, 1934), 5. Möhle, Hans Baldung Grien, 8. Hieber, “Hans Baldung, gen. Grien,” 5. Dix to Ludwig Justi, 12 April 1933, reprinted in Dix, Briefe, 866–7. George Grosz, “Unter anderem ein Wort für deutsche Tradition,” Das Kunstblatt 15, no. 3 (1931), reprinted in Künstlerschriften der 20er Jahre: Dokumente und Manifeste aus der Weimarer Republik, ed. Uwe M. Schneede, 3rd edition (Cologne: DuMont, 1986), 327–30. On Grosz’s relationship to the German Communist Party, and break with it in 1932, see Barbara McCloskey, George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

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Figure 9.4: Hans Baldung-Grien (1484–1545), Karlsruher Skizzenbuch (Sketchbook of Hans Baldung-Grien), fol. 58 recto. Münster Preacher Caspar Hedio, 1543. Silverpoint on primed paper. Inv.-Nr. VIII 1062. Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe. Photo: bpk / Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe / Art Resource, NY.

Resonant Drawings Ephraim the Dairyman and Joseph the Dairyman were not private pictures or working sketches, but rather were drawn on two almost identical sheets of paper that were close to the size of folios, hence somewhat larger than the typical sixteenth-century painted portraits to which they are compositionally related. Although by no means the largest drawings that Dix made in 1933 and 1934, they were much larger than the perforated sheets of the pocket-sized sketchbooks that Dix often had used through the 1920s. The

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two drawings had a certain physical presence. They were well suited for public display and sale at a time when Dix was overcoming his initial despair, had a few contacts within the cultural bureaucracy put into place by the National Socialist regime in Berlin, and was seeking to re-establish his career.31 Joseph and Ephraim, as Dix drew them, were neither beautifully ideal nor sublimely handsome, but rather interestingly picturesque, and the pair of drawings dwells on their disparate, highly individual, even crooked features. Joseph has a long and narrow face, Ephraim’s is wide and square. Joseph has a distinctively arched nose, Ephraim’s is straight. Joseph has a wispy mustache and stubble, Ephraim wears a full, curly beard. The hood of Joseph’s cloak or jacket hangs down his back, Ephraim’s is pulled up over his head. Joseph looks with contemplatively wide eyes into the distance with the hint of a furrowed brow, while Ephraim makes eye contact with the viewer, a smirking squint leaving crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. Yet even as the drawings accentuate the differences between the two men, Dix points to a commonality. The two sheets of paper are virtually identical in size and the conventional composition of the two busts is essentially the same. As the inscriptions at the top of the drawings indicate, the two men shared a trade. Assuming that they were real people whose rustic facial features and demeanors had caught Dix’s eye, they presumably lived in or near Randegg, the tiny village in southwestern Germany where Martha Dix’s ex-husband owned a castle. It was there that Dix and his family had retreated after his professional defeat in Dresden in 1933. Ephraim the Dairyman and Joseph the Dairyman are significant not only because of their references to the art of centuries past, but also because of their representation of German people in the present. Until 1934, Dix’s attention as a caricaturist and portraitist had been entirely focused on the bodies, faces, and habitus of the denizens of Germany’s postwar cities. The urban focus of this body of drawn, painted, and printed work, though unsystematic, can be related, to a certain extent, to the photographic social documentary project of August Sander, in which Dix and his wife, Martha, themselves appeared.32 In 1934, however, Dix suddenly shifted, depicting for the first time two residents of the countryside. This rare departure certainly has to be understood as a direct material byproduct of Dix’s move from Dresden; he evidently drew what was in front of him after

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Aside from his close ties to Lenk, Dix was in touch with Hans Weidemann, one of the leading figures of the group of young National Socialists who vociferously promoted Expressionism as the authentic artistic counterpart to the national revolution. In 1934, when Weidemann was shunted aside from his most influential positions in the course of the sharp debate over modern art between Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg, Nierendorf lamented that he (and presumably Dix) had lost one of their “strongest supports.” In an undated letter to Martha Dix, Dix mentioned that he knew Weidemann and Hans Hinkel, another high-ranking figure in the Nazi cultural administration. See Weidemann to Dix, 14 July 1933, Deutsches Kunstarchiv, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg, Nachlass Dix, I, C–782 (hereafter cited as GNM , DKA , Nl Dix); Karl Nierendorf to Dix, 26 March 1934, Archive of the Galerie Nierendorf, Berlin; and Dix, Briefe, 120. August Sander, Citizens of the Twentieth Century: Portrait Photographs, 1892–1952, ed. Gunther Sander, transl. Linda Keller, 4th printing (Cambridge, MS .: MIT Press, 1997 [1986]), 150, 160, 327.

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his move to the countryside, close to the Swiss border.33 However, drawings of such men, seen isolated from their environment, do not resemble the figures of Sander’s farmers, experiencing social modernization around 1900. They seem more closely related to the physiognomies of Erna Lendvai-Dircksen’s regionally rooted, seemingly timeless, racialized “face of the German folk,” though her photographs identified the sitters by trade and region rather than individual name (Figure  9.5).34 Dix had

Figure 9.5: Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, Der Hulebauer, Rauhe Alb (Swabian Farmer). 1932, as published in Das Deutsche Volksgesicht (Face of the German Folk). Photo: Author. 33

34

Dix does not seem to have returned to related subjects until between 1939 and 1943, when he made two portraits of anonymous “bearded farmers” and a number of sketches of men and women harvesting. See Lorenz, Otto Dix: Werkverzeichnis der Zeichnungen, vol. 4, 1554 and vol. 5, 2280–5. See, for instance, Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, Das Deutsche Volksgesicht (Berlin: Kulturelle Verlagsgesellschaft, 1932). Two very brief discussions of her work and thinking are found in Daniel H. Magilow, The Photography of Crisis: The Photo Essays of Weimar Germany (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 94; and Pepper Stetler, Stop Reading! Look! Modern Vision and the Weimar Photographic Book (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 187.

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composed drawings similarly for years by the time he made this pair, isolating the busts of his sitters on an empty field. One cannot say if he had such photographs as LendvaiDircksen’s in mind when he drew the two dairymen in 1934. However, by then the conventions of such portraits, especially when depicting the faces of rural types, certainly could have appealed to viewers who thought in terms of blood-and-soil ideology, or others who wished to find favor with those who did.35 The thematic shift represented by these two Old-Masterly drawings, as well as their similarity to well-known conservative visual representations of the German people, brings to mind the pair of letters that Dix and Ludwig Justi exchanged in April 1933. Just as he did in the letter he wrote to the president of the Prussian Academy of Arts on the same day, Dix informed Justi that he had never been a member of or sympathized with any political party, but he then diverged from the other letter by ending, as mentioned earlier, with his claim to be an exemplary German artist “in the best sense.”36 Justi, whose politics and motivations had long been regarded with suspicion by some in Berlin’s modern art world, responded with a sharp critique of Dix’s scandalous Verist depictions of prostitutes and war, and an expression of his agreement with the Nazi rejection of them. On the other hand, he professed admiration for Dix’s recent portraiture. Though warning against opportunism, he hoped that the painter, a man from “the fourth estate [der vierte Stand]”—a reference in German to the working class—would contribute to the new regime’s transformation of the nation and people [Volk] with that kind of positive, powerful work.37 Dix never made common cause with the Nazi dictatorship, as Justi seemed to hope he would, though the painter was in contact with some officials in the regime’s first two years and did sell a landscape painting to the Ordensburg Sonthofen, a school in Bavaria for the training of Nazi Party leadership cadres, in 1941.38 Dix’s correspondence with Karl Nierendorf and his brother Josef rather makes clear how difficult and delicate the situation was for Dix in the years after Hitler’s rise to power; even when people liked his new work, it was very difficult to persuade them to buy it. That said, there is no doubt about the critical approval and institutional recognition that Dix enjoyed, relatively speaking, with landscape drawings and portraits such as Joseph the Dairyman and Ephraim the Dairyman. In August 1934, Josef Nierendorf told the artist that seven silverpoint landscapes on display in the Nierendorf brothers’ gallery in Cologne had

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Noting the prevalence of landscapes, interiors, and “rustic peasant faces” in the exhibition “Die Auslese,” organized and promoted by Alfred Rosenberg in November 1934, Elm suggests that Dix’s two drawings of dairymen and their display in early 1935 are evidence of opportunism. See Elm, “Otto Dix und Franz Lenk,” 49. Dix to Ludwig Justi, 12 April 1933, reprinted in Dix, Briefe, 866–7. Ludwig Justi to Dix, 26 April 1933, GNM , DKA , Nl Dix, Otto, I, C 54. Justi’s letter is reproduced in full in Olaf Peters, Neue Sachlichkeit und Nationalsozialismus: Affirmation und Kritik, 1931–1947 (Berlin: Reimer, 1998), 85. Dix to Ernst Bursche, 27 December 1941, reprinted in Dix, Briefe, 506. Dix asked Bursche to be discrete about this, clearly and justifiably concerned that he and others could get into trouble if the news got out.

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awakened “very great interest,” though nothing had sold.39 In early 1935, the Nazi and SS press was intransigently opposed to Dix’s work, but critics in the mainstream and nationalist-modernist art press who chose to write about the exhibition in Karl Nierendorf ’s Berlin gallery spoke highly of Dix’s recent drawings in their reviews.40 Without mentioning the portraits, one commentator perceived Dix’s silverpoints and pen-and-inks as especially clear evidence that the artist had “gathered his old strength,” praising the clear structure of his landscape drawings and proclaiming the beginning of a “new phase of hopeful creativity.”41 Another characterized the landscapes and portraits as a “highly unusual blending of contemporary psychology and the primeval power of Dürer’s contour lines [einer höchst eigentümlichen Verbindung heutiger Psychologie und der Urkraft Dürerischer Formenlinie].”42 Though the acquisition of a painting did not come into question, Joseph the Dairyman was bought in April 1935 by the Nationalgalerie under Eberhard Hanfstaengl, who had replaced Justi (and Justi’s first, short-lived successor, Aloys Schardt) as director in late 1933.43 Ephraim the Dairyman was acquired by a private collector two years later.44 Hanfstaengl was sympathetic to certain kinds of modern art and was committed to the defense of his museum against the depredations of Nazi militants. Eventually he too would be forced out of the Nationalgalerie and into retirement as a result of the radicalization of art policy that culminated in the exhibition “Degenerate Art” in 1937.45 Yet Dix’s drawing was not seized during the confiscation of thousands of art objects from public art museum collections that preceded and followed that decisive event. Like his silverpoint Dörflingen, which the Nationalgalerie acquired in late 1934, it has remained in the collection of the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin to this day.46 Even the most militant activists in the Nazi art world apparently could find nothing wrong with it, despite their visceral, unflagging hatred of Dix and the overt, confrontational social critique of his earlier Verism.

39 40

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43 44 45

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Josef Nierendorf to Dix, 23 August 1934, Archive of the Galerie Nierendorf, Berlin. According to Nierendorf, critics writing for Berlin’s mainstream daily newspapers were waiting to see what was written in the Nazi Party’s newspapers. However, Nierendorf reported that the latter were refusing to publish anything. See Karl Nierendorf to Dix, 16 February 1935, archive of the Galerie Nierendorf, Berlin. For discussions of the critical reception that did develop, see Lothar Fischer, Otto Dix: Ein Malerleben in Deutschland (Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1981), 103; Peters, Neue Sachlichkeit und Nationalsozialismus, 131–2; and Elm, “Otto Dix und Franz Lenk,” 50–4. Fritz Hellwag, “Otto Dix, Bilder aus dem Hegau. Zur Ausstellung in der Galerie Nierendorf in Berlin,” Die Kunst 71, no. 9 (June 1935), 272–7, esp. 274–6. F. Paul, “Dix und Lenk. Gemeinschafts-Ausstellung in Berlin bei Nierendorf,” Kunst der Nation 3, no. 3 (1 February 1935), 3. “F. Paul” was the pseudonym of Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, one of Dix’s oldest and strongest public supporters since 1919. Lorenz, Otto Dix: Das Werkverzeichnis der Zeichnungen, vol. 4, 1551. Lorenz, Otto Dix: Das Werkverzeichnis der Zeichnungen, vol. 4, 1552. Jörn Grabowski, “Eberhard Hanfstaengl als Direktor der Nationalgalerie: zu ausgewählten Aspekten seiner Tätigkeit zwischen 1933 und 1937,” Jahrbuch Preussischer Kulturbesitz 33 (1996), 327–42. On the acquisition of the landscape, see the correspondence, dating from September to October 1934, in the archive of the Galerie Nierendorf, Berlin.

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The Reality of Randegg Dix was a Realist artist, much of whose work of the 1920s focused on one of the central themes of the male modernist tradition from Baudelaire and Manet to Seurat, Kirchner, Picasso, and Léger. Like them, he was fascinated by the figure of the prostitute, and, like them, he was deeply committed to the representation of the marginal, eroticized spaces of modern urban leisure and popular culture. Hence, it should come as no surprise that his first impulse in the face of his rapidly eroding position in Dresden was to move to another city. In the early summer of 1933, he mentioned to Hans Weidemann that he was thinking about moving back to Düsseldorf, where he had experienced considerable success in the early 1920s. Weidemann—a graduate of the increasingly modernized and increasingly modernist state art academy in Düsseldorf in the 1920s, a protégé of Goebbels, and one of the most prominent Nazis to publicly support certain forms of modern art—thought that this was a good idea. In the midst of a brief discussion of the current art-political situation, he remarked: “The West is indeed more fruitful. We might see each other again this fall in Düsseldorf. I saw excellent works by you at Nierendorf ’s.”47 Two years later, Dix sought to find a small atelier in Berlin, which was only growing in importance as the center not only of the state but also of the art market.48 However, nothing came of these plans. In the end, Dix split his time. He spent summers in the country—first in Randegg and then, after a new house was finished in 1936, in the nearby village of Hemmenhofen— and winters in Dresden. Dix deeply disliked village life. His reported description of Randegg and its environs in 1933 as a “[s]ickeningly beautiful [zum Kotzen schön]” paradise in which he felt banished may be apocryphal.49 However, Dix did express similar sentiments in two later letters. “There is nothing more stupid and intellectually sterile than life in the village,” he wrote in one, and stated in the other that it had been a big mistake for him to leave the city for the countryside, where he felt too exposed.50 This sense of superiority, anxiety, and alienation helps to explain the appearance of many of Dix’s townscapes of the mid– 1930s. Randegg often appears at a distance, as though in a tourist’s picture postcard, or spreads out below the viewer, who seems to occupy the position of the lord of the castle. Human figures are tiny, if they are present at all. Though pretty or picturesque views, these pictures do not suggest that Dix was especially interested in the people who lived there, with the apparent exception of the two dairymen. However, Randegg was a more interesting and unusual place than Dix’s letters and pictures make it out to be. Like several other villages in the region, it had been the home

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“Es ist Recht so, daß sie nach Düsseldorf übersiedeln wollen. Der Westen ist doch fruchtbarer. Es kann möglich sein, daß wir uns im Herbst in D.dorf wiedersehen. Bei Nierendorf sah ich ausgezeichnete Arbeiten von Ihnen.” Weidemann to Dix, 14 July 1933. As in note 31. Dix to Lenk, undated (summer 1935), reprinted in Dix, Briefe, 482. See Beck, “Flucht ist immer falsch,” 21, 30. Dix to the Thielepapes, 1936, and Dix to Franz Lenk, undated, in Dix, Briefe, 486, 496.

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of a sizeable Jewish community for several centuries.51 The first Jews settled in the village around 1656, and the population grew steadily until the nineteenth century. By 1825, somewhat more than forty percent of Randegg’s population—289 of 713 residents—was Jewish; the number peaked at 351 in 1849. After that, it gradually declined, largely as a result of emigration to the United States. Yet in 1925 seventy-nine Jews still lived in Randegg (about 8.2 percent of the total population), and sixty-two remained in 1933. Through the years, numerous Jewish businesses had existed in the town, and a school, ritual bath, and rabbi had provided for the community’s spiritual needs. In 1810, a masonry synagogue replaced an earlier wooden structure in the center of the village, where it stood until its destruction—against the mayor’s will—in November 1938. The Jewish cemetery was just outside of town, built on a hillside across a broad, shallow valley from the castle, from which it could be seen. The group of drawings and the Romantic painting that Dix made of the cemetery from 1934 to 1935 suggest precisely that point of view, while his well-known painting rotates it about ninety degrees (Figures 9.6 and 9.7). Dix never depicted the unassuming synagogue nestled into the center of the village; the only religious architecture one discerns in his drawings, watercolors, and paintings of Randegg are the steeples of a chapel and the village church. However, the Jewish cemetery certainly must have appealed to the old sense of a dialectic of life and death that he had derived from his intensive reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy since about 1912. A similar view of things can be seen both in his wartime depictions of flora and fauna on the battlefield, and in his postwar print cycle, Death and Resurrection. Furthermore, to depict a Jewish cemetery after 1933 was inevitably to comment on the old history of German anti-Semitism and its newest form, the Nazi dictatorship’s ever intensifying persecution of Germany’s Jewish population.52 What has been overlooked by scholars who have written about Dix in the early 1930s is that he may have commented on the presence and situation of Jews in the southern German countryside in another way as well, namely in the inscriptions across the tops of Joseph the Dairyman and Ephraim the Dairyman. These recall those found in Northern Renaissance portraits, thus emphasizing yet again Dix’s engagement with the Old Masters. At the same time, they put emphasis on the names of the two men, which are written in a form of block lettering unlike the cursive used for their trade. And it is this accentuation of these specific names that insinuates the existence of a

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The following discussion is based on: Samuel (Semi) Moos, Geschichte der Juden im Hegaudorf Randegg (Gottmadingen: Eckerlin, 1986); Helmut Fidler, Jüdisches Leben am Bodensee (Frauenfeld: Verlag Huber, 2011); and http://www.alemannia-judaica.de/randegg_synagoge.htm [accessed January 22, 2018]. Several art historians have pointed out the existence of a sizeable Jewish population in Randegg, but they do not go into much detail. See Löffler, Dix: Oeuvre der Gemälde, 48; Peters, Neue Sachlichkeit und Nationalsozialismus, 139. For important discussions of this group of pictures, see Dietrich Schubert, “Politische Metaphorik bei Otto Dix, 1933–1939,” in Kunst und Kunstkritik der dreißiger Jahre, ed. Maria Rüger (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1990), 148–55, 319–22 and his very closely related “ ‘Ich habe Landschaften gemalt—das war doch Emigration’: Zur Lage von Otto Dix und zur politischen Metaphorik in seinem Schaffen 1933–1937,” in Otto Dix. Zum 100. Geburtstag 1891–1991, eds Wulf Herzogenrath and Johann-Karl Schmidt, exh. cat. Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1991), 273–82. Furthermore, see Peters, Neue Sachlichkeit und Nationalsozialismus, 133–44.

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Figure 9.6: Otto Dix, Der Judenfriedhof von Randegg (The Jewish Cemetery of Randegg), 1934. Silverpoint. 19.1 × 21 in., 48.6 × 53.2 cm. Kunstmuseum Albstadt (Stiftung Sammlung Walther Groz) Inv. Nr. SWG 76/574, Photo: Courtesy Kunstmuseum Albstadt. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. relationship between these two individuals and the Jewish community with which Dix was, presumably quite unexpectedly, brought into contact by his move. Circumspection is certainly warranted, inasmuch as published records of Randegg’s Jewish residents in 1933 and 1938 mention farmers and several horse and livestock traders, but no dairymen, strictly speaking. Furthermore, they do not include any adult men named Joseph or Ephraim.53 Nonetheless, the fact that Dix’s only two lifelike portraits of what appear to be residents of Randegg or its environs employ these specific names is crucial to the argument here, and shifts one sharply away from the various aspects of the drawings that indicate Dix’s absorption with and by national

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Moos, Geschichte der Juden, 108–9, 137–47.

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Figure 9.7: Otto Dix, Judenfriedhof in Randegg im Winter mit Hohenstoffeln (The Jewish Cemetery in Randegg in the Winter with the Hohenstoffeln), 1935, oil on panel, 23.6 × 31.5 in., 60 × 80 cm. Inv. Nr. Nl 919. Saarlandmuseum Saarbrücken, Stiftung Saarländischer Kulturbesitz. Photo: Tom Gundelwein. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

tradition. Joseph, the name of three important men in the Bible, was not unusual. It had been used by Jews, referring to the famous Joseph of the Old Testament, since the Middle Ages. It had become increasingly popular among German Gentiles since the Church had begun officially to recognize the Virgin Mary’s husband in the seventeenth century: “Since the eighteenth century, Josef has surpassed the once prevalent Johannes, and today ‘Sepp’ is much more common in the countryside.”54 Ephraim, however, was different. Biblically, Ephraim was one of the two sons of the famous Joseph of the Old Testament, and eventually became the patriarch of one of the (eventually ten lost) tribes of Israel. The name began to be used in Germany after the Reformation, apparently largely in the German Jewish community. One thinks of Veitel Heine Ephraim, the eighteenth-century court jeweler, banker, chairman of the Jewish community in Berlin, and owner of an eponymous palace there. One might 54

Josef Karlmann Brechenmacher, Deutsches Namenbuch (Stuttgart: Verlag Adolf Bonz, 1928), 113. See also Hans Bahlow, Deutsches Namenlexikon: Familien- und Vornamen nach Ursprung und Sinn erklärt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 267.

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also mention Ephraim Moshe Lilien, the Zionist artist who moved to Germany from Poland in 1899. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a rare example of a Gentile with the name.55 Hence, it was perhaps no coincidence that the Nationalgalerie acquired Dix’s drawing of a man named Joseph rather than one named Ephraim. The latter would have been far more likely than the former to indicate Jewish identity, or to be perceived as a sign of the widespread diffusion and continued presence of Jewish culture in Germany. In the world represented by anti-Semitic caricatures in the German illustrated press during the Weimar Republic, things were clear and transparent. There, a set of physiognomic features and expressive gestures unequivocally marked the Jewish body. In the countryside as it was imagined in such images, Jews only appeared as the alien exploiters and decadent foes of honest German, Gentile peasants and yeomen. They were shown buying real estate, driving hard bargains, and being driven away (Figures 9.8 and 9.9). Joseph the Dairyman and Ephraim the Dairyman, on the other hand, may hint at a more complicated reality than the one propagated by blood-andsoil ideologues. They seem to ask if and how one could really tell the difference between Jews and Gentiles. In the 1920s, the painter had incorporated stereotypical elements into his portraits of Jewish people.56 At about the same time, he had been surprised to discover that a client with “swastiklerish” (hakenkreuzlerischen) features and the appearance of a “Protestant pastor” was a Zionist Jew.57 Yet the features of Joseph and Ephraim are highly individualized. The drawings contain no traces of anti-Semitic stereotypes, such as hooked noses, full lips, and heavily lidded dark eyes. Hence, it is impossible to tell if the names of the two men depicted in them indicate that they were in fact Jewish dairymen or rather perhaps the sons of Gentiles who, living among a large Jewish community, had become accustomed to and fond of such names. The effect is similar to Dix’s painting of Jewish gravestones that were as much a part of the German landscape as the old oak trees that grew next to them.

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According to one website that provides decade-by-decade lists of the names ranked by ostensible popularity, Joseph was generally at the bottom end of the thirty most popular names in Germany between 1900 and 1920. Ephraim never appears in the rankings. Though it does explain its sources and methods, such rankings are difficult to verify. However, reputable German lexica and studies of first names lead to much the same conclusion. At least two (Bahlow, Brechenmacher) do not include Ephraim at all. Others do, but their entries for Ephraim are substantially shorter than the ones for Joseph. See Ernst Wasserzieher, Hans und Grete: 2500 Vornamen erklärt, 18th revised edition (Bonn: Ferdinand Dümmlers Verlag, 1972), 43, 63; Günther Drosdowski, Lexikon der Vornamen: Herkunft, Bedeutung und Gebrauch von mehreren tausend Vornamen, 2nd edn (Mannheim: Biographisches Institut, 1974); Wilfried Seibicke, Vornamen (Wiesbaden: Verlag für deutsche Sprache, 1977), 282, 301; and https://www.beliebte-vornamen.de/446-quelle.htm [accessed January 27, 2018]. See, for instance, Sabine Rewald, ed., Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s, exh. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 104–19, 116–19, 162–4; James A. van Dyke, “Erasure and Jewishness in Otto Dix’s Portrait of the Lawyer Hugo Simons,” in Renew Marxist Art History, eds Warren Carter, Barnaby Haran and Frederic J. Schwartz (London: Art/Books, 2013), 362–81; James A. van Dyke, “The Politics of New Objectivity: A Specific History,” in Barron and Eckmann, eds, New Objectivity, 65–75. Dix to Martha Dix, undated, in Dix, Briefe, 93.

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Figure 9.8: Eduard Thöny, “Das künftige Oberland” (“The Future Heights”), Simplicissimus 24, no. 22, August 26, 1919. Photo: Courtesy Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek Weimar / Hans Zimmermann.

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Figure 9.9: “Tiroler Aufstand 1921 (Frei nach Defregger)” (“Tyrolean Rebellion 1921 [Loosely after Defregger]”), Kladderadatsch, October 30, 1921. Photo: Courtesy Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg.

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To blur boundaries in such a way, and to articulate such doubt about Jewish difference, did not constitute resistance, if that is understood to require work in the political underground or conspiratorial activity aiming to overthrow Hitler’s dictatorship.58 That would have been out of character for Dix, who had always refused partisan commitment, despite his willingness to work with Communist friends and to exhibit pictures in left-wing exhibitions in the 1920s. Moreover, in late 1934 and early 1935, the unresolved situation, though still very difficult, does not seem to have appeared to be quite as bleak to Dix as it had in 1933. There was interest in his recent work; no one seems to have been wishing him dead or imprisoned at that point, and consequently his letters to the dealer Karl Nierendorf began to show traces of hope and optimism.59 Yet the subversion of Nazi anti-Semitism would not have been surprising. Dix did not only emulate Old Masters such as Baldung-Grien. Like Grosz, who in 1918 had painted a picture that invoked Heinrich Heine’s famous satirical poem, “Germany, A Winter’s Tale,” Dix once or twice also referred in 1935 to the writings of that radical, Romantic, Jewish poet of the nineteenth century, whose work had been censored and who had spent the last decades of his life in exile.60 Seen in this light, the making of two unusual drawings of striking yet ambiguous figures in a traditional yet challenging technique and unobjectionable Old-Masterly, putatively national style is very unlikely to have simply been an act of opportunism, resignation, or even affirmation, though one can neither discount the uncertainties and the pressures that Dix faced nor forget that they were pictures that sold in the art market of the 1930s. Neither was their making an act of organized resistance. However, they were significant as briefly public inscriptions of the artist’s individual dissent. Viewed with attention, they may make visible a criticism of a cornerstone of Nazi ideology, just as the next wave of anti-Semitic agitation and violence was beginning to gather momentum.61

58 59 60 61

Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent, 3; Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, 83–4. Peters, Neue Sachlichkeit und Nationalsozialismus, 124–8. Lorenz, Dix: Das Werkzeichnis der Zeichnungen, vol. 4, 1564; Van Dyke, “Dix’s Folk Art,” 90–5. Peters, Neue Sachlichkeit und Nationalsozialismus, 140.

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A Whisper Rather than a Shout: Ursula Wilms and Heinz Hallmann’s Topography of Terror Kathleen James-Chakraborty

How does one commemorate resistance? Berlin’s memoryscapes are mostly devoted to acknowledging crimes and honoring their victims. The Topography of Terror also reminds us that there were people who dared to stand up to the Nazis, even though success, if defined as political change rather than preserving one’s own conscience, proved impossible. The Topography of Terror, perhaps in part for this reason, is also rather different in architectural terms from the nearby Jewish Museum or the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. We are not physically dislocated here, made almost nauseous as in the Garden of Exile at the Jewish Museum, or left to delight, as unfortunately many visitors to the Memorial undeniably do, in its uneven ground plane. The mood is always somber at the current installation of the Topography of Terror, which opened in 2010 (Figure 10.1).1 While the story of the grassroots effort that resulted in its creation in 1987 has been recounted elsewhere, there has been relatively little scholarly discussion of the design of its current building and the surrounding landscape in which the literal foundations of the Gestapo, the SS , and the Reich Security Main Office remain embedded.2 The German architect Ursula Wilms and her husband the landscape architect Heinz Hallmann won a 2006 competition only after an earlier project by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor was abandoned due to cost overruns. Their design makes a substantive contribution to the emotional and intellectual impact the site has upon Berliners and tourists alike. In comparison to the Jewish Museum, which opened in 2001 (Figure 10.2), and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

1 2

http://www.topographie.de/en/ [accessed December 16, 2017]. For an exception see Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Modernism as Memory: Building Identity in the Federal Republic of Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018) 163–8. For standard works on memory that include discussions of earlier phases in its development see Jenny Wüstenberg, Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), esp. 101–18; Andreas Nachama, ed., Topography of Terror: Gestapo, SS and Reich Security Main Office on Wilhelm and Prinz-Albrecht-Straße (Berlin: Stifting Topographie des Terrors, 2010); and Karen Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2005) 63–123. See also www.topographie.de

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Figure 10.1: Ursula Wilms and Heinz Hallmann, Topography of Terror, 2006–10, Berlin. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Topographie_des_Terrors_2011.jpg

Figure 10.2: Daniel Libeskind, Jewish Museum, 1989–99, Berlin. https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Garten_des_Exils_Gesamt.jpg

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Figure 10.3: Peter Eisenman, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 1997–2005, Berlin. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Memorial_to_the_Murdered_ Jews_of_Europeabove.jpg

(Figure 10.3), dedicated four years later, the Topography of Terror subtly allows the facts rather than the architecture to make the greatest initial impression. Attracting more visitors but less attention than the more celebrated Berlin structures that stand at the center of most discussions of the role of commemoration in the architecture and culture of the last several decades, it demonstrates that meaningful alternatives to starchitecture exist, even in the district of the city that is arguably its birthplace.3

3

The literature on the Jewish Museum and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is too extensive to cite here, but two contributions certainly cemented their place in the discussion of memory in relation to Berlin. These are James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) and Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003). The conditions for their reception was also shaped by Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). See http://www.topographie.de/en/ [accessed December 16, 2017], for the figure that more than a million people visited the site in 2015; “1,3 Millionen Besucher in ‘Topographie des Terrors,’ Berliner Morgenpost December 16, 2016, https://www.morgenpost.de/ incoming/article208998215/1-3-Millionen-Besucher-in-Topographie-des-Terrors.html [accessed December 16, 2017], for the increase in figures the following year, which notes that this was the fifth year in a row that more than a million people had visited the site. For the significantly lower visitor numbers for the Jewish Museum see Max Müller, “Jüdisches Museum: Facelifting in Kreuzberg,” Berliner Morganpost, March 7, 2017; and for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’s underground information center https://www.stiftung- denkmal.de/denkmaeler/denkmal-fuerdie-ermordeten-juden-europas/besucherzahlen.html, although https://www.bundesregierung.de/ Content/DE /Artikel/2016/01/2016-01-22-besucherrekord [both accessed January 3, 2017], claim that the above-ground part of this memorial is the most visited place in Berlin.

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The Topography of Terror’s remit includes documenting resistance. It marks the site of the state apparatus dedicated to hunting down and torturing those Third Reich functionaries regarded as its opponents. In addition to Jews, these included those who rejected the regime on political, religious, or other moral grounds, first within Germany and then, between 1938 and 1945, in the territory the Nazis annexed and invaded. Among those incarcerated and abused here were Georg Elser, who in 1939 set off a bomb in Munich in an attempt to assassinate Hitler, and Arvid Harnack and Harro Schulze-Boysen, members of a group the Gestapo termed “the Red Orchestra.”4 The Topography of Terror was established by West Berliners who, contrary to the predominant position in the Federal Republic in the initial years of the Cold War, did not believe that commemoration of anti-Nazi activity by Communists and Socialists should be the prerogative of the East German state, while the West largely focused on those within the church and the army.5 Instead they wanted to honor all the victims of the various Nazi bodies headquartered here.

Creating a Memorial in the Context of the International Building Exhibition As a place of pilgrimage and an institution, the Topography of Terror resulted directly from the international spotlight being shone on Berlin’s architecture scene in the early 1980s. From 1979 until 1987, the International Building Exhibition, best known by its German acronym IBA , transformed edges of the West Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg, which is located just south of where the Berlin Wall stood from 1961 to 1989 (Figure 10.4).6 The West Berlin city government sought to gentrify a workingclass district whose inhabitants included many migrants from Turkey as well as current and former students from across the Federal Republic. The first were attracted by bluecollar jobs, many of them in the city’s many factories. The male members of the second group arrived for the most part because of the exemption from military or civil service that accompanied a move to Berlin, which was not technically a part of the Federal Republic, but instead was still officially governed by Britain, France, and the United States. The West Berlin government worked closely with relatively young and extremely ambitious architects from around the world to make parts of Kreuzberg a showcase for alternatives to modernist orthodoxies regarding both city planning and architecture. Among the key figures involved were the Italian architect and theorist Aldo Rossi; his disciple the architect and educator O.M. Ungers; his student the Dutch architect Rem

4 5

6

http://www.topographie.de/en/the-historic-site/the-house-prison/ [accessed February 7, 2018]. Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memories: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Esra Akcan, Open Architecture: Migration, Citizenship and the Urban Renewal of Berlin-Kreuzberg (Basel: Birkhäuster-DeGruyter, 2018).

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Figure 10.4: Aldo Rossi, IBA Housing, 1987, Berlin. Courtesy of Livia Hurley.

Koolhaas; Rob Krier, an architect from Luxembourg who was another admirer of Rossi’s; and Josef Paul Kleihues, the German architect who directed the IBA . Both the Turkish and the activist (and often anarchist) community in Kreuzberg attempted in various ways to combat the transformation of their neighborhood. The Topography of Terror emerged out of the opposition to the IBA mounted by local activists. The respect IBA organizers had for the district’s original street pattern and nineteenth-century housing blocks led to a proposal by the Italian architect Giorgio Grassi to reconstruct what had once been one of the neighborhoods’ finest buildings, the Prince Albrecht Palace (Figure 10.5).7 Built at the end of the 1730s, it had been renovated in the 1830s by the celebrated architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel as the residence of the king’s youngest son before serving from 1934 until its destruction by aerial bombardment in 1944 as the headquarters of the security service of the Nazi SS . Since the late 1970s, the architectural historian and preservationist Dieter HoffmannAxthelm, among others, began to draw attention to the site’s horrific history and the necessity of marking it in a much more overtly political manner.8 For them even the

7

8

https://divisare.com/projects/337928-giorgio-grassi-area-dell-ex-prinz-albrecht-palais-a-berlinoc [accessed December 16, 2017]. Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm, “Die Topographie sind am Ziel, der Ort geht unter,” Bauwelt 97 (2006), 14.

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Figure 10.5: Prince Albrecht Palace, 1737–9, Berlin, as remodeled by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in the 1830s. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Prinz-AlbrechtPalais.jpg victorious design by Jürgen Wenzel and Nikolaus Lang for a memorial was insufficient.9 They launched an amateur excavation that revealed the foundations not only of the Prince Albrecht Palace but also of neighboring buildings that had also housed Nazi state police bodies. In 1987, a year that saw both halves of Berlin celebrate the city’s 750th anniversary, a temporary exhibition structure created by the architect Jürg Steiner was built atop the uncovered remains. It attracted so much attention that the question quickly arose of how to make the installation permanent.10 The purpose of the IBA was to erect subsidized housing that would attract middleclass residents to what was then a marginal part of the city at the same time that it created a compelling alternative to modernist tower blocks by adhering to the established streetscape and to the height limits and window-to-wall ratios commonplace a century earlier. In many ways its chief accomplishment, however, was to launch a new generation of international architecture talent and to turn the attention of some of its members away from nostalgia for an intact past and towards an appreciation of the forces that had fragmented it. None of these new stars came from the city or were even German, and some had not been selected to build anything for the IBA , but their shared familiarity with the city and its charged past left them well positioned to garner commissions there 9 10

http://www.topographie.de/en/the-historic-site/after–1945/ [accessed January 3, 2018]. http://www.steiner.archi/?p=2305 [accessed December 16, 2017].

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even before German reunification in 1990 turned areas neighboring Kreuzberg into Europe’s largest construction sites.11 Daniel Libeskind won the competition for the Jewish Museum in 1989 with a scheme whose emphasis on mapping echoed Peter Eisenman’s IBA apartment block at Checkpoint Charlie, which had been completed in 1986. Already in 1988, the publicist Lea Rosh began the campaign that would culminate with the construction of Eisenman’s design of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Originally, long before Eisenman garnered the commission as a result of the second of two competitions, Rosh hoped to place the memorial on the Topography of Terror site. Thus, what began in the late 1970s as a focus on repairing the wounds of war and of modernist planning eventually morphed into widely heralded strategies for marking absence, above all that of Jews and other Nazi victims of state-sponsored terror. Although adopted eventually by Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats, early efforts were spearheaded by those who more often voted for the socialists and the Greens. The limits of employing cutting-edge architects to create the commemorative spaces whose construction helped alleviate concerns over the transfer of the Federal Republic’s capital back to Berlin were exposed, however, in the efforts to make the Topography of Terror permanent. The process proved fraught. Zumthor, who although not involved in the IBA , was already one of Europe’s most celebrated architects (he was awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2009), when he won a competition for it held in 1993. Construction began in 1997 but was abandoned in 1999 as building costs shot skyward; five years elapsed before the fragmentary concrete shell was finally pulled down.12 In selecting Wilms and Hallmann’s design in its stead, the client consciously stepped away from the level of architectural fireworks that had long characterized both the neighborhood and Berlin spaces of commemoration, whether Libeskind’s lightning bolt or Eisenman’s cascading stelae.

The Wilms and Hallmann Design Two different challenges faced Wilms and Hallmann when they conceived their winning design. The first was to create something that would not overwhelm either the excavated remains of the Prince Albrecht Palace or the other Third Reich sites on its street edges and that would provide an appropriate backdrop for open-air and indoor photographic exhibits. At the same time, whatever was done had to fit into a complex site bounded by a series of historically important buildings, many of which had significant contemporary uses. The experience of the Topography of Terror is carefully staged, with many tourists in particular drawn into the very porous site without even knowing exactly what they

11

12

Paul B. Jaskot, The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 127–65. http://socks-studio.com/2011/11/14/zumthors-topographie-des-terrors-1993-2004-visualhistory-of-birth-growth-and-death-of-a-project/ [accessed December 19, 2017] for a photo essay documenting the project from model through demolition.

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are entering. The open-air exhibits lining its Niederkirchnerstraße edge are accessible well beyond normal German museum hours and can be glimpsed from the street at all times. (A second set of excavated foundations located to the southwest of the neighboring Martin Gropius Building attracts much less attention, although there are paths leading to it.) Here, too, trenches expose the uncovered remnants of the site’s former structures. The brick foundations of the Prince Albrecht Palace abut the last centrally located stretch of the Wall, itself a significant tourist draw. A simple gray metal frame supports a glass roof that shelters the remains and those lingering alongside them to read the bilingual exhibition panels. Its supports sit not in pavement, but in rectangular pools of loose stone, which emphasize their connection to the ground beneath. There is also a narrow path running along the edge of the Wall from which one can look down upon the excavations, which express none of the architectural distinction that what was built atop them originally had. The aesthetics have been stripped away by war; only the barest of architectural bones proved recoverable. The documentation center is set far back from the two streets defining the corner site, so that it supplements rather than dominates the information boards erected amid the actual ruins (Figure 10.6).The rear of the site is covered by a thick canopy of trees, which buffer that approach from the day-to-day life of this part of the city. Outliers from this grove appear almost to be marching forward towards the low-slung building, which sits isolated in a slightly sloping field covered with larger loose stones, through which run only a few paved pathways. This reference to rubble is particularly appropriate for what is in part an archeological site, but also as a space to be traversed in order to reach the exhibitions spelling out in more detail what took place or was planned here. For instance, the SS , whose headquarters were here, ran a network of concentration and later also extermination camps; in addition to its role in the Holocaust the Gestapo was charged with the suppression of resistance at home and abroad and with the surveillance of forced labor.13 This architectural solution emphasizes that this is particularly barren ground, while also referencing the stones that Jews often place atop graves. Bands of ashlar edge the places where this rocky field meets pavement. Where these accompany a shift in level they provide places for people to sit; there are also some plain white benches. This stark desert-like carpet of stones is quite different from what existed here before construction began on Zumthor’s design; steep grassy banks once separated the narrow path alongside the ruins, which were sheltered by Steiner’s narrower wooden structure, from the rest of the site. Organized around a sunken courtyard, the building itself provides facilities for visitors and staff as well as two levels of exhibition spaces, one at and one below grade. Both the way in which its exterior walls perch lightly upon the ground and the courtyard at the center is cut back into the earth emphasize the building’s ambivalent relationship to the ground upon which it sits. The supports tying together its double exterior walls evoke the frame of the structure protecting the ruins, and at its heart the building, too, digs deep as if to expose what happened here. There is the sense across 13

http://www.topographie.de/en/the-historic-site/reich-ss-leader/ and http://www.topographie.de/ en/the-historic-site/gestapo/ [both accessed February 7, 2018].

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Figure 10.6: Ursula Wilms and Heinz Hallmann, Documentation Center, Topography of Terror, 2006–10, Berlin. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Topographie_ des_Terrors_1.jpg

the entire site of something being stripped away to reveal the truth, even while the documentation center, as opposed to the masonry bones of the earlier structures, is somewhat tenuously perched upon what most visitors understand as radically toxic ground, a place in which the arrest, torture and murder of millions was planned and, in the case of torture, at times executed in the prison that was part of the complex. Although most of what one experiences here is a twenty-first-century creation, some of the emotional impact is certainly imparted by the experience of being at the actual location where the persecution described either happened or was planned. Among those who worked here were Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. There is no such visceral connection to place at either the Jewish Museum or the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe. There are multiple ways in which this architecture resists the starchitecture culture that has flourished since the 1980s in the immediate environs. One is in the understated bleakness of the design, whose framing of absence is far less dramatic than the voids Libeskind carved through the Jewish Museum or the representations of them with which he decorated its facades. Equally noteworthy is the explicit rejection here of the postmodern acceptance of urban context that contributed not only to the design of

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some of the documentation center’s immediate neighbors but arguably also to that of the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which in many ways, despite its architect’s affiliation with deconstruction, reconstructs rather than challenges the fabric of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century city. Although both the height of the ground plane and of the pillars lining them ebbs and flows, the width of the passageways between them remains constant, as consequently does the sense of being bounded by exactly the kind of historic street walls that the IBA proudly reintroduced.14 Wilms and Hallmann turned instead quite explicitly to modernism itself, including the retreat from the street line as well as its formal vocabulary, in an implicit rebuke of IBA grandstanding as well as of its project of healing. This is, after all, not a scar but an exposed, reopened wound. That does not mean that there is no reference here to local architecture. The documentation center is inspired at least in part by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s nearby New National Gallery, built in the context of the Cold War (it originally faced the Wall). The same architect’s Crown Hall on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, offers an even more explicit precedent for how its stairs lightly meet the ground. And yet Mies’s transparency would not be completely appropriate here. A finer grain is needed in order not to overwhelm the nuance present elsewhere on the site. The documentation center’s gray double skin is purposely indistinct, in contrast to the decisive firmness of Mies’s bold steel framing. The difficulty of even identifying exactly where the dematerialized walls are located hinders the definition of enclosure and thus protection that they offer. On the interior, there is thus little way to escape either a visual connection with the exposed rock, bricks, and concrete of the ground into which the building is set, the ruins of the Prince Albrecht Palace and its neighbors beyond, and the boundary created by the remaining stretch of the Wall, except to gaze into the excavated courtyard at its center, whose central reflecting pool is again rimmed with loose stones. The grade level space is, like its counterpart in the New National Gallery, undivided by interior supports, although downstairs accommodation is carved out for a lecture theater, offices and, of course, toilets. Mies’s large ceiling coffers give way here to a much finer and shallower grid above which the lighting is placed, while the matt stone flooring establishes another continuous surface treatment. The enormous effectiveness of the Topography of Terror in engaging visitors, who linger to read the accounts it presents of Nazi persecution, demonstrates that careful design can whisper rather than shout to attract the attention as well as command the respect of those it seeks to persuade. Visitors are not told how to experience this place, in contrast to the way in which Libeskind so clearly instructs us to understand his very literally disorienting Garden of Exile or the evocation of the gas chambers in the Holocaust Tower.15 And yet a sense of decorum is created here that is very different

14

15

For a more developed version of this argument see James-Chakraborty, Modernism as Memory, 168–71. https://www.jmberlin.de/en/libeskind-building [accessed February 26, 2018 for the purpose of these spaces].

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from the free-wheeling playground that the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe becomes on any sunny day, when the laughter of toddlers hiding behind, and teenagers jumping across, its concrete blocks, increasingly etched with cracks, subverts its solemn purpose.16

The Specificity of the Urban Context The task of setting the appropriate tone is rendered particularly complex by the varied character, histories, and purposes of the surrounding buildings, which are never screened off from view unless one is in the lower level of the documentation center. The oldest and in many ways the most handsome of these is the Martin Gropius Building, immediately to the west (Figure 10.7). Originally a museum of applied arts, it is named for one of its two architects, a great-uncle of the founder of the Bauhaus, and was designed to be an appropriate neighbor for the Prince Albrecht Palace. Completed

Figure 10.7: Martin Gropius and Heino Schmieden, Martin Gropius Building, 1877–81, Berlin. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gropius_Bau_Berlin_1.jpg

16

For further controversy over how the site is used see https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kwnv79/ why-are-all-these-gays-taking-grindr-photos-at-a-holocaust-memorial [accessed December 22, 2017].

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in 1881, it reopened for the first time since the war exactly a century later.17 The contrast between the celebration of Prussia in the inaugural exhibition that year and the view out over the largely abandoned area beside it helped spur the founders of the Topography of Terror, who were repelled by the possibility of encouraging nostalgia in such a setting.18 Since then the building has hosted a wide array of temporary art exhibitions, very few of which have been as escapist. Less visible from the most frequented parts of the Topography of Terror site but still important are the Europe and Germany office blocks to the southeast. These were built during the 1920s when the originally residential character of the district was being challenged by the southward expansion of Berlin’s downtown. Twelve stories tall, the Europa block now houses the Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (Figure 10.8).19 A documentation center for the Foundation of Flight, Expulsion, and

Figure 10.8: Bielandberg and Moser, Europa Building, 1926–31, rebuilt 1959–66, Berlin. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Berlin,_Kreuzberg,_ Stresemannstrasse,_Europahaus,_Bundesministerium_für_Wirtschaftliche_ Zusammenarbeit_und_Entwicklung.jpg 17

18 19

Winnetou Kampmann and Ute Weström, Martin Gropius Bau. Die Geschichte seiner Wiederherstellung (Munich: Prestel, 1999). Wüstenberg, Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany, 104. Dietrich Neumann, “Die Wolkenkratzer kommen!” Deutsche Hochhäuser der Zwanziger Jahre (Braunschweig/WiesbadenVieweg and Teubner, 1995), 164.

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Reconciliation, which will tell the stories of the Germans who fled or were kicked out of Eastern Europe, is scheduled to open in 2018 in the comparatively low-rise Germany block.20 Since the late 1940s there have been tensions between those, usually to the right of center, who believe that marking this aspect of German suffering is at least as important as honoring the victims of fascism, which in the first decades after the war was nearly the exclusive purview of the left.21 Placing this new center in the shadow of the Topography of Terror in many ways represents the recent return to the center stage these victim groups occupied in the early years of the Federal Republic, now re-legitimized by their proximity to the results of a commemorative effort originally developed in conscious opposition to them. The two structures that are integral to the experience of the Topography of Terror lie to the immediate north. Here what was once the Nazi Air Ministry and is now the Federal Finance Ministry looms behind a remaining stretch of the Wall (Figure 10.9).

Figure 10.9: Ernst Sagebiel, Detlev Rohwedder Building as seen from the Topography of Terror, 1935–6, Berlin. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Finanzministerium_ Berlin_Rückseite.jpg 20

21

http://www.bbr.bund.de/BBR /DE /Bauprojekte/Berlin/Kultur/SFVV /sfvv.html [accessed December 22, 2017]. Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2001), 51–87. See also Wüstenberg, Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany.

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The unsettling relationships that result from this juxtaposition work in at least two ways for those looking in at or out from the Topography of Terror. Originally intended to disturb the views out from the Martin Gropius Bau; the Topography of Terror is now inescapable for many of those working in one of the most important arms of the national government. Meanwhile the Ministry building has a complex history that, for those aware of it, inescapably colors their experience of the adjacent Topography of Terror.22 Designed by Ernst Sagebiel, who had previously worked for the Jewish architect Erich Mendelsohn, it was one of the most prominent government edifices erected in Berlin by the Third Reich. Subsequently, in addition to housing the Soviet occupation authorities, it was also where the German Democratic Republic was founded and, following reunification, where its economy was privatized, an effort led by Detlev Rohwedder, who had built his career in West Germany’s steel industry. After Rohwedder’s assassination in Düsseldorf in 1991, probably by a member of the Red Army Faction, the building was re-named for him. Although its full-length addresses Wilhelmstrasse, its gray limestoneclad bulk is omnipresent for those who step back from viewing the ruins of the Prince Albrecht Palace or who look north from the documentation center. Indeed, the documentation center is carefully designed to maintain the color palette and to some degree the austerity of its troubling neighbor but also to contrast very specifically with the monumentality Sagebiel established by the repetitiveness of his building’s relatively small windows. The presence of the Wall matters, too. If the dividing line between the Soviet and American sector had been drawn one block further to the south, the site of the Prince Albrecht Palace would have landed in East Berlin where it would have been beyond the reach of the activism that established the Topography of Terror. Nor is it likely that, had it fallen on their side, the East German state would have done much to mark this spot. At the same time, the Wall’s presence from 1961 until well beyond the time that West Berliners began to pay attention to this place, all but ensured that no use valuable enough to deter their efforts would spring up here. Even now, its shadow adds to the poignant sense of dread many visitors experience here, reminding them as well that terror was never the monopoly of a single German state. More cheerful structures also line the site, however, making it clear that it is possible to build here without being so explicitly haunted by the burden of the past. To the east sits IBA housing by Rossi that established the template for much of the so-called critical reconstruction (the term, popularized by Hans Stimmann, the city building official who led most of this effort, referred to the attempt to restore the historic street pattern, building height, and window-to-wall ratios following reunification of Berlin’s Mitte, the historic city center that was formerly part of East Berlin).23 Completed in 1987, Rossi’s cheerfully polychrome series of apartment blocks was intended to

22 23

Ladd, Ghosts of Berlin, 145–7. Gianni Braghieri, Aldo Rossi (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 1991), 124–31; for critical reconstruction see Jörn Düwel and Michael Mönninger, Von der Sozialtopie zum städtischen Haus: Texte und Interviews von Hans Stimmann (Berlin: Dom Publishers, 2011); and Hans Stimmann, ed., Berliner Altstadt: Von der DDR -Staatsmtte zur Stadtmitte (Berlin: Dom, 2009).

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transform the ruins of what had once been Berlin’s diplomatic and administrative quarter into apartments appealing enough to entice well-employed young West Berliners to live abutting the Wall. Punctuated by the small triangular gables that became one of his signature devices, the block is anchored at the corner by a four-story white cylinder, whose lower portion is often wrapped in posters for local events. Much tougher than the nostalgic pastiche he created for the Quartier Schützenstraße erected a few blocks to the east following reunification, the Wilhelmstrasse group is nonetheless an attempt to normalize this part of the city rather than to confront what had happened directly across the street. Nothing about the design of the Topography of Terror engages it, but it is nonetheless an inescapable presence from many parts of the site.

Conclusion By attracting larger numbers of visitors than even the Jewish Museum, which charges admission, or the information center under the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which does not, the Topography of Terror is—at least from the perspective of encouraging what James E. Young terms “memory work,” that is having to confront and acknowledge, as well as potentially come to terms with what happened in the past—extremely successful.24 Unlike Zumthor’s project, Libeskind’s building, or Eisenman’s memorial, however, it has attracted little of the publicity that since the mid– 1980s has been bestowed on many of Berlin’s new buildings and above all on its commemorative spaces. Undoubtedly one reason for this is the complexity of what the Topography of Terror commemorates. The perpetrators and the wide range of their victims, who ranged from active political resistors to Jewish and Roma babies, are all remembered together here. This makes it impossible to celebrate the heroism of those punished for opposing Nazism without undercutting the acknowledgment that they were not the only ones who suffered at the hands of the murderous regime. Wilms and Hellmann’s understated but powerful architectural strategy focuses on exposing Nazi crimes over either celebrating resistance or honoring victims. Three other explanations for the relative lack of scholarly attention paid to the Topography of Terror also merit mention. First, the design strategies that attract and hold the attention of visitors and form an appropriate backdrop to the horrific stories being recounted here, resist being captured by photography. Secondly, neither design partner was already famous. Moreover Wilms, as a woman, and Hallmann as a landscape architect are not, unlike Zumthor, Libeskind, and Eisenman, among the stars of the architecture profession’s upper echelons. Finally, by the time the Topography of Terror finally opened, Berlin, its buildings, and the memories they kept raw were no longer news.

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James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge, 184–223.

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The experience of the Topography of Terror is necessarily relational and also dynamic. No single view captures even a fraction of the complexity entailed in looking out from the documentation center at the rocky field that leads to the excavated ruins and beyond, in turn from left to right, to the Martin Gropius Building, the Detlev Rohwedder Building as fronted by the Wall, and Rossi’s housing blocks (the Europe and Germany blocks are more difficult to glimpse through the trees, and lie in the opposite direction from the excavated part of the site). Visitors are not expected only to visit the documentation center and study its exhibits, but to spend time walking along the excavations that line Niederkirchnerstraße, from which they become more aware of the neighboring structures. Even the most ill-informed recognize the Wall. The effectiveness of the strategies adopted here lies precisely in this lack of being able to be reduced to a single powerful image or even a series of them. Contemporary architectural culture, with its emphasis on mediality, has little way of recognizing the impact that the careful staging of place rather than an emphasis on the production of images, can achieve. There is also little framework for understanding success in terms that are in no way commercial and at the same time remain completely detached from the articulation of an original theoretical position esteemed within the academy. And, although in 2014 women constituted 43 percent of the registered architects in Germany, a much higher percentage than in Austria (18 percent), Belgium (27 percent), France (38 percent), Ireland (29 percent), Italy (38 percent), the Netherlands (21 percent), Spain (29 percent), the United Kingdom (25 percent), or the United States (18 percent), stardom has evaded the many women in Germany who practice architecture successfully.25 Wilms, who had not previously designed anything that has attracted anywhere near the same degree of attention as the Topography of Terror, and Hallmann, who also had not, benefited from the competition format. Since then, they have repeated their initial success with an entry, for which they shared credit with the artist Nikolaus Kolius, for an understated but prize-winning design for a memorial to the victims of the Nazi euthanasia policy. Dedicated in 2014 in the shadow of Hans Scharoun’s celebrated Philharmonie, it has also done relatively little to lift their profile.26 Part of the problem, too, is that being the first to do something often matters more than having done it extremely well. Berlin and its ghosts are no longer at the center of international architectural culture. This has moved on to consider the kinds of forms and ornaments made possible by digital technologies and arguably encouraged by working outside the West, as well as to issues of sustainability. All of these lie well

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https://www.ace-cae.eu/fileadmin/New_Upload/7._Publications/Sector_Study/2014/EN/2014_EN_ FULL .pdf [accessed January 3, 2018], and Despina Stratigakos, “Why is the world of architecture so male?,” Los Angeles Times, 21 April 2016, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oestratigakos-missing-women-architects-20160421-story.html [accessed February 28, 2018]. Thomas Jakob, “Denkmal für Euthanasie-Opfer,” Garten + Landschaft, April 14, 2014, https://www. garten-landschaft.de/ein-denkmal-fur-euthanasie-opfer-berlin/, and Kerstin Krupp, “Denkmal für ‘Euthanasie-Opfer,’” Berliner Zeitung, September 2, 2014, https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/kultur/ berlin-tiergarten-denkmal-fuer--euthanasie--opfer-eingeweiht-179998 [both accessed January 3, 2018].

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outside of the way in which new forms of remembering were conceptualized in Berlin in the 1990s and the opening decade of the twenty-first century.27 New memorials there attract little scholarly attention, even as visitor numbers to them continue to soar. The issues they address continue, however, to matter. The controversy in August 2017 over the continued presence of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the continued lack of major commemorations of slavery in American public space, indicate that this is an issue that remains at the crux of political culture well beyond Germany.28 Memorials are still meaningful or their presence would not continue to be contested. Developing effective ways of marking repression and honoring resistance to it has become, if anything, more important than celebrating victories or even simply acknowledging victims. The Topography of Terror was established by a group of leftwing Berliners, most too young to have been members of the Nazi party, the German army, or otherwise responsible for the crimes committed by the Third Reich, who wanted to ensure that neither these crimes nor opposition to Hitler’s dictatorship was forgotten. Originally working in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, their efforts are now supported by the city and national governments without regard to what political party is in power. Significantly, far from being tucked out of sight in what was once a marginal location in West Berlin, they now take place in proximity to significant chunks of the national government, which no longer seeks, as Chancellor Helmut Kohl did as recently as the 1980s, to minimize or normalize German culpability for state-sponsored Nazi terror. The Topography of Terror will never sit as easily in Berlin as the Arc de Triomphe does in Paris or the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. It is instead intended to disturb the possibility of a return to normalcy, including that of neoclassical strategies of commemoration. The Topography of Terror will easily outlast the circumstances of its creation. Well past the time when living witnesses of what happened here have all died, the walls, built to sustain the status of the Prussian monarchy but commandeered to shelter fascist brutality, will still testify to the authenticity of place and of the histories told here. Above all, it will continue to be a crucial component of this part of Berlin because of this compelling relationship to place, but the design, which so strongly resists the urge to put architecture ahead of attentiveness, and which so subtly supports the goals of the institution it leaves so exposed, is nonetheless a too often overlooked component of its effectiveness. Architecture here crafts experience rather than focuses on aesthetics. Beauty is not present, nor should it be, but understated genius certainly is.

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For the impact of the digital see, for instance, a trio of recent books by Antoine Picon, Digital Culture in Architecture (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2010); Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity (New York: Wiley, 2013); and Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence (New York: Wiley, 2015), and for sustainability, Michael Braungart and William McDonough, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make (New York: North Point Press, 2002), and Jason F. McLennan, The Philosophy of Sustainable Design (Kansas City : Ecotone, 2004). For African-American sponsored memorials to both slavery and the civil rights movement see Dell Upton, What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift and Monument Building in the Contemporary South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

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Part IV

Art That is Created in Acts of Resistance

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From Anti-Nazi Postcards to Anti-Trump Social Media: Laughter as Resistance, Opposition, or Cold Comfort? Peter Chametzky

On April 8, 1943, Elise and Otto Hampel, a working-class Berlin couple, were executed in Plötzensee Prison. Their capital offense had consisted of writing and leaving in public spaces some two hundred postcards bearing anti-Nazi messages. Previously not overtly political, the Hampels were compelled to their brave but futile act of resistance by the death of Elise’s brother in the war. The Hampels’ postcards, dating from 1940 to their arrest on October 20, 1942, are not believed to have had any effect in fomenting broader resistance to the Nazi regime. But, they alarmed the Gestapo, which collected the cards soon after they were deposited in stairwells, on benches, and in other public places. The sheer number of cards fostered suspicion that they were the work of a resistance cell, similar to the leaflets left in public spaces by the White Rose group in Munich. However, there is no evidence that the Hampels were part of any larger network, and none was presented at their trial. The story would end there, meriting a paragraph in a chapter on internal German acts of resistance, had not art intervened and turned the Hampels into enduring symbols. Immediately after the war the Hampel file came into the possession of Johannes Becher, a communist poet and postwar organizer of the Kulturbund zur Demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands (Cultural Alliance for the Democratic Renewal of Germany). Becher passed it on to the writer Hans Fallada, with the suggestion that he turn it into a novel.1 After spending seven months in 1946 undergoing substance abuse treatment, Fallada (b. Rudolf Ditzen in 1911) wrote the over 500-page novel, Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Every Man Dies Alone) over the course of three months. 1

On Fallada, his damaged and tortured later life, ambiguous position in Nazi Germany, and the genesis of the novel through Becher, see Geoff Wilkes, “Afterword” to Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone (1947), trans. Michael Hofmann (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2009). This edition also reproduces cards by the Quangels, preserved in their Gestapo file, and documents relating to their case. Thanks to Johan Ahr for calling the novel to my attention. For more on Becher and his role in the Kulturbund, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, In A Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 72–106. The Hampels’ Wikipedia article reproduces one of the cards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_and_Elise_Hampel

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In it, he told the story of Otto and Anna Quangel, based on the Hampels. In the novel, it is their son rather than a brother who dies in combat. Anna is devastated, Otto is characteristically withdrawn, reticent, until he finally announces that he has a plan to “do something.” Anna is expectant, excited, but then disappointed when her husband’s plan is to write and distribute . . . postcards: “‘Isn’t this thing that you’re wanting to do, isn’t it a bit small, Otto?’ He stopped rummaging, and still standing there stooped, he turned his head to his wife. ‘Whether it’s big or small, Anna,’ he said, ‘if they get wind of it, it’ll cost us our lives. . . .’ ”2 Otto’s fatalistic line and the Hampels’ fate testify to the Nazi state’s serious regard for the propaganda potential of postcards. It saw postcards as a valuable tool to spread its own imagery and messages, and as a means more easily to monitor correspondence.3 A 1940 SS policy advisory addressed the images on field postcards, cards sent by soldiers on active duty. “More and more extremely kitschy field postcards are turning up in shops . . . field postcards should be created picturing, for example, good looking racially acceptable girls and women from the area of operation, figures from German history, the leadership of the movement and military, or contemporary artworks.”4 By contemporary artworks, the SS meant those by painters and sculptors such as Adolf Ziegler and Hitler’s preferred sculptor of monumental nude figures, Arno Breker, whose works were shown annually from 1937 to 1944 in the grandiose Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition, hereafter GDK ) in the Haus der deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) in Munich.5 These academically naturalistic works were to offer evidence that the “temple of art” had been “cleansed” of modernist “degeneracy” (Entartung), that is, of abstracting works by artists such as the modernist Willi Baumeister (1889–1955), who was represented by four paintings and a number of graphics in the 1937 Munich “Degenerate Art” exhibition. Ziegler, President of the Imperial Chamber of Fine Art, had been empowered by propaganda minister Goebbels to seize works of “degenerate art” from German museums. When he declared the

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Fallada, 132, see also Wilkes, 522. The story’s enduring dramatic appeal is attested to by the fact that Fallada’s novel was adapted into a 1962 West German television movie, a 1969–70 three-part East German television series, a 1976 West German film, various adaptations for the stage, and the 2016 film Alone in Berlin, directed by Vincent Peréz and starring Emma Thompson, Brendan Gleeson, and Daniel Brühl. On the massive production of art postcards in Nazi Germany, see Frank Wagner and Gudrun Linke, “Mächtige Körper: Staatsskulptur und Herrschaftsarchitektur,” Inszenierung der Macht: Ästhetische Faszination im Faschismus, ed. idem, (Berlin: D. Nishen, 1991), 72. Report on the “Kitschification” (Verkitschung) of Field Postcards,” 28 February 1940, Meldungen aus dem Reich: Auswahl aus den Geheimen Lageberichten des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS 1939–1944, ed. Heinz Boberach (Berlin: Luchterhand, 1965), 52–3. The Central Institute for Art History in Munich, in cooperation with the German Historical Museum and the House of Art (successor to the House of German Art, and housed in the same, Nazi-commissioned neoclassical Munich building), has created a comprehensive online documentation of the GDK exhibitions, featuring page-by-page reproductions of the catalogues, floor plans, and photo albums with installation photographs. See, http://www.gdk- research.de/db/ apsisa.dll/ete [accessed February 16, 2018]. See also Ines Schlenker, “Defining National Socialist Art: The First Grosse Deutsche Kunstaustellung 1937,” in Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, ed. Olaf Peters (Munich: Prestel, 2014), 90–105.

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“Degenerate Art” exhibition open, one day after the opening of the first GDK , he declared: “German Volk (folk), come and judge for yourselves!”6 On March 23, 1944 Baumeister wrote in his diary: Called to the police station in Urach. 1) The state secret police have taken exception to the strange postcards that I regularly receive from Franz Krause. (I’ve already asked Krause not to send any more of these, since they’re conspicuous these days, and won’t be understood by outsiders. The cards are pasted fragments in the manner of photomontages.) I told the authorities that these are harmless cards done in jest, having to do with work at the Herberts Maltechnikum.7

The Herberts Maltechnikum was a research institute focused on historical painting techniques that operated from 1937 to 1944 in Kurt Herberts’s Wuppertal paint and lacquer factory. Baumeister’s friend, architect and designer Heinz Rasch, managed the institute, and recruited to it Baumeister, Krause, Georg Muche, Oskar Schlemmer, Hans and Lily Hildebrandt, and others. Their findings were published as Herberts’s own work in a series of books and, in exchange for this work, Herberts protected them from war duties.8 In 1941 Baumeister reworked postcards reproducing works by Ziegler into Dadaistic political and artistic satires, and shared them with friends, as I have written about rather extensively elsewhere.9 In Jokkmokmädchen (Maiden from Jokkmok, Figure 11.1), for instance, he altered a postcard reproducing a 1937 Ziegler painting depicting Terpsichore, the ancient Greek muse of dance and choral music. This painting had been shown in the 1937 GDK , a show that Baumeister visited along with the concurrent “Degenerate Art” exhibition. All of the text, except for Jokkmokmädchen,

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“Deutsches Volk, komm und urteil selbst!,” “Zieglers Rede zur Eröffnung der Ausstellung ‘Entartete Kunst’ 1937,” in Die ’Kunststadt’ München, 1937: Nationalsozialismus und ‘Entartete Kunst’, ed. Peter-Klaus Schuster (Munich: Prestel, 1987), 218. Diary of Willi Baumeister, March 23, 1944, unpublished folio, Archiv Baumeister, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, 471. Urach is a village in the Swabian Alps to which Baumeister moved his family to escape the bombing of Stuttgart. See Inventur—Art in Germany, 1943–55, ed. Lynette Roth with Ilke Voermann (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 44–5, 109–18; Alexandra Dern, Modulation und Patina: Willi Baumeister, Oskar Schlemmer und Franz Krause (Münster: Museum für Lackkunst, 2004); Kurt Herberts, Modulation und Patina: Ein Dokument aus dem Wuppertaler Arbeitskreis um Willi Baumeister, Oskar Schlemmer, Franz Krause, 1937–1944 (Stuttgart: G. Hatje, 1989); Schlemmer, Baumeister, Krause, Wuppertal 1937–1944 (Wuppertal: von der Heydt Museum, 1979); Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art, and the Chemical Industry (London: Reaktion, 2005), 193–208, contrasts the Wuppertal activities with the collaboration of most of the German chemical industry. Peter Chametzky, “Marginal Comments, Oppositional Work: Willi Baumeister’s Confrontation with Nazi Art,” Willi Baumeister: Zeichnungen, Gouachen, Collagen, ed. Ulrike Gauss (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie & Edition Cantz, 1989), 251–72; Peter Chametzky, “The Post-History of Willi Baumeister’s anti-Nazi Postcards,” Visual Resources XVII , no. 4 (2001), 459–80; Peter Chametzky, Objects as History in Twentieth-Century German Art: Beckmann to Beuys, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 94–103, 117–35; Peter Chametzky, “Postcards on the Edge in Nazi Germany,” Carte postale et creation, eds Isabel Ewig, Emmanuel Guigon, Line Herbert-Arnold (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris Sorbonne, forthcoming 2018).

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derives from one of the books on historical painting techniques produced at the Herberts’ Maltechnikum. In Baumeister’s collage, the preparation of a wall for fresco painting is conflated with preparing the nude figure for sex. Labeling her a maiden from the Lapland village of Jokkmok, Baumeister identified and mocked the supposed classical muse, in the context of Nazi racialized aesthetic policy, as a “Nordic” ideal of beauty. Jokkmok’s extreme northern location and Dadaistic name, exposes the absurdity of Ziegler’s concoction.10 Baumeister also created a startling and now celebrated doodle around the penis of Breker’s monumental relief sculpture, The Avenger, as reproduced in the September 1941 issue of a party-line art magazine (Figure  11.2).11 The reproduction is of the

Figure 11.1: Willi Baumeister, Jokkmokmädchen (Maiden from Jokkmok), 1941, collage on a postcard of Adolf Ziegler, Terpsichore, 1937, 5.8 × 4.1 in., 14.9 × 10.5 cm. Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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The hands holding plastering tools are probably Baumeister’s, and can be seen in Kurt Herberts, The Complete Book of Artists’ Techniques (New York: Praeger, 1958), 271, 277. “Die Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung 1941, II ,” Kunst dem Volk (Vienna) 12 no. 9 (September 1941), 1–40. Baumeister drew on the Breker reproduction on page 12. See Chametzky, 2010, 117–32.

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plaster version, shown in the 1941 GDK , of a never completed, ten-meter-tall bronze, intended as one of the intimidating decorations to be installed along the new north-south axis to be constructed as part of Albert Speer’s plan for the redesign of Berlin as Germania, capital of the Third Reich. A contemporary report on the 1941 GDK intoned: “Arno Breker has made it his task to embody symbolically in this series of reliefs the virtues and strengths of German values, so that this series of reliefs, work on which is much further advanced than the public realizes, will develop an epic both timeless and timely on the Germanic-German character.”12 The threatening Avenger, embodiment of “Germanic” virtues, strengths, and values, wields a sword, with which it will decapitate the snake. Baumeister’s defacement of the sculpture’s penis reminds us of the connection between snakes, decapitation, and castration anxiety. As Freud observed: To decapitate = to castrate. . . . The hair upon Medusa’s head is frequently represented in works of art in the form of snakes, and these once again are derived from the castration complex. It is a remarkable fact that, however frightening they may be in themselves, they nevertheless serve actually as a mitigation of the horror, for they replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of the horror. This is a confirmation of the technical rule according to which a multiplication of penis symbols signifies castration.13

Snake heads proliferate in the Breker relief, with five of them oozing out of the rock beneath The Avenger’s feet. They are a symbolic concatenation of the “antisocial” elements the Nazis feared would contaminate, and ultimately castrate, the martially eroticized Aryan (male) body of the Volk. Breker’s figures suggest that erotic energies generated among men, and by images of idealized warriors, can and should be sadistically sublimated into violence against “acceptable” targets. Klaus Theweleit has identified one of the storm trooper’s problems, and its “solution”: “You should love men, but you are not allowed to be homosexual . . . the best thing is to obey and repress the contradictions.”14 The sword, a phallic symbol of state-regulated power, must castrate the “other”: the Jew, the homosexual, the Sinti, the Roma, the empowered New Woman, who is feared precisely as a potential castrator, a crippler of the male, Germanic, lifeforce, which must be avenged against the claimed transgressions of the “decadent” Weimar Republic era that preceded the Nazi takeover. The philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug has described the male body as depicted by Breker as “the body of a

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Werner Rittich, “Neue Deutsche Plastik. Zu den Werken der Bildhauerkunst in der ‘Grossen Deutschen Kunstaustellung 1941,’” Die Kunst im Deutschen Reich 5 no. 8–9 (August–September 1941), 259. Sigmund Freud, “Medusa’s Head,” (1922) in Collected Papers 5, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1950), 105. Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien II (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1980), 334.

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Figure 11.2: Willi Baumeister, Altered Avenger, pen and ink drawing on reproduction of Arno Breker, The Avenger, page 194 from article “Die Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung 1941, II ,” Kunst dem Volk (Vienna), September 1941, Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

state-regulated self-control, of an imperialistic mechanism, simultaneously subordinate and superior.”15 Baumeister’s penis-nosed little man renders the threatening image ridiculous, taking a “degenerate” artist’s revenge on the system that has labeled him too as an “other.” In so doing it exposes and mocks the sculpture’s phallocentrism and the castration anxiety haunting this “armored body.”16

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Wolfgang Fritz Haug, “Ästhetik der Normalität/Vor-stellung und Vorbild. Die Faschisierung des männlichen Akts bei Arno Breker,” in Wagner and Linke, 97. In Chametzky, 2010, I follow a suggestion made by Anthony Julius and advance the idea that the bow-tie-wearing-penis-nosed-wiry-haired little man is, in fact, Baumeister’s self-portrait as Jewish stereotype. See Anthony Julius, Transgressions of Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 171–4, where he states: “The penis becomes a long nose, the face a Jewish caricature that mocks the Nazis’ deepest, most fantastical fears about the emasculating effect of Jewish power.” See also Angela Stercken, “Der Rächer mit neueum Kopf. Arno Brekers Akte,” Sprachformen des Körpers in Kunst und Wissenschaft, ed. Gabriele Genge (Tübingen: A. Francke, 2000), 75–94, and Toby Clark, Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 11.

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In 1989, in my first published analysis of these extraordinary but hitherto ignored pieces, I classified them as “oppositional works” in light of their limited circulation—in contrast to John Heartfield’s montages in the Arbeiter Illustrieter Zeitung (Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper, AIZ ) which can be categorized as “resistance,” since like the Hampels’ cards, they circulated publicly; though unlike them, they were part of a broader, active resistance movement.17 Anthropologists such as James C. Scott and sociologists such as Jocelyn A. Hollander and Rachel L. Einwohner have done valuable work in documenting and characterizing a variety of activities, some of which might have no visibility or measurable effect in the public sphere, that could be categorized as “resistance.” As Hollander and Einwohner have written, “everything from revolutions (Goldstone, 1991; Scott, 1985; Skocpol, 1979) to hairstyles (Kuumba and Ahanaku, 1998; Weitz, 2001) has been described as resistance.”18 In historical studies of Nazi Germany, though, the term resistance (Widerstand) has generally been reserved for those who participated in some way as active agents in attempts to bring down or undermine the Hitler regime, or engaged in activities intended to hinder implementation of its policies. Thus, a private citizen not engaged in a resistance organization, who nonetheless hid Jews in her apartment, would count as a member of the resistance, in that this activity, in addition to being personally courageous and highly risky, sought to hinder the policy of deportation and elimination. The particularly high stakes at that time, as the Hampels and many others who were executed for their actions attests to, compels the need to maintain a distinction from those who risked less, whatever their level of internal opposition may have been.19 Our own historical moment in the United States, which one hopes is indeed momentary, of empowered and electorally confirmed nationalism, nativism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and demagoguery—and the threat of authoritarian rule—and

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In Chametzky, 1989, as now, I’ve drawn on the differentiation made by the historian Walther Hofer between resistance (as in “the resistance”) and oppositional or resistant activities or attitudes, to label Baumeister’s creations “oppositional works,” rather than resistance. “Among other things,” Hofer wrote, “there’s an ongoing discussion of the terms resistance (Widerstand), opposition (Opposition), counter-work (Gegenarbeit) and resistant (Resistenz, as in immune from infection). . . . This proliferation of terms, from resistance to opposition to resistant, could broaden perspectives beyond the active resistance, to include other forms of dissent to National Socialism. This requires, though, that sharper lines of distinction be drawn between resistance and the more broadly claimed positions of oppositional or resistant activities or attitudes, in order to promote better understanding of the concept of resistance.” Chametzky, 1989, 267, and Walter Hofer, “Diskussion zur Geschichte des Widerstands,” in Der Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus, eds Jürgen Schädeke and Peter Steinbach (Munich: Piper, 1985), 1120. See also, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Widerstand statt Anpassung: Deutsche Kunst im Widerstand gegen den Faschismus 1933–1945 (Berlin: Elefanten, 1980). Jocelyn A. Hollander and Rachel L. Einwohner, “Conceptualizing Resistance,” Sociological Forum 19:4 (2004), 534. See note 17. In addition to the Hampels, a Munich realtor, Benno Neuberger, was also put to death for creating anti-Nazi postcards, which he deposited unaddressed in a mailbox. See Leslie, 203–4, and Paul Mattick, “Postcards,” available at: http://www.ganahl.info/mumok_paulmattick.html [accessed March 14, 2018].

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the massive circulation through social media of altered imagery both attacking and supporting Trump and Trumpism, cannot help but recall the era in which Baumeister, Heartfield, and the Hampels created and circulated their images in opposition to Nazism.20 The fine distinctions drawn between levels of resistance in Nazi Germany are less relevant in the United States today. Symbolic forms of protest against Trumpian policies and plans, such as those discussed below, still have a chance to influence outcomes within our democratic, constitutional system, in distinction from in Nazi Germany, and so can be categorized as activities intended to and with potential to resist the current administration. Whether and how they might function effectively as such is discussed below.21 While social media posts can reach a vastly larger audience than postcards, like postcards, the format created by these corporate platforms prescribes the form and context of communication through them. As the last US election and its aftermath has shown, the network one addresses is also circumscribed, self-selecting, and often limited to those with similar views. David Castillo and William Egginton have asserted that in the present media environment, “we are entitled to our own facts, our own media-framed reality.” Writing prior to the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election, they presciently recalled that candidate Donald Trump, misinformed by his preferred television network about the outcome of the popular vote on the night of November 6, 2012, tweeted out a call for revolution against Barack Obama, since he believed what he was told and tweeted what he wanted to believe: that Obama had won only the electoral and not the popular vote.22 While Castillo and Egginton referred to

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One of the most widely disseminated warnings about the threat of an authoritarian end to United States democracy, drawing parallels between the rise and coming to power in the 1920s and 1930s of European Fascism and the current situation in the US , has come from the Yale historian of Central and Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust, Timothy Snyder, in his 2017 bestseller, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Snyder posted his twenty lessons on Facebook, and, according to the Yale News in March 2017, it was quickly shared over 17,000 times. https://news. yale.edu/2017/03/16/yale-historian-shares-sobering-analysis-past-and-action-plan-present-newbook [accessed January 5, 2017]. In January 2018 the Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published How Democracies Die, also quantifying the warning signs of totalitarianism, many of which Trump exhibits. See Nicholas Kristof,“Trump’s Threat to Democracy,” The New York Times, January 10, 2018, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/opinion/ trumps-how-democracies-die.html [accessed February 16, 2018]. It is also worth noting that in 1968 the Federal Republic of Germany adopted into its Basic Law (Grundgesetz), as Article  20 clause 4, “the right to resist any person seeking to abolish this constitutional order, if no other remedy is available.” It leaves open what form that resistance might take, and how to determine the unavailability of any other remedy. See, Deutsche Bundestag, Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, print version, last amended on December 23, 2014, trans. Christian Tomuschat, David P. Currin, Donald P. Kommers in cooperation with the Language Service of the German Bundestag, 27. See also, Jutta Limbach, “Georg Elsers Attentat im Lichte des legalisierten Widerstandsrechts,” in Georg Elser – Ein Attentäter als Vorbild, eds Achim Rogoss, Eike Hemmer, Edgar Zimmer (Bremen: Temen, 2006), 105–10. David R. Castillo and William Egginton, Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 5, 73. This predicts Trump’s repeated denials of the reality of his own loss of the popular vote in 2016.

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cable news choices (Fox, CNN , MSNBC ), the choices we make on social media, what and who we like, follow, and retweet, enroll us in what the sociologist Nick Couldy and media theorist Andreas Hepp have described as an updating for the digital, networked age of Norbert Elias’s concept of “figurations”: socially constructed groups that circulate “the shared meaning that the individuals involved produce through their interrelated social practice.”23 Figurations, they claim, have now evolved into data-driven “collectivities” in which “new norms of actions and reactions emerge . . . new entities for governments and civil society actors to deal with.”24 The first grand jury indictments against Russian individuals and organizations by the Special Counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, on February 16, 2018, asserted also that the individuals forming such collectivities, when they seek to influence political outcomes, may well be sponsored by hostile government entities. Within this online collectivity, and no doubt others, lurked actors playing fictional online roles designed to dupe and deceive as many others within it as possible. As the indictment states: “By 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators used their fictitious online personas to interfere with the U.S. presidential election.”25 In both Nazi Germany and Trump America, artists are trying to use the same techniques as those sponsored by authoritarian or would-be authoritarian governments. In Hitler’s Germany both sides employed postcards and montages, among other media. Under the “aspirational fascism” of Trump he acts as his own Twitter troll, while opponents retweet his belligerent comments as evidence against him.26 Like Heartfield’s

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Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, The Mediated Construction of Reality (Cambridge, UK : Polity, 2017), 63. Couldry and Hepp, 136. Sheera Frankel and Katie Benner, “To Stir Discord in 2016, Russians Turned Most Often to Facebook,” The New York Times, Sunday, February 17, 2018, 1. Available at: https://www.nytimes. com/2018/02/17/technology/indictment-russian-tech-facebook.html [accessed February 17, 2018]. For the Mueller indictment (quote here from p.  17), see “Read the Special Counsel’s Indictment Against the Internet Research Agency and Others,” The New York Times, February 16, 2018, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/16/us/politics/document-TheSpecial-Counsel-s-Indictment-of-the-Internet.html [accessed February 17, 2018]. The term “aspirational fascism” derives from the political scientist William Connolly’s Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy Under Trumpism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017), and was brought to my attention by Juliet Koss. One could and should also analyze the use of altered imagery and clever slogans to propagate the authoritarian ideologies that the artists discussed here oppose. For Nazi Germany, see, for instance, the dust jacket of the antiSemitic book by Carl Neumann, Curt Belling, and Hans-Walther Betz, Film- “Kunst” Film-Kohn Film-Korruption Ein Streifzug durch vier Filmjahrzent (Film-“Art” Film-Cohen Film Corruption: an excursion through four decades of films; Berlin: H. Scherping, 1937), which presents a montage of “Jewish” movie moguls surrounded by female faces and flesh, reproduced in Stephanie Barron, “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991), 184. An analogous image in the present is that of Hilary Clinton’s head silhouetted against a wall of one-hundred dollar bills, and flanked by a red star of David with “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” inscribed in it, retweeted by Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, and then removed when it was called out for its anti-Semitism. Available at The Jerusalem Post: http://www. jpost.com/US -Elections/ Did-Trump-use-anti-Semitic-imagery-in- attack-on-Clinton–459304 [accessed December 17, 2017].

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montages and Baumeister’s postcards, contemporary oppositional social media posts often engage in satirical humor, reworking existing images, scaling them down, adding text and extrinsic elements to convey their creator’s point of view, and often mocking the subject of the original image. On Facebook one sees Trump dressed in a Nazi uniform, wearing a swastika armband, jutting out his chin, sporting a roseate Hitler mustache and posed in front of an appropriately traditional landscape painting, labeled “Twitler” (Figure  11.3). On Twitter, an amateur image-maker circulates grotesque images of Trump, with his mouth altered into an anus.27 Does the circulation of such images constitute resistance, oppositional work, or mere humorous venting? The Web has provided an important tool in popular uprisings against authoritarianism and neoliberalism, notably during the Arab Spring and by the Occupy Movement. But what happens with the move from the online link economy, the era of websites and blogs, to that of the “like economy”?28

Figure 11.3: Twitler, Facebook screenshot, September 7, 2017.

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Posted by chelsanity and shown and discussed by Sabine Kriebel, “‘Benuetzte Foto Als Waffe’: John Heartfield in the Digital Age,” paper delivered on the panel, “Cultures of Resistance to Political Oppression,” from which this anthology derives, at the German Studies Association annual meeting, October 2017. Carolin Gerlitz and Anne Helmond, “The Like Economy: Social Buttons and the Data-Intensive Web,” New Media and Society 15 no. 8 (2013), 1348–65. Cited in Oliver Leistert, “The Revolution Will Not Be Liked: On the Systemic Constraints of Corporate Media Platforms for Protests,” in Critical Perspectives on Social Media and Protest: Between Control and Emancipation, ed. Leistert and Lina Dencik (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 20.

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In my opinion, the effectiveness of online oppositional imagery can be judged according to its ability to move beyond circulation within social media networks, to become weapons in social movements and to be granted legitimacy by becoming the focus of discourse in the press, the political world, and the public sphere beyond the “like economy.” The alleged Trump-supporting Russian conspirators realized the necessity for “real action” in the streets. In the February 16, 2017 indictment, a fictitious, Russian-created US Trump-supporter is quoted as writing in an email to a Florida Trump campaign official: “You know, simple yelling on the Internet is not enough. There should be real action. We organized rallies in New York before. Now we’re focusing on purple states such as Florida.”29 German media theorist Oliver Leistert has argued that the transition from links to likes, marks “a transition from rights to express opinions to the necessity to fit within an often changing and intransparent [sic] regime of codes of conduct, terms of services and ownership.”30 So, the ability to transcend these prescribed and monetized platforms is a key indicator of social and political efficacy, whether the move is into the streets, or onto media outlets that despite their self-selecting audiences, and over and against Trump’s constant claims that anything he does not like is “fake news,” are known to employ effective if not perfect vetting of their content, granting them legitimacy as purveyors of real news (e.g., The New York Times, NPR , Wall Street Journal, Washington Post). When social media posts become real news, including Trump’s tweets, they have moved beyond circulation to have the potential to affect policies and actions. Baumeister’s creations were part of a small network of postal satirists active in Nazi Germany, including architect Franz Krause and artist Robert Michel. These artists had been exchanging satirical, creative, illustrated correspondence for years, and doubtlessly saw it as a convenient, time-tested outlet for their critical commentaries on Nazi policies. The images and text combinations they created were often subtle. Their subtlety not only somewhat veiled their dissent, but also contrasted with the vulgar clarity of Nazi propaganda and culture in general. Baumeister’s and his friends’ postcards, like social media posts, circulated to a limited, self-selected “figuration,” to employ Elias’s term. On a much larger scale, this could also be argued of Heartfield’s famous photomontages for the AIZ—though at that time, frontpage AIZ images would have been visible to a diverse audience perusing the offerings at newsstands or in cafés. Whether they would have convinced casual observers in such contexts is as questionable as the influence exerted by today’s social media posts on those with opposing views. While it is certainly possible to friend people on Facebook with different political opinions, or to subscribe to publications with divergent political leanings, or to follow the Twitter account of anyone one wishes, the algorithms that suggest who or what we follow tend to reinforce who and what we

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“Read the Special Counsel’s Indictment Against the Internet Research Agency and Others,” The New York Times, February 16, 2018, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/16/ us/politics/document-The-Special-Counsel-s-Indictment-of-the-Internet.html [accessed February 17, 2018]. Leistert, 20.

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already follow and think, and hence to ossify us into “collectivities.” Answerable to the internationalist Comintern rather than the German Communist Party, the AIZ ’s target was “a mass leftist audience.”31 The collectivity of the AIZ ’s “mass leftist audience” is in many ways analogous to today’s networked collectivities.32 As Sabine Kriebel has argued, humor, anchored in trauma, was central to Heartfield’s project and, at his best, achievement. She quotes an anonymous 1934 commentator in the AIZ that his works “inspire the friend and wound the foe and make laughter a devastating weapon.”33 She anchors Heartfield’s jokes within contemporaneous Marxist theories of humor’s potential political efficacy, including Georgy Lukács’ “holy hate”—the righteous mocking of collectivism’s opponents—Mikhail Bakhtin’s “revolutionary grotesque,” and Walter Benjamin’s regard for slapstick comedy and Mickey Mouse. She makes a strong case, though, that when Heartfield rejected heroic socialist realist propaganda, he most effectively and affectively deployed Anatolii Lunacharskii’s contemporary concept of the empowering effect of “revolutionary laughter.” Following ideas Lunacharskii published subsequent to his 1929 removal as Soviet People’s Commissar for Education, she sees “Heartfield’s acrid mockery as a process of transformation that empowers an otherwise beleaguered political subject.”34 Their humor was not primarily about creating a community (Bergson), or providing compensatory release of repressed urges (Freud), but served to harden the political resolve of their intended audience. Heartfield’s August 10, 1933 AIZ frontpage montage, Instrument in God’s hand? Toy in Thyssen’s hand!, adapts George Grosz’s 1920 drawing, The Secret Emperor, to mock Hitler as a Hampelmann (a pull-string, jumping-jack figure) in the capitalist’s hand. The mobilization of homophobic tropes notwithstanding (as Kriebel states, having Thyssen pull on the string dangling between the Hitler figure’s hinged legs turns “child’s play into a hand job”35), such a montage is brilliant not only as a work of art and design, but also as empowering political satire, for their intended audience, the already radically anti-capitalist and anti-Nazi (and perhaps homophobic) readers of the AIZ . Under threat from Hitler, they see him belittled, and overpowered by another opponent, big capital, whose power and influence can be explained through more conventional Marxist analyses than can the demagogue’s. Broader efficacy as a political weapon, beyond the mass leftist audience, is harder to gage. As Kriebel subtly comments about Heartfield’s anti-Nazi montages:

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Sabine Kriebel, Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 47–8. Castillo and Egginton go much farther back in their analysis and analogies, linking two periods of rapid change in communication technology, which they call “inflationary media”: the digital revolution of our time, and the early modern period’s development of moveable type, a vibrant print culture, urban mass theater, and illusionistic perspectival painting, which already provoked “a crisis of reality.” Castillo and Egginton, 1. Kriebel, 178. Kriebel, 184. Kriebel, 168. It is figure 72 and the Grosz 75 in Kriebel.

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. . . what I want to recover from these works and the moment of their making is both their tragic inadequacy and the urgency of the laughter they aim to provoke. Witnesses to a failed revolution, they ask their beholders to chuckle ruefully, at times rancorously, at the folly of power, and to uphold their moral superiority and communal fortitude as they undergo political demise and exile.36

So far as I know, no one has been put to death, or driven into hiding or exile, for their anti-Trump posts, tweets, gifs, or memes. Certainly there have been professional consequences for social media activity, as well as threats both real and virtual.37 Trump’s nativism and racism, while abhorrent, is not, so far as we know, genocidal—and in the first year of his presidency we did not experience a Reichstag fire. The German parliament building burned on February 27, 1933, an event widely believed to have been orchestrated by the Nazis themselves, and surely was then instrumentalized by them. It allowed the passage by the parliament of an act that effectively stripped itself of governmental power: on March 24 the Enabling Act granting Hitler broad, extraconstitutional powers, allowing the Nazi Party to impose the “coordination” (Gleichschaltung) of civil institutions into the Nazi state and into accord with its ideology. One of the first acts “enabled” was the dismissal of undesirable employees from government positions, including at universities and art academies. On March 29, for instance, orders were issued to fire Willi Baumeister from his professorship at the Frankfurt Staedel Art School, and he received his letter of termination on March 31.38 While many of Trump’s statements indicate that he would welcome such Gleichschaltung, the free, constitutionally protected press continues to function, and the judiciary has thus far preserved its independence (while attempts are being made to stock the judiciary with ideologically acceptable, if not legally qualified, jurists)39 and blocked a number of his initiatives, such as the Muslim travel ban and the rescinding of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA ) policy for undocumented

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Kriebel,187. It should also be remembered that despite their “tragic inadequacy,” Heartfield’s sharp satires were among those works that in spring 1934 ignited a diplomatic confrontation between Germany and Czechoslovakia, when they were shown in Prague in the Association Mánes’s First International Caricature and Humor Exhibition in Prague. See Keith Holz, Modern German Art for Thirties Paris, Prague, and London: Resistance & Acquiescence in a Democratic Public Sphere (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 84–97; and Badischer Kunstverein, 117–18. Thanks to Andrés Zervigón for a reminder about this affair. Holz provides a bracing coda to this controversy, reminding us that simply protecting artistic freedom, as the Association Mánes attempted, “failed to acknowledge art’s contingency in political processes,” and “the necessity of supporting political struggles that would create political conditions to enable artistic as well as other freedoms” (95). And, the activity may actually be falsified, see Chris Quintana, “A Case of Mistaken Identity Spurs Hateful Messages for a Sikh Professor,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 20, 2017, available at: https://www.chronicle.com/article/A-Case-of-Mistaken-Identity/240714 [accessed February 19, 2018]. On the “grounds” for and timing of his dismissal, see Chametzky, 2010, 116–17. Jonah Engel Bromwich and Niraj Chokshi, “Trump Judicial Nominee Attracts Scorn After Flopping in Hearing,” The New York Times, December 15, 2017, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/ 2017/12/15/us/politics/matthew-petersen-senator-kennedy.html [accessed February 18, 2018].

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immigrants who arrived as small children. Time will tell if these institutions, and the electorate, succeed in preserving our democracy. It will also take time to fully evaluate the role of digital anti- (and pro-) Trumpism in this struggle. While I have not documented Baumeister suffering any negative repercussions for his own creations, the 1944 diary entry quoted above does substantiate that his correspondence was being monitored, and that the potential for repercussions did exist. He and his friends’ Dadaistic interventions into Nazi visual culture had a long preparation in their careers. As early as 1912, Baumeister received an altered postcard from his best friend, future Bauhaus master Oskar Schlemmer, who had traveled from their native Stuttgart to Berlin (Figure  11.4). In Berlin, he apparently attended an exhibition of German Impressionists such as Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, and Wilhelm Trübner. Addressing the card to “H. Maler” (Mr. Painter) W. Baumeister, and punning on his last name’s connection to a common one for Swabian restaurants (Schlemmerkeller, Gourmand Cellar), he shuffled the artists’ names into new configurations, a surprising move even for the young Schlemmer, an artist not at all known in his mature practice to have embraced humor, let alone the power of chance. He created this card before Dada was born out of the ruins of the First World War, and before the supposed origins of Berlin Dada’s revolutionary development of photomontage through the exchange of altered postcards from the front on the part of Grosz and Heartfield; or, in a competing claim, Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch being inspired by studio photographers’ postcards into which soldiers could paste a photograph of their head onto an impressively uniformed, and intact, body.40 Andrés Zervigón has argued that the importance of Heartfield’s and George Grosz’s wartime cards resides in their status as precursors of the program for Berlin Dada montage, and the later AIZ works. None of the wartime cards are extant, so we have to accept on faith that amidst the massive exchange of governmentally encouraged postcard correspondence during the First World War, Grosz and Heartfield enacted the program later theorized by Heartfield’s Soviet friend, Sergei Tret’iakov, to use displacements, juxtapositions, and text to create politically “subversive images.”41 It would take Baumeister’s dismissal from his professorship at the Frankfurt Staedel Art School in March 1933 and exposure to “Great German Art” at the time that his own public creations were pilloried as “degenerate,” to compel him to a comparable practice. Franz Krause and Baumeister had known each other since the early 1920s, when Krause studied architecture in Stuttgart, and their postcard correspondence

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Elizabeth Otto, “Real Men Wear Uniforms: Photomontage, Postcards, and Military Visual Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Germany,” Contemporaneity 2, no. 1 (2012), available at: http:// contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/contemporaneity/article/view/44/15 [accessed February 18, 2018]. Andrés Mario Zervigón, John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 44. See also Kriebel, 85, and for Tret’iakov’s 1936 text, “John Heartfield montiert,” see Eckhard Siepmann, Montage: John Heartfield vom Club Dada zur Arbeiter-Illustrierten Zeitung (Berlin: Elefanten, 1977), 168–75.

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Figure 11.4: Oskar Schlemmer, Postcard to Willi Baumeister, 1912, collage, 4.1 × 5.8 in., 10.5 × 14.9 cm. Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.

began.42 During the Nazi period, Krause’s postcard play continued. An undated card from around 1942 that must have been sent, if at all, in an envelope, has on one side a collage featuring classical sculpture and a laughing woman, perhaps laughing at the Nazis’ revival of classicism (Figure 11.5 and 11.6). On the other side, rather than the classical profile view of Hitler printed on commercial stamps, Krause created a sketchy pencil drawing of a mustached face in frontal view, with right hair part but no eyes or mouth, presenting a Hitler devoid of his famous affect, and by remaining characterless and mute incapable of effect. Krause was monitored by the secret police from at latest 1939.43 In 1940 he was denounced by a party-member neighbor, who claimed to have witnessed Krause shouting on the street, after an air raid siren sounded, “Jetzt scheissen sich die Nazis die Hose voll” (“Now the Nazis are going to shit their pants”), and, after a two-second pause, “Gott sei Dank” (Thank God). In his written response to the SS , Krause neither denied nor confirmed the charge. Perhaps as a consequence, he was sent to Minsk on the

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For an overview, see See Gerda Breuer, “ ‘Willi Baumeyster. Was M8 die Kunst?’ Postkarten an Willi Baumeister,” in Franz Krause, 1897–1979: Architekt, Künstler, Poet, eds Breuer and Pia Mingels (Cologne: Wienand, 2014),132–5. Gestapo Akte RW 58 Nr. 34041 über Franz Krause (1897–1979), Landesarchiv NordrheimWestfalen, Duisburg. See also Fabrice Laurich, Franz Krause (1897–1979) (Mémoire de Master 2: UFR Histoire de l’Architecture et de l’Art Contemporain, 2013), 42–4. My thanks to Isabelle Ewig for sharing this thorough thesis with me, and to M. Laurich for friendly assistance.

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Figure 11.5: Franz Krause front of postcard to Willi Baumeister, c. 1942, collage and pen and ink, 5.8 × 4.1 in., 14.9 × 10.5 cm. Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.

Figure 11.6: Franz Krause back of postcard to Willi Baumeister, c. 1942, pencil, 4.1 × 5.8 in., 10.5 × 14.9 cm. Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.

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Figure 11.7: Franz Krause, front of field postcard to Willi Baumeister, c. 1942, pen and ink and stamps, 4.1 × 5.8 in., 10.5 × 14.9 cm. Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. Eastern Front to work on construction projects.44 A field postcard sent to Baumeister from Minsk has an illegible date on one side, while officially printed texts convey an anti-Soviet message on one side, and a warning to the sender not to include any information about the unit in which he is serving on the other (Figures 11.7 and 11.8).45 A stamp below the latter message informs us that the SS conveyed this post. On the other side Krause executed a bizarre drawing relating to his construction duties: no doubt fancifully suggesting a project to construct a tower that would enable “far viewing” (Fern seh) from Minsk to Stuttgart, represented by a pen and ink sketch of the central train station, designed by Paul Bonatz, with Baumeister’s residence on Gerokstraße on a nearby hill highlighted. Baumeister had been friends with the artist, designer, and architect Robert Michel (1897–1983), husband of Bauhaus artist Ella Bergmann-Michel, since his Frankfurt period (1928–33), when both were founding members of the ring neuer werbegestalter

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Krause served in the military 1939–1945, but Heinz Rasch was often able to arrange furloughs for him, during which time he participated in research at the Maltechnikum. While this work had no military applications, Herberts’s business was actively involved in producing paints and lacquers for military use, whereby the Maltechnikum could also be represented as part of the war effort, and thus keep Baumeister, Schlemmer, et al. protected from other war-related duties. I estimate its date at or around April 16, 1943.

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Figure 11.8: Franz Krause, back of field postcard to Willi Baumeister, c. 1942, pen and ink, 4.1 × 5.8 in., 10.5 × 14.9 cm. Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.

(Circle of New Advertising Designers).46 For New Year of 1933 Michel sent Baumeister a card riffing on the artist’s name: the text and images concern “a great Baumeister,” or architect, of antiquity. Michel portrayed himself on the other side as a horned painter of fanciful abstract creatures. In November 1936, Michel sent Baumeister and family a card with delicate curlicue drawings and a heart punctured by an arrow (Figure 11.9). The ironic text states: “In the attachments you are heartily thanked, on behalf of the office for art (Kunscht, written as if pronounced by a Swabian such as Baumeister) and morals, department I, room 376181. The objects involved in this process will be acquired by the local collection of degenerate art” (entartete Kunst). In that this card was written and sent while the “degenerate art” campaign was ongoing—and before the

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For more on Ella Bergmann-Michel, see Jennifer Kapczynski’s essay in this volume. For a short summary of the ring, see Jeremy Aynsley, Graphic Design in Germany, 1890–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 156–62. For a more comprehensive view of its political aspirations, see Maud Lavin, “Photomontage, Mass Culture, and Modernity: Utopianism in the Circle of New Advertising Designers,” in Montage and Modern Life, 1919–1942 (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1992), 36–59. One of the stated reasons for Baumeister’s dismissal from his professorship in 1933 was his membership in Frankfurt’s October Group, to which Michel and other ring members also belonged. The October Group was an association of artists, designers, and critics in Frankfurt committed to increasing knowledge of innovations in design in the Soviet Union. See Chametzky, 2010, 112, 116.

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Figure 11.9: Robert Michel, Postcard to Willi Baumeister and Family, November 21, 1936, typed text and pen and ink, 4.1 × 5.8 in., 10.5 × 14.9 cm. Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. term had been given its broadest publicity through the 1937 exhibition, Michel’s seriously comic card touches on all of the edgy themes—art, politics, the art world and its discontents, private messages and public pronouncements—that postcards as well as social media implicate. We cannot know if Michel’s card was seen by anyone other than the Baumeister family. We also can’t know if it would have influenced their thinking, or implicated the sender and recipients. The text is subtle. But, as committed modernists, and prior members of progressive circles, these artists were used to and adept at in-group communications that often remained opaque to, or were ridiculed by, outsiders. During the Nazi period these communications assumed political dimensions and maintained group solidarity. The political scientist and new media theorist Jodi Dean has argued that what matters in the current digital era is that images and ideas get repeated, circulate, and incite imitation. Dean has theorized that we have passed from the era of industrial capitalism to what she has labeled communicative capitalism. Her 2009 book Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism & Left Politics was formulated and written in the post–9/11, Bush era, prior to the massive proliferation of online social media and smartphones (the iPhone premiered in 2007). At that time blogs were the preferred platform for immediate personal attempts at intervention in the online public sphere. Despite this, Dean presciently observed:

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. . . multiple opinions and divergent points of view express themselves in myriad intense exchanges, but this circulation of content in dense, intensive global communications networks actually relieves top-level actors (corporate, institutional, and governmental) from the obligation to answer. . . . Criticism doesn’t require an answer because it doesn’t stick as criticism. . . . So rather than responding to messages sent by left activists and critics, top-level actors counter with their own contributions to the circulating flow of communication—new slogans, images, deflections and attacks; staged meetings or rallies featuring supporters; impressive photo-ops that become themselves topics of chatter. . . . I refer to this democracy that talks without responding as communicative capitalism.47

A factor not yet present in that pre-Facebook-and-Twitter-dominated-era critique, but which strengthens rather than undermines the concept of communicative capitalism, is that the content we provide for current platforms, regardless of intended meaning, becomes monetized as data points. In a much more recent text, Dean writes: “In the words of the technology theorist Jaron Lanier, ‘ordinary people “share,” while elite network presences generate unprecedented fortunes.’”48 So, despite or perhaps because of Trump’s lies, Twitter loves him, since he provides content that circulates, gets repeated, and generates views. On Facebook, as Peter Dahlgren notes, “The click of the ‘like’ button sends signals out on to networks where the like-mindedness pre-structures considerable trust, and where this credibility becomes translated into a promotional asset for marketing. . . . One clicks to befriend people and ideas who are ‘like’ oneself, generating and cementing networks of like like-mindedness”.49 And, as the investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election reveals, those with which one associates online may well be fictitious entities. Dean’s recent writing (see note 48) has become more sanguine than her 2009 book was on the potential for resistance within these networks in which, she says, “we live montage.” Adapting Walter Ong’s concept of “secondary orality,” highlighting the role of verbal communication in a culture dominated by print, Dean posits “secondary visuality,” which she defines as “the incorporation of images into mass practices of mediated social and personal communication.” Such incorporations annotate the image world we inhabit. Her ideas here derive from a thinker deeply embedded in the communicative culture of our other period of interest, Walter Benjamin. She addends to Benjamin’s theorizing of the work of art’s traditional “cult value” and modern “exhibition value,” its “circulation value.”50 For Dean, images, including selfies, have

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Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism & Left Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 21–2. Jodi Dean, “Faces as Commons: The Secondary Visuality of Communicative Capitalism,” onlineopen.org, December 31, 2016. Peter Dahlgren, The Political Web: Media, Participation and Alternative Democracy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 61. Dean’s Benjamin reference is to Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–52.

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become authorless, unmoored from the individual to become instead the face of and in the crowd. She optimistically concludes her 2016 essay: Political tactics adequate to this setting will find ways to seize and deploy the common in the service of a divisive egalitarian politics. Instead of repeating the individualist worry over being just another face in the crowd, they will champion the face as a crowd, recognizing the increasing force of collectivity and the common and the necessity of seizing for the many what is claimed by the few.

Dean’s valorization of selfie culture, grounded in scrutiny of her daughter’s Snapchat account, which, rather than glorifying, mocked her “real” self, and rather than asserting authorship, blurred identity, bears comparison with Benjamin’s defense of Mickey Mouse against Adorno and Horkheimer’s charge that the violence done to cartoon characters was the culture industry’s instrument to habituate the audience to violence that could and would also be turned on them. As Sabine Kriebel argues in making her case for Heartfield’s use of mass media tactics to provoke revolutionary laughter, Benjamin argued for “embodied laughter,” by which animated motion pictures’ opticality and tactility could revive rather than train the otherwise docile subject.51 In our era of “inflationary media,” when ever-increasing amounts of one’s time is spent in online environments, it remains necessary to maintain consciousness of our corporeal selves, which in the physical world provides our final refuge and remains our final weapon. A painless way to do so is through laughter, which shakes the body. At the same time, if we recognize and harness the tools that digitization provides it may be possible to move beyond the individual and to rally collectivities, again, as in Heartfield’s time, with the revolutionary power of laughter. While I find Dean’s recent analysis somewhat optimistic, since the platforms that depend on mass content creation will doubtless morph into other entities that like biological beings are primarily motivated by their own survival and desire for profit, I would like to provide a couple of examples of recent artists who I think have used the Web to create effective secondary visuality, annotating our image world, and deployed in the street-level world, critically. Their creations have been employed for actions on the streets and have gained attention in the real press, so in my opinion have succeeded as resistance to Trumpism. Two artists, whose works have leaped on the one hand from the physical to the virtual, and on the other, from the virtual to the physical, are Robin Bell and Mike Mitchell.52

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Kriebel, 209–10. Other examples could include the collective Intelligent Mischief, and its “Black Body Survival Guide,” or “The Other Border Wall Proposals” project. These were presented, along with other interventions, on February 23, 2018, at the College Art Association Annual Meeting, in the session “Evasive Articulation in the Age of ‘Fake News’: Thinking about the Relationship between Art and Truth during the Trump Era,” organized by Aja Mujinga Sherrard and Shiloh R. Krupar. The former was presented (with other examples) by Krupar and Sarah Kanouse, the latter by Jennifer Meridian. See http://www.intelligentmischief.com/ and http://jennifermeridianstudio. com/the-other-border-wall/ [both accessed February 27, 2018].

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Bell is the Washington, D.C. based artist who on May 15, 2017 projected onto the Trump International Hotel phrases referring to Trump’s possible unconstitutional use of the office of POTUS for personal gain (Figure  11.10). Audacious as this act was, and reminiscent of the projections of Krzysztof Wodiczko,53 the image gained international, and what publicists refer to as “earned” media attention through Bell’s sharing of it on Twitter, where it earned attention and distribution through USA Today, the BBC , NPR ,

Figure 11.10: Robin Bell, #Emoluments Welcome, projection on Trump International Hotel, Washington DC , May 15, 2017, as circulated on Twitter. Photo by Liz Gorman/ bellvisuals.com.

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In 1989, for instance, when the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. gave in to conservative pressure and cancelled its showing of the retrospective exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, Wodiczko projected some of the photographs from the censored exhibition on the façade of the museum. This precursor and others to Bell’s work is also noted by Stephanie Eckardt, “ ‘Pay Trump Bribes Here’ On the Trump Hotel Is Not the First time Artists Have Projected Their Protest,” W, May 16, 2017, available at: https://www.wmagazine.com/story/trump-hotel-pay-trump-bribeshere-projection-protest-art [accessed February 19, 2018].

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and other real news outlets.54 Bell’s projections have continued, and he is able to respond quickly to the latest Trumpian outrage and project his message both in actual public space, and in the public commons provided by social media. On December 9, 2017, for instance, he and his projector returned to the Trump International and projected slogans reminding viewers of the continued plight of Puerto Rico, over two months after Hurricane Maria’s landfall on September 20. Fluid movement between the physical and virtual, with each having its virtues, characterizes Bell’s work. When he projects onto the Trump International Hotel at 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, the 1899 Old Post Office and Clock Tower, Bell employs site specificity to pinpoint, mock, and critique one specific locus of his and his followers’ general ire. His work calls out Trump’s transgression of norms and probably of laws on the skin of the thick, Romanesque-revival walls of the former post office that Trump’s business conglomerate now leases from the government of which he is at the head.55 Social media affords this real-world imagery the potential for vast dissemination. Any laughter elicited somatically registers discontent and displeasure at this state of affairs, and pleasure in its clever exposure. Movement between the physical and virtual, in the other direction, also characterizes Mitchell’s work. Mitchell is the Texas-based graphic designer who created the “[45” logo. He rotated the number associated with Trump’s presidency, the forty-fifth, fortyfive degrees, and by employing a red circle and diagonal and black sans serif typeface, echoed but did not replicate the design of the Nazi swastika. Distributed online for easy printing for use in demonstrations, it became an object put into practice, often in DIY versions, on the streets in demonstrations across the country (Figure  11.11). The image’s effectiveness and fluidity attracted attention in both the mainstream and the art press.56 Nazi Germany’s connection to Trump’s USA is not referenced through specific people, policies, or programs, but through logos and imagery. Trump’s status as “45” identifies him more specifically, subtly, and appropriately than images such as “Twitler,” the broad humor and blatant analogy of which has the potential to trivialize Nazi crimes in comparison to those of which Trump has been accused. Mitchell’s logo, in action, calls attention not to crimes but to the power of mobilized and mobile images, in Nazi Germany and now. These may move through the post, over virtual networks, or into the streets, to compel obedience or incite terror. They can provoke or support resistance, or, at the least, provide the cold comfort of gallows humor in private, and physical presence and camaraderie in public, as oppositional work in defiance of political repression.

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See Parry Headrick, “Distinguishing paid, owned, earned, traded, and shared media,” Ragan’s PR Daily, posted May 22, 2013, available at: https://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/Distinguishing_ paid_owned_earned_traded_and_shared_1 4511.aspx [accessed March 3, 2018]. According to Wikipedia, The Trump Organization signed a sixty-year lease with the GSA in 2012. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Post_Office_(Washington,_D.C.) [accessed February 19, 2018]. See Brian Boucher, “Meet the Artist Whose Swastika-Inspired Anti-Trump Logo Has Gone Viral Across the Country,” artnet.com News, August 22, 2017, available at: https://news.artnet.com/artworld/no–45-anti-trump-logo–1056047 [accessed September 16, 2017].

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Figure 11.11: Mike Mitchell, “Ћ 45” on the Street, 2017, as reproduced in Brian Boucher, “Meet the Artist Whose Swastika-Inspired Anti-Trump Logo Has Gone Viral Across the Country,” artnet.com News, August 22, 2017. Courtesy artnet.com News and Mike Mitchell. In Nazi Germany, and in exile, John Heartfield publicly and courageously created and circulated anti-Nazi montages. No saint, his work sometimes trafficked in stereotypical and deceptive imagery. His work qualifies as resistance. Baumeister, Krause, and Michel worked in Nazi Germany, Krause for the Nazi military. To survive, they needed to make accommodations to the system that rejected them as artists. Their private correspondence and Baumeister’s audacious doodle confirm that they maintained both individual oppositional attitudes, and group solidarity. This served them well at the time, and for posterity. Today’s anti-Trump posters and tweeters do the same. And some of their creations rise to the level of resistance, the bar for which is still set at a lower level than in Nazi Germany.

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Opera as Resistance: The Little Match Girl and the Terrorist in Helmut Lachenmann’s Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern Joy Calico

As an extravagant art-form traditionally beholden to wealthy patrons and state institutions, opera may seem a poor medium for speaking truth to power. Yet there is a modernist if modest tradition of deploying opera for this purpose in the twentieth century, established by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill during the Weimar Republic and perpetuated by Luigi Nono and B.A. Zimmermann in the 1960s. German composer Helmut Lachenmann (b. 1935) contributed to this tradition in 1997 with Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (The Little Match Girl), generally described as an opera even though the composer calls it “Musik mit Bildern” (music with images). The libretto is based on Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Little Match Girl,” but also incorporates quotations from Leonardo da Vinci and Gudrun Ensslin. Ensslin (1940–77) was a founding member of the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, a leftist militant organization established in West Germany in 1970 and designated a terrorist group by that state. She was also a childhood friend of the composer. Instead of treating Andersen’s text as a naïve children’s story, Lachenmann foregrounds its critique of social and political forces that leave the most vulnerable to fend for themselves, most conspicuously by bringing it into dialogue with excerpts from Ensslin’s prison letters. I locate his use of Andersen’s fairy tale within the tradition of Marxist illuminations of folk and fairy tales traced by German folklorist Jack Zipes. I will argue that this work performs resistance in two ways: it resists the conventions of opera as genre and institution, and it opposes the dominant politics of 1990s Germany. British music journalist Tom Service describes Lachenmann’s musical style as “enacting a kind of politics of musical production,” and quotes the composer: “you hear the conditions under which a sound- or noise-action is carried out, you

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Tom Service, “A Guide to Helmut Lachenmann’s Music,” The Guardian, June 12, 2012, https:// www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2012/jun/12/helmut-lachenmann-contemporarycomposers-guide [accessed 19 January 2018]. The 2008 quotation is from Lachenmann et  al., “Music concrete instrumentale,” Slought Foundation Online Content, https://slought.org/resources/ musique_concrete_instrumentale [accessed January 19, 2018].

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hear what materials and energies are involved and what resistance is encountered.”1 Here Lachenmann speaks of the resistance of instruments and performers, but he could also speak of resistance on the part of some audiences. The language is that of Marxist critique, even if he eschews an explicit political affiliation. This chapter has three parts: an introduction to the tradition of opera as resistance and Lachenmann’s piece in that corpus; an exploration of Lachenmann’s Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern from that perspective; and a typology of resistance.

Opera as Resistance Opera emerged from aristocratic courts in Italy around 1600, and by the 1670s it could be found throughout the continent. The first public opera house opened in Venice in 1637, and eventually opera became a more-or-less quotidian component of Italian culture, even if elsewhere it retained stronger associations with the moneyed classes and their political agendas. Well into the twentieth century censors worked diligently in cities across Europe to ensure that nothing incendiary found its way onto the operatic stage. Even so, the performance of a nationalist grand opera in Brussels, La muette de Portici by Daniel Auber, has long been credited with setting off the Belgian Revolution in 1830 (even if scholars have reconsidered the precise nature of its role in recent years).2 More often, opera is a genre that can be fashioned into a tool for social critique rather than a tool of revolution—less of a frontal assault on the political powers-that-be and more of a commentary on the social conditions enabled by those political systems.3 (The same systems, it should be noted, that enable the production of opera itself, so there is always an internal tension at work.) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s operatic treatment of Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais’s play La nozze di Figaro from 1786 is an early such example (the plot involves servants outwitting a master determined to invoke his droit du seigneur, or the right of a feudal lord to have sex with his vassals’ brides on their wedding nights). There are two German landmarks in this tradition from the Weimar Republic: Die Dreigroschenoper (1928) by Bertolt Brecht, Elisabeth Hauptmann, and Kurt Weill; and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930), also by Brecht and Weill. Both are socialist critiques of capitalism, and find the composer Kurt Weill wielding popular musical styles with surgical precision to devastating satirical effect.

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See, among others, Anselm Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century, trans. by Mary Whittall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 127–34. The field of opera studies has boomed in recent decades and there are numerous exemplary studies of the symbiotic relationship between specific oeuvres and their host states, such as Georgia J. Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). For a general history of canonical opera and politics see Mitchell Cohen, The Politics of Opera: A History from Monteverdi to Mozart (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017) and John Bokina, Opera and Politics: From Monteverdi to Henze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

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This kind of tuneful satire was one mode of musical modernism; another dominant strain was atonality, the rejection of functional harmony and melody for other musical languages that were less melodious and more dissonant. Modernist operas with atonal or post-tonal music present a very different soundscape, and can cultivate a very different kind of social critique. There are a few such works from the 1960s. Die Soldaten, written by West German composer B.A. Zimmermann (1918–70) and premiered at Cologne in 1965, may be the biggest and rawest of these. The plight of soldiers and civilians brutalized by warfare unfolds in a howling cacophony, the disorienting effect of which is exacerbated by the fact it takes place yesterday, today, and tomorrow all at once. Others are by Luigi Nono (1924–90), the Italian composer married to Arnold Schoenberg’s daughter Nuria, and one of the few who sought to combine atonal music with an overtly socialist humanist agenda. His Intolleranza 1960 arranges the forces of “capitalist exploitation, fascism, and colonialism” on one side, against “an emigrant miner who rebels, the people in opposition, and the struggle against colonialism” on the other.4 In 1975 Nono also composed Al gran sole carico d’amore (In the Bright Sunshine Heavy with Love) with a libretto drawn from texts by a host of Marxist writers (Bertolt Brecht, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Karl Marx, and Vladimir Lenin). Both Zimmermann and Nono incorporate pre-recorded material into their sound designs while avoiding linear narrative and musical tonality. Nono was Lachenmann’s mentor, and between the composition of Al gran sole in 1975 and its German premiere in 1978 Lachenmann began to consider writing a “music theater work with a social critical impetus” himself, based on Andersen’s story.5 Lachenmann’s opera is another example in the loose modernist operatic tradition of social critique, and socialist critique, replete with non-linear plot and noisy soundscape. It also offers a prime opportunity for a more rigorous theorizing of opera as resistance.

Lachenmann’s Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern At age eighty, Lachenmann is the éminence grise of German modernist music. Das Mädchen marked the first time he took his distinctive soundscape into the opera house, arguably the most conservative corner of the art-music art world. Here I use the term “art world” as put forth by Howard S. Becker, referring to “the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of

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Mark Berry, After Wagner: Histories of Modernist Music Drama from Parsifal to Nono (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2014), 159–60. Nono’s Intolleranza has been performed only rarely, but a new critical edition of the score prepared by Angela Ida De Benedictis was used for a concert performance given by Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in New York in March 2018. The score is forthcoming from Schott. Rainer Nonnenmann, Der Gang durch die Klippen: Helmut Lachenmanns Begegnung mit Luigi Nono anhand ihres Briefwechsels und anderer Quellen 1957–1990 (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2013), 314.

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doing things, produce(s) the kind of artworks that art world is noted for.”6 David Metzer describes Lachenmann’s compositional process as beginning with musical sounds, or musical means of creating sounds, and then “demusicalizing” them in order to alter the surface of that sonority as well as the cultural and semantic meaning that surrounds it.7 The ways in which the instruments of Western classical art music are usually played “and the techniques of what is considered ‘good’ or ‘musical’ sound production only account for a small part” of the sounds the instruments could make (this includes the human voice).8 The composer explores an ever-expanding range of sound possibilities to encourage new ways of listening, in what Laurence Osborn interprets as an attempt to rejuvenate semiotics, “freed from cultural baggage and tied to the perceptual and cognitive capacities of listeners.”9 Crucially, however, in Lachenmann’s estimation as summarized by Tim Rutherford-Johnson, “those means of ‘good’ sound production are deeply connected to a historical concept of music that is in turn aligned with bourgeois values, conditions of class oppression, certain market structures, and an all-round tainted system of meaning making.”10 Opera, with its sonic conventions of voice and orchestra rooted in class and market structures, not to mention expectations for discernible plot, theatricality, and patronage, is a genre and an art world ripe for opposition and resistance. Indeed, Nicholas Till writes that, for Lachenmann, “no genre is more challenging formally, ideologically and institutionally than opera.”11 Andersen’s little match girl is a wretched, barefoot child sent into the snow on New Year’s Eve to make money for her family by selling matches. In a futile attempt to keep warm she strikes the matches one at a time, and the flames conjure happy visions: warm ovens, Christmas trees, a holiday meal, and finally her deceased grandmother, who takes her to heaven. Passersby find her body on the street the next day. In Lachenmann’s telling, the story is neither sentimental nor maudlin; it is also scarcely discernible. “The text is so fragmented that it serves more as a collection of phonemes, plosives, sibilants and clicks for vocal exploration than as a conveyer of the story, the very materiality of the language blocking its communicative or expressive function.”12 There are no singers onstage. (In Frankfurt Opera’s 2015 production directed by Benedikt von Peter the only person onstage was the actor Michael Mendl, who remained silent throughout while cavorting with a guinea pig; in the 2016 Spoleto

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Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), x. David Metzer, Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 197. Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 200. Laurence Osborn, “Sound, Meaning, and Music-Drama in Lachenmann’s Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern,” Tempo 68, no. 268 (April 2014), 20–33; here, 20. Tim Rutherford-Johnson, 200. Nicholas Till, “A new glimmer of light: Opera, metaphysics and mimesis,” in The Legacy of Opera: Reading Music Theatre as Experience and Performance, edited by Dominic Symonds and Pamela Karantonis (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013) 39–64; here, 54. Till, 54.

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production directed by Mark Down and Phelim McDermott the visual field was largely dedicated to projected texts and shadow puppetry). Two sopranos more-or-less envoice the role of the girl but they sing little intelligible text, while the enormous orchestra and chorus produce few sounds a listener can readily attribute to an instrument. The score is also void of mimesis with the crucial exception of attempts to conjure sonorities that sound cold. These are based on a notion of “music as meteorological condition with naturalistically derived sound categories”: the hollow, brittle timbre of Styrofoam rubbed across string instruments, the use of metal for the clinking or pinging of cold, the snowfall in rising and sinking triads.13 Into this drastically de-familiarized context, Lachenmann introduced texts by Leonardo da Vinci (in which he reported the mixed feelings experienced while staring into a dark cave as a seeker of knowledge) and an excerpt from a letter written by Gudrun Ensslin. As a founding member of the Red Army Faction (RAF ), known colloquially as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, she was involved in five bomb attacks that resulted in four deaths as well as fires in two Frankfurt department stores in April 1968. The RAF represented the radicalized New Left, emerging from the student protest movement determined to confront the apparent failure of denazification with urban guerrilla warfare. Goaded by West German authoritarianism and imperialism, unbridled capitalist consumption, and its attendant global exploitation, they struck back with acts of domestic terrorism.14 She and Lachenmann were both children of Protestant ministers. He says of his childhood friend: We shared a house in the Tuttling deanery. My father was her father’s boss. Presumably, we have similar religious backgrounds. She was a highly talented student – idealistically inclined, her humane enthusiasm more and more broken by the political events of the time – rearmament, US interventions in the Third World, the Algerian War, the Vietnam War, etc. radically transformed her intellectual and idealistic energy into unbelievable bitterness, hatred for the political system and even preparedness to resort to criminal violence.15

Lachenmann says that fire is the link between the match girl and Ensslin: “she herself is something like an extremely disfigured variant of my ‘girl.’ Not only did she play with matches, she went beyond that and made use of violence, thereby disfiguring her own humaneness.”16 Ensslin’s presence in the opera can be interpreted as an attempt to humanize her by linking her to a sympathetic (albeit fictitious) figure via what

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Nonnenmann, 405–6. See Stefan Aust, Der Baader-Meinhof-Komplex (Goldmann Verlag, 1998); translated by Anthea Bell as Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F., revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Regarding the West German response see Karrin Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Liner notes to the recording of Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern, Staatsopernchor and Staatsorchester Stuttgart, Lothar Zagrosek (Kairos, 2002), CD 0012282KAI ; 23. Lachenmann in Kairos liner notes, 23.

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Lachenmann appears to see as common ground: two vulnerable characters failed by their respective societies: There is no excuse for her criminal deeds. But with her conviction in court, the question of our responsibility is not yet answered. Gudrun Ensslin wrote a letter in her Stammheim prison cell using some ugly, violent language, but in the end her words are of touching beauty – beautiful because they call a spade a spade – so that I do not only simply see the unleashed preparedness to use violence and her broken spirit, but also her love for the individual who breaks under the strictures of society.17

In 1972 the RAF leaders were imprisoned together in Stammheim Prison in northern Stuttgart, where they undertook a series of hunger strikes over the years and would commit suicide together in 1977.18 There the prisoners circulated letters among one another and, through their lawyers, to allies on the outside. The quotation Lachenmann incorporates into the opera is from one of these letters, written in early 1973. Ensslin is writing about social systems designed to destroy those for whom the contradiction between wanting to live and being unable to live is an explosive one: the criminal, the insane, the suicide – they embody this contradiction. they die wretchedly therein. their demise makes clear the hopelessness/impotence of persons in the system: either you destroy yourself or you destroy others, either dead or selfish. in their wretched death is not only the apotheosis of the system: they are not criminal enough, they are not insane enough, they are not murderous enough, and that means faster death through the system in the system. at the same time their wretched death shows the negation of the system: its crime, its madness, its death is the expression of the rebellion of the smashed subjects against their destruction, not thing, but person. (writes on our skin)19

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Lachenmann in Kairos liner notes, 23. There have been claims from supporters that the prisoners were actually murdered. Without evidence to the contrary the general consensus remains that they committed suicide. “der kriminelle, der wahnsinnige, der selbstmörder – sie verkörpern diesen widerspruch. sie verrecken in ihm. ihr verrecken verdeutlicht die ausweglosigkeit/ohnmacht des menschen im system: entweder du vernichtest dich selbst oder du vernichtest andere, entweder tot oder egoist. in ihrem verrecken zeigt sich nicht nur die vollendung des systems: sie sind nicht kriminell genug, sie sind nicht wahnsinnig genug, sind nicht mörderisch genug, und das bedeutet, ihren schnelleren tod durch das system im system. in ihrem verrecken zeigt sich gleichzeitig die verneinung des systems: ihre kriminalität, ihr wahnsinn, ihr tod ist ausdruck der rebellion der zertrümmerten subjekte gegen ihre zertrümmerung, nicht ding, sondern mensch. (schreibt auf unsere haut.)” The capitalization is as in the original, as is all punctuation except the final parenthetical phrase. Ensslin wrote “schreibt auf. unsere haut” but Lachenmann removed the period. The letter is identified simply as “reden wir von uns / gudrun, anfang 73.” From das info: Briefe der Gefangenen aus der RAF 1973–1977, edited by Pieter H. Bakker Schut (Hamburg: Neuer Malik Verlag, 1987), 14–18; here, 18.

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The link he forges between the match girl and the terrorist may be less idiosyncratic than it appears. Jack Zipes has written about the surge in fairy-tale studies by West German Marxists in the mid–1970s as the student movement of the late 1960s “rediscovered, so to speak, the formidable Marxist tradition of the Weimar period, a tradition that had been obfuscated at school and in the university.”20 Zipes is referring to writings about the power of fairy tales by several prominent figures on the Left during the 1920s and 1930s, including Edwin Hoernle’s 1923 essay “The Work in the Communist Children’s Groups,” Ernst Bloch’s 1930 “The Fairy Tale Moves on its Own in Time,” and Walter Benjamin’s 1936 “The Narrator.” He discerns three primary themes in the scholarship of the mid–1970s that grew out of a fresh look at these texts: analyses of the ways in which fairy tales have been transformed to serve the interests of capitalist societies; a belief that fairy tales “can be modernized and reshaped to incorporate a critique of present-day society along utopian lines”; and analyses of the decline of the utopian as the stories are handed down over time.21 Zipes is writing specifically about the German fairy-tale tradition, and the Grimms in particular, but it is not difficult to see a parallel in Lachenmann’s work with Andersen’s tale. He had been thinking about it since at least 1977–8, which coincides with the heyday of the Marxist fairy-tale revival. That was the year he created Les Consolations by adding new movements based on Anderson’s story (Präludium, Interludium, and Postludium) to two other pieces (Consolation I and Consolation II ) based on an Ernst Toller text and the Wessobrunn prayer, respectively, which he had composed a decade earlier. It is worth noting that this was also the time of the so-called German Autumn, forty-four days in September and October 1977 during which the RAF tried to force the release of their leaders in Stammheim with a murder, a kidnapping, and a commercial airline hijacking, all of which were badly botched and eventually resulted in the prisoners’ suicides. This was the point at which Lachenmann forged the connection between the fairy-tale character and Gudrun Ensslin. He describes Les Consolations as the first step toward the opera.22 When Pieter H. Bakker Schut’s Stammheim: Der Prozess gegen die Rote Armee Fraktion was published in March 1987, Lachenmann sent a copy to his mentor Luigi Nono and inscribed it to him with a reference to Ensslin. He began sketching a detailed outline of several scenes of the opera on December 1, 1987, and received a commission from Peter Ruzicka at Hamburg Opera in the fall of 1988 for an opera due in 1992; he completed the piece in 1996 and it was premiered in January 1997, twenty years after her death. In the opera, the text of Ensslin’s letter appears in a scene entitled “Litanei” (Latin for “litany”) just after the girl has lit the second match and it goes out. The title of this section is a liturgical term referring to a series of petitions in a formulaic call and

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Jack Zipes, “Marxists and the Illumination of Folk and Fairy Tales,” in Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm, edited by Ruth B. Bottigheimer (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 237–43; here, 238. Zipes, 239–40. Nonnenmann, 315; see also 345.

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response pattern between clergy and congregants. It gestures toward the religious upbringing that is part of Lachenmann’s public image, something he shared with Ensslin, and obliquely toward the quasi-oratorio nature of the piece (generally understood as an unstaged sung work on a religious theme, such as G.F. Handel’s Messiah).23 The title could refer to the repetitive nature of Ensslin’s text, in which she rages against a litany of societal sins. It can also be construed as an attempt at intercession, asking for mercy (a common refrain in the liturgical form) if not for her personally then for the society that produced her. Sonically this passage is quite typical of the opera as a whole. The choir and two soprano soloists vocalize, mostly on atomized syllables divorced from their semantic content, and instrumentalists use extended techniques to generate sound effects. The line marked “Summe” is added for the conductor’s benefit so that s/he can keep track of the text, since it is virtually impossible to follow its deconstructed distribution among the different voices on the page (Figure 12.1).24 It is impossible to recognize Ensslin’s text audibly, but most opera productions now feature projected texts, so audiences would be able to read the text while listening to its

Figure 12.1: Helmut Lachenmann, Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (The Little Match Girl), Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2007, page 173, measures 196–203.

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Eberhard Hüppe, “Rezeption, Bilder und Strukturen: Helmut Lachenmanns Klangszenarien im Lichte transzendenter Gattungshorizonte” in Matteo Nanni and Matthias Schmidt, eds Helmut Lachenmann: Musik mit Bildern? (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2012), 71–94; here 85. Email from conductor John Kennedy, August 21, 2017.

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incomprehensible vocalization. I think it is clear from the style and content that this excerpt is not from Andersen’s story, so if it is projected the director must decide whether to provide an attribution for this quotation. In the Spoleto production by Mark Down and Phelim McDermott, the piece was performed in German and the texts were visualized in English translation; this text was not attributed to Ensslin, nor was it marked as anything other than the Andersen story. This production was designed for an American audience—in fact, this was the opera’s American premiere—and this festival audience almost surely had no idea who Gudrun Ensslin was. In the program booklet this text is simply described as “a letter from prison by Gudrun Ensslin”; there is no mention of the RAF, or the link the composer himself forged between the match girl and the terrorist. Is this disassociated text sufficient to qualify as political resistance if no one knows the reference? Perhaps, among an American opera-going crowd, the fact that the criminal, insane, and suicidal are relegated to the margins of society, just as the little match girl is, is sufficient. German audiences are more familiar with that history. The RAF is credited with killing at least thirty-three people and conducting 296 attacks before officially disbanding in 1998—just one year after the opera’s premiere. On the occasion of the opera’s 1997 premiere in Hamburg, there were some cheeky headlines. “Hamburger spielt mit dem Feuer!” (Hamburg plays with fire!) read the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung preview, a multivalent play on the plot of the Andersen story, Ensslin’s arson, and the very real possibility that the Hamburg Opera could be making a big mistake by staging this piece. Others then and now struggle to make sense of the connection Lachenmann forged between Andersen’s beloved, pathetic creature and the terrorist who remained a controversial figure even among the old Left, which was conflicted over her zealous commitment to violence.25 Why bring the RAF into the opera house at all in 1997? In fact, the RAF was already very much in the news that year, as Svea Bräunert’s magisterial study of the group notes, because a new collection of prison letters also appeared that year, and some readers were shocked by the harsh, military-style language members used with one another. Bräunert writes about Klaus Theweleit’s essay from 1998 entitled “Bemerkungen zum RAF Gespenst” (Remarks on the Ghost of the RAF ) in which he analysed the prisoners’ language as an unwelcome reminder of and return to the violence that RAF members had inherited from their fascist parents.26 With the benefit of hindsight, Bräunert argues that the “ghost” of the RAF might actually represent something less violent, less of Theweleit’s abstract radicalism and its leftist critique of a haunted relationship to German history, and more of a “memorial-cultural figure, appropriate for certain forms of imagery and temporality” and “traumatic retrospection.”27 It is plausible to me that this is how Lachenmann invokes Ensslin here: as a figure for traumatic retrospection.

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Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 24, 1997, 36. Svea Bräunert, Gespenstergeschichten: Der linke Terrorismus der RAF und die Künste (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2015), 337–70. Bräunert, 370. I am grateful to Svea for corresponding with me on this topic.

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Not only was the RAF back in the news in 1997 thanks to the publication of the prison letters, but some conditions were eerily reminiscent of those that first enraged Ensslin in the late 1960s. Germany was more of a capitalist state than ever, still beholden to US policy, and host to numerous US military bases. Chancellor Helmut Kohl had committed German troops to the first Gulf War in 1990; they were mobilized but did not see combat. In 1992 the Federal Constitutional Court declared that the German Army could take part in UN and NATO missions with a parliamentary mandate. From 1992–5 they enforced the no-fly zone in the Bosnian War—the German Army’s first foreign action since the Second World War. In other words, at the time Lachenmann wrote this opera, Germany was just returning to international military engagement. Also in 1997, tensions between Germany’s former East and West remained high, as did unemployment, and an influx of immigrants from post-Soviet states strained the system (2.3 million ethnic German settlers, 2 million asylum seekers). Kohl’s soon-tobe successor, Gerhard Schröder, was proposing reforms to Old-Age Insurance and Health Insurance, among other things, systems designed to protect the most vulnerable members of society.28

A Typology of Resistance The framework for thinking about Das Mädchen as an act of resistance comes from Jocelyn Hollander and Rachel L. Einwohner, two sociologists whose 2004 article “Conceptualizing Resistance” argued that the term “resistance” was widely used but drastically undertheorized. They eschew debates about definition in favor of identifying “analytically important aspects of resistance.”29 In their survey of the literature, they identified one common denominator—that resistance must include an action against something—and two recurring issues: recognition and intent (534). They also noted that, “resistance is most frequently understood to be aimed at achieving some sort of change,” and that “the change which resistance demands is often assumed to be progressive or at least prosocial” (536). In their conceptualization, then, the two core elements of resistance are opposition and action, both broadly defined; the variants occur most often in matters of recognition and intent. I would argue that the necessity and degree of recognition and intent are in fact at the heart of interpreting artworks as acts of resistance. Hollander and Einwohner ask, “Must oppositional action be readily apparent to others, and must it in fact be recognized as resistance?” (539). There is considerable disagreement on this point. Some acts of resistance may be illegible to their intended “target,” either because that audience is not acculturated to recognize it, or because those engaged in the act of

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Lutz Leisering, “The Welfare State in Postwar Germany,” in Welfare States and the Future, edited by B. Vivekanandan and N. Kurian (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 113–30. Jocelyn A. Hollander and Rachel L. Einwohner, “Conceptualizing Resistance,” Sociological Forum 19, no. 4 (2004), 533–54, here, 535. Also useful is the list of features in Stephen Duncombe’s introduction to Cultural Resistance Reader (New York: Verso, 2002), 8.

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resistance have deliberately obscured the resistance from the target even while other observers may be able to recognize it as such. Other scholars argue that an act only qualifies as resistance if both the target and other observers recognize it (541). The role of intention is even more hotly contested. Hollander and Einwohner observed that “questions about intent often focus on smaller-scale and ‘everyday’ acts of resistance” because “scholars generally agree that mass-based movements and revolutions clearly represent resistance,” rendering “the intent behind such acts a non-issue” (542). Their survey of the literature on theories of resistance identifies three approaches to the issue of intent. One school of thought maintains that an action can only qualify as resistance if the actor intends it as such; a second rejects that requirement on the premise that knowing an actor’s state of mind is impossible; a third group argues that intent is not central because the “actor may not even be conscious of his or her action as resistance” (542–3). They also note that recognition and intent can be connected: “an observer (such as a researcher) may fail to recognize an act as resistant if she lacks the cultural knowledge to identify the intent behind the action”; and of course, it is possible for the same act to be interpreted differently by different observers (543). Hollander and Einwohner used their research to develop a sociological typology of resistance, taking as a given the notion that resistance requires an oppositional act of some kind, and then developing categories to account for variants in recognition and intent. Having absorbed their ideas, I set about attempting to think about Lachenmann’s opera through each type, bearing in mind that it appears to operate on two planes simultaneously: performing resistance in a critique of the genre and institution of opera while opposing the German politics of its day, the mid-1990s. Because this opera does not fall in the category of a mass movement or political revolution—its plot is not about such an event, and, as far as I can tell, scholars do not write about it as resistance—the category of “overt resistance” is a poor fit in terms of high politics. However, Service’s observation that one can hear the material resistance of instruments in the performance of this music, and the negative reactions I observed in the audience at a performance at the Spoleto Music Festival in Charleston in 2016 suggest that it is clearly recognizable as opposition to some “targets” within the opera art world. It is worth remembering, however, that there are denizens of the new music art world, which overlaps slightly with that of the opera art world, who thrill to Lachenmann’s ability to coax new sounds out of conventional instruments in what Tim Rutherford-Johnson calls “his aesthetic of marginality and depletion.”30 Sociological typologies are not zero-sum games. I can also read Das Mädchen as “covert resistance,” because the decision to include Ensslin’s texts in an opera based on the story of “The Little Match Girl” is an incontrovertible act of opposition meant to inject politics into what might otherwise be read as a sentimental tale about the preventable death of a child from poverty and societal indifference—but it is covert because the manner in which Lachenmann inserts Ensslin into the piece renders that act of opposition virtually illegible. The text

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Rutherford-Johnson, 201.

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setting makes it incomprehensible. Only audience members with considerable knowledge of West German terrorism from the 1970s would recognize her name, and the text he quotes from one of her letters will be comprehensible only if it is visibly projected onstage; the sung text is distributed across multiple performers in such a way as to render it unrecognizable to the ear. The next three types of resistance—unwitting, target-defined, and externallydefined—all presuppose a lack of intention, and I am reluctant to eliminate actor intention from the analysis. Even if one is inclined to dismiss an actor’s statements about intention as self-serving, performative, or revisionist, several actions indicate intentionality, such as the interjection of a terrorist from recent history into a fairy tale. Despite all its unconventional features (signaled from the outset by the fact that Lachenmann calls it “Musik mit Bildern” (music with images) rather than an opera or even a piece of music theater), the fact remains that Das Mädchen is the result of a prestigious commission from a prominent opera company. The Staatsoper Hamburg is no stranger to radical innovation, but writing a major work for such a large operatic institution unequivocally imbricates the composer and the piece in the cultural apparatus. We might also speak of unintended consequences here. The work is designed to challenge genre conventions of sound, narrative, and representation as well as expectations for engagement and legibility (to the point, it must be said, that it alienates some audience members in that art world entirely; many patrons walked out of the Spoleto performance I attended). Now, Das Mädchen may constitute an act of resistance against the genre and its consumers, but it is fully complicit in the system of opera as institution because Das Mädchen is prohibitively expensive and difficult to produce. Only a major institution can afford to employ an enormous orchestra, chorus, and soloists of such high musical caliber and retain their services for the extensive rehearsal period necessary, and even then, it may be possible only within the heavily subsidized models of institutional funding one finds in Germany. (The American premiere in Charleston in 2016 took place under the auspices of a major international festival rather than a conventional opera company.) The quotation cited earlier in this essay, in which Lachenmann’s stance is described as critical of the art music world’s “bourgeois values, conditions of class oppression, certain market structures, and an all-round tainted system of meaning making,” rings a bit hollow by this measure. The last two types—missed resistance and attempted resistance—admit some intentionality even when the acts go unrecognized as resistance by at least one group of observers. The target group must be subdivided in order to account for the multilevel nature of these interpretations. If the target is the opera genre and its consumers, then it is safe to say that Das Mädchen is recognized as such by enough musicians and audiences while simultaneously going un-recognized by the operatic institution (observer) as to qualify as missed resistance. But if the target is actually the citizen, and this is supposed to represent an intervention on behalf of German society’s most vulnerable by linking Ensslin to Andersen’s tragic fairy-tale figure with the hope of affecting political change, then it must stand as attempted resistance because it has not produced that change (as far as I am aware). In sum: if the target is opera and its

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consumers, Das Mädchen may qualify as overt or missed resistance; if the target is opera as institution, it is attempted resistance; and if the target is the citizen, it may be covert or missed resistance. In my opinion, the opera speaks truth to each of these power structures. The question remains, is that truth heard? Hollander and Einwohner’s typology is quite useful for clarifying the essential issues underpinning theories of resistance, and I have recounted their work in detail because I think it has much to offer those of us attempting to work at the intersection where art meets politics, activism, or even engaged citizenship. That space will always be fraught because it is the prerogative of art to operate on multiple levels at once, embody simultaneous contradictory meanings, indulge ambiguity, engage in misdirection and subterfuge, and elicit more questions than answers. Many people attempt acts of resistance in their creative work that do not rise to the level of overt resistance, but there is value in thinking more broadly about what might constitute acts of resistance. Not to delude ourselves into believing we are storming the barricades when we are hunkered down in our offices, but to learn to recognize as such those acts that were previously illegible to us.

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Montage as a Form of Resistant Aesthetics Today: Marcel Odenbach and Thomas Hirschhorn Verena Krieger

The 1930s saw a veritable boom of theories on the principle of montage in the arts. This came in reaction to new artistic phenomena such as the Dadaists’ and Surrealists’ collages, Bertolt Brecht’s and Erwin Piscator’s Epic Theater, Alfred Döblin’s montage novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, John Heartfield’s photomontages, or Sergej Eisenstein’s filmic montage of attractions. The Cubists had already introduced montage to the arts in 1912/13 with their papiers collés, thus disrupting traditional pictorial concepts.1 After the First World War, it became an artistic practice increasingly applied in the context of social struggle. The politicization of artistic montage practices was immediately reflected in its theorization. Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Günther Anders—to name the most prominent German thinkers in this international discussion—unanimously agreed that artistic montage, as a practice that creates complexity by juxtaposing disparate elements, had the potential to open new, critical perspectives on modern conditions.2 This postulation of montage’s critical and emancipatory function was revived in the 1970s and is perpetuated to this day.3 1

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On the impact of the papier collé on the concept of image, see Clement Greenberg, “Collage,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 70–83. Bertolt Brecht [1930]: “The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre: Notes to the Opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny,” in John Willett (ed. and trans.), Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (London: Methuen, 1964), 33–42; Walter Benjamin [1930] “The Crisis of the Novel,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 1 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 299–304; Walter Benjamin [1934]: “The Author as Producer,” in Michael W. Jennings et al. (eds), Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 768–82; Ernst Bloch [1935], Heritage of Our Times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); Günther Anders [1938]: “Über Photomontage,” in Mensch ohne Welt: Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1984), 175–91. Other important authors in this context are László Moholy-Nagy, Raoul Hausmann, Karel Teige, Gustav Klutsis, Varvara Stepanova, and Aleksander Rodchenko. I will not expand on their work here, as their arguments focus on other points and developed in different historical and political contexts. See for example Peter Bürger [1974], Theory of the Avantgarde, Theory and History of Literature series, Volume 4 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); Georges Didi-Huberman, “Was zwischen zwei Bildern passiert: Anachronie, Montage, Allegorie, ‘Pathos’,” in Lena Bader et  al. (eds), Vergleichendes Sehen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010), 537–72; Juliane Rebentisch, “Montage and Late Modernity: Notes on William de Rooij’s Intolerance,” in Willem de Rooij and Benjamin Meyer- Krahmer (eds), Willem de Rooij – Intolerance (exhibition catalog) (Berlin, Düsseldorf: Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, 2010), 33–42; Georges Didi-Huberman, The Eye of History: When Images Take Positions (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2018).

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Contemporary artists Marcel Odenbach (b. 1953 in Cologne) and Thomas Hirschhorn (b. 1957 in Bern) both reflect current socio-political themes in the medium of photo collage. They both belong to the same generation; a bit younger than the student movement generation of 1968, but directly influenced by it. Both artists achieved critical international acclaim in other media—Odenbach as a video artist, Hirschhorn with installations—and yet, the principle of montage plays a constitutive role in their work that goes beyond genres.4 In the following, I will examine paper collages by both artists, taking a closer look at their characteristic montage style. Classic montage theories inform the discursive backdrop, with a focus on the contextual differences between artistic development in the 1930s and today. I am interested how the postulated critical and resistant qualities in Odenbach’s and Hischhorn’s work can be considered analytically, and where we can locate them in the context of historical montage practices. Is montage still an expression of resistant aesthetics in today’s art production, and if so, what does this entail? Since the terms “montage” and “collage” have a diffuse conceptual history, and there is no generally accepted terminological delineation between the two, I will begin with a brief definition.5 There is a basic difference between the aesthetical principle of montage and its technical-material manifestations: collage, photomontage, assemblage, décollage, installation, etc. Montage as an aesthetical principle is the combination of disparate elements from heterogeneous contexts in a singular unit that is not a

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Odenbach employs heterogeneous material in his videos; he cuts, cross-fades, uses split-screen, or de-synchronizes sound and image. Hirschhorn summarizes his entire oeuvre as “collage.” See Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Ur-Collage”: On the Occasion of the Exhibition: A Conversation Between the Artist and Sebastian Egenhofer, held on 17 January 2009 at Galerie Susanna Kulli; Available online: http://www.susannakulli.ch/sites/default/files/Hirschhorn_Egenhofer_en_de.pdf [accessed February 27, 2018]. There is no generally agreed upon terminological delineation between the two terms. Use within Art History and Cultural Studies varies. At times the terms are used synonymously, but often they are not clearly differentiated, or inconsistently hierarchically ordered. However, there are tendencies to employ “montage” as the general term for the aesthetical principle. This is predominantly rooted in the montage theories of the 1930s, particularly those of Ernst Bloch, who introduced “montage” as an umbrella term for various new forms of modern (popular) culture. See, for example, Bloch, Heritage of Our Times; Herta Wescher [1968], Collage (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979); Annegret Jürgens- Kirchhoff, Technik und Tendenz der Montage in der bildenden Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (Giessen/Lahn: Anabas, 1984); Klaus Honnef, “Symbolische Form als anschauliches Erkenntnisprinzip: Ein Versuch zur Montage,” in Peter Pachniche and Klaus Honnef (eds), John Heartfield (exhibition catalog) (Akademie der Künste zu Berlin/Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn/Kunsthalle Tübingen, Cologne: DuMont, 1991), 38–53; Katherine Hoffman (ed.), Collage: Critical Views (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989); Hilmar Frank (ed.), Montage als Kunstprinzip. John Heartfield zum 100. Geburtstag: Internationales Colloquium 16./17. Mai 1991, Akademie der Künste zu Berlin (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1991); Diane Waldman, Collage, Assemblage, and the Found Object (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1992); Hanno Möbius, Montage und Collage. Literatur, bildende Kunst, Film, Fotografie, Musik, Theater bis 1933 (Munich: Fink, 2000); Diedrich Diederichsen, “Sampling und Montage: Modelle anderer Autorschaften in der Kulturindustrie und ihre notwendige Nähe zum Diebstahl,” in Anne-Kathrin Reulecke (ed.), Fälschungen: Zu Autorschaft und Beweis in Wissenschaften und Künsten (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), 390–405; Anna Schober, “Irony, Montage, Alienation: Aesthetic Tactics and the Invention of an Avant-garde Tradition,” published as a two-part essay in Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, 37:3 (2009), 24–9 and No. 4, 15–19.

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homogenous whole, but rather a field of tension identifiable as construct. The principle of montage thus forms the polar opposite of the idea of the artwork as an organic unit. Therefore, it has fittingly been referred to as the “symbolic form of Modernity.”6

The Bipolar Image Odenbach’s 225 x 208 cm, large format paper collage Abgelegt und Aufgehangen (Put Down and Hung Up) (2013) presents an almost symmetrically composed still life (Figure  13.1). Four judges’ robes on hangers dangle from a metal coat rack. Bright scarlet with large white collars, they are evidently the robes of German constitutional judges. Slightly offset, they hang one after the other, facing the viewer and thus creating

Figure 13.1: Marcel Odenbach, Abgelegt und Aufgehangen (Put Down and Hung Up), 2013; collage: ink on paper 7 ft. 5 in. × 6 ft. 10 in., 225 × 208 cm. Sammlung Hildebrand, Leipzig. Photo: Vesko Gösel. Courtesy the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018.

6

Honnef, “Symbolische Form als anschauliches Erkenntnisprinzip,” 44f and 52 in reference to Erwin Panofsky [1927], Perspective as Symbolic Form (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 1991).

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the effect of placeholders for the people they usually dress. In front of the robes, a tabletop horizontally spans the image, with three red caps arranged on it in an equally symmetrical fashion. The black backrest of a judge’s chair markedly towers behind them, creating a third spatial layer between the table and the robes. The scene ends abruptly at the front ledge of the table, where we see a white surface with streaks of red and gray color trickling down it. The aesthetic break between the naturalistic depiction in the upper and abstract color in the lower part of the picture functions as the vehicle for a radicalized perception of the whole image. The red streaks of color inevitably spark associations to blood, which, in turn spreads to the red judges’ robes, making them seem blood red, too. Yes, the streaks of blood seem to stem from the robes, without any recognizable causal connection. This gives the scene an air of uncanniness: the coat rack appears brutal in its metallic simplicity; with the robes it suddenly seems like a row of meat hooks. Since the top row of coat hooks is cut off by the collage’s upper edge, they seem to be dangling, thus emphasizing the motif of hanging even more. The robes, the streaks of color as well as the coat rack’s hooks and supports create a strong vertical pull, counter-balanced by the coat rack’s cross-strut, the back of the chair, and the tabletop. The title, Abgelegt und Aufgehangen, emphasizes both the motif of hanging, of verticality, and of being set down, of horizontality. Both verbs, put down and hung up, ostensibly referring to nothing other than the caps set down on the table and the robes hung up on the coat rack, have the tendency to form a negatively connoted semantic field of association. In German “ablegen,” for example, is the verb used to describe the administrative act of “filing away” documents. In a metaphorical sense, “abgelegt” can also mean “to be cast aside,” or “to be abandoned.” The vernacular expression “aufgehangen,” “hung up,” is unusual in Standard German and is reminiscent of “being hanged.” The perfect participle in passive voice adds further emphasis to the negative connotation, similar to the picture’s visual associations to blood and butchering. What at first seems to only refer to the objects depicted could also be a reference to human beings. Several layers of reciprocally increasing chains of association in word and image produce an eerie atmosphere of violence, reshaping the depicted coat rack with negative associations, subtly turning it into a picture of the National Socialist People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof). Everything in this artwork is montage. Image and title are set into a relation of montage that is as carefully arranged as the collage’s various layers. Moreover, once we step closer, we can see that the entire composition is made up of innumerable tiny images. A closer look reveals that the tabletop and the robes are actually a plethora of photos with various content, assembled in a collage and dyed various colors with ink. In his collages, Odenbach uses documentation material from German history, private family photos as well as art historical works. Portraits play a prominent role, while newspaper clippings and other texts only appear now and then. Over the years, he has put together an impressive archive, which serves as a feed for his collages. Odenbach’s elaborate production process is as follows: He assembles images from various sources, but keeps cropping to a minimum to keep singular motifs recognizable. The resulting montages are reproduced as black-and-white photocopies, consciously taking into

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Figure 13.2: Marcel Odenbach, collages at an intermediate stage of production. Photo: Vesko Gösel. © Marcel Odenbach.

account the loss of image quality that this process entails. Then the images are dyed in different colors, creating a pool of collages, which, however, are only an intermediate stage of production (Figure 13.2). From these images, the artist cuts parts that fit in color, motif, and form and then integrates them into the actual artwork. Not only the small images that the large format work is comprised of are based on photography; the meta-structure of the main image is, too. Odenbach uses both found and produced photographs for his collages. The selected photograph is projected onto the surface of the large format paper, onto which he then translates the composition, allowing a certain amount of liberties compared to the original. He then fits the small collages into the composition structure, followed by a further set of adaptations and changes. For example, a photograph depicting an intermediate stage of Abgelegt und Aufgehangen reveals that the paper was cropped at the upper edge later, emphasizing the “hanging” effect of the coat rack. The front ledge of the table cutting off the scene was also added at a later time. The result is a bipolar pictorial structure, consisting of a meta-image and innumerable micro images, which are combined to form individual elements such as cap, robe, and tabletop, and to give the surface a vibrant, lively character. It is impossible to say which visual layer is the “true” one. Both exist equally and in reciprocal dependence as the meta-image forms the dominant framework, while the micro images constitute the meta-image. This bipolar structure forces recipients to switch back and forth between micro and meta-perspective.7 Here is a similarity to Diego

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Velázquez’ paintings, which also encourage viewers to switch their perspective, as different things become visible up close and further away: for example, his large format oil painting Las Hilanderas (The Spinners) (c. 1657/58) offers a perfectly illusionist presentation, which dissolves into undefined blotches of color when viewed up close.8 Unlike in Velázquez’ work, the closer inspection of Odenbach’s collage does not dissolve objects, but rather reveals new objects that create a field of tension with those of the meta-image. In Abgelegt und Aufgehangen, the subject of the micro images is German history, ranging from the age of Goethe to National Socialism, to the student movement of 1968. Odenbach also used Goya’s Caprichos on the Spanish Inquisition. The coat rack is comprised of pictures of the Nuremberg Trials and the Auschwitz Trials in Frankfurt. The images are not always easy to identify through the colored ink, but as images spread by mass media, lots of them have reached an iconic status as references to Germany’s jurisdiction and how it deals with the past. There is also an intermediary layer between the micro images and meta-image: the dabs of color used to create folds in the robes, or reflections on the tabletop. Here we have a true analogy to Velázquez’ paintings, known for their borrónes, or blotches, to his contemporaries. In both cases these dabs of color are not figurative in their own right, but rather functional for the overall effect of the picture. The aesthetical appeal of the artwork is owed to this intermediate layer, which may be less apparent, but is constitutive for the image as a whole. The process described above and the pictorial structure it produces is characteristic for the majority of Odenbach’s collage work.9 We find it, for example, in his Mahnmal für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus unter Freiburger Universitätsangehörigen (2005), a memorial to commemorate the victims of National Socialism among members of the Freiburg University, displayed in the university’s lecture hall building (Figure  13.3). The main subject featured here is a partially drawn-back curtain, exposing the names of those persecuted. Closer inspection reveals that it too is comprised of innumerable smaller images—serial repetitions of historical documents of various provenances, which all revolve around National Socialism. Odenbach’s technique is particularly striking in Die Gute Stube (2011, 170 x 140 cm), which roughly translates to “The Nice Parlor,” or representative living room. We look into a slightly stuffy, yet welcoming interior, with a large window presenting a view to a terrace and further into an alpine landscape (Figure  13.4). The chosen form of presentation, with a broad white border around the image suggesting a mat and a slim black frame, add to the prim, traditionalist impression. In fact, the motif is a depiction

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Matthias Mühling,“Marcel Odenbach – Collages and Montages,” in Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V. (ifa) Stuttgart/Elke aus dem Moore (ed.), Marcel Odenbach: Stille Bewegungen/Tranquil motions (exhibition catalog) (ifa Stuttgart, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013), 10–16. On Velázquez’ special employment of color and its implications in the contexts of Art Theory and Gender Studies, see Verena Krieger, “Arachne als Künstlerin. Velázquez’ Las hilanderas als Gegenentwurf zum neuplatonischen Künstlerkonzept,” in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 65 (2002) 545–61. See Stephan Berg/Christoph Schreier/Kunstmuseum Bonn (eds), Marcel Odenbach: Papierarbeiten/ Works on Paper 1975–2013 (exhibition catalog) (Kunstmuseum Bonn, Berlin: Kehrer, 2013).

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Figure 13.3: Marcel Odenbach, Mahnmal für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus unter Freiburger Universitätsangehörigen (Memorial for the Victims of National Socialism among the Students, Staff, and Faculty of the University of Freiburg), 2005; collage: c. 36 ft. 1 in. × 2 ft. 11 in., 28 × 2 m. University of Freiburg, Germany. Photo: Sandra Meyndt / Universität Freiburg. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018.

Figure 13.4: Marcel Odenbach, Die Gute Stube (The Nice Parlor), 2011; collage, ink on paper: 5 ft. 7 in. × 4 ft. 7 in., 170 × 140 cm. Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf. © Photo: Vesko Gösel. Courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018.

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of Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat Berghof Obersalzberg in Bavaria. As the others mentioned above, this work is also comprised of a large number of micro images. They are not easy to discern due to the layers of color applied to them, but they clearly shine through. No other work by Odenbach seems to be as sharply polarized as this one: The interior’s stuffy homeliness becomes eerily uncanny as soon as we find out whose place it was, and lamp shades made of pictures of skulls and bones become terrifyingly ambiguous. During its most recent exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna (2017), the collage’s bipolarity was doubled by an analogous bipolarity on the textual level. The title Die gute Stube was contrasted with an accompanying text pointing out that it was Hitler’s mountain retreat.10 This results in an emblematic structure with the title serving as the motto and the side text as complementary subscriptio. Unlike the classic emblem, the subscriptio does not serve as an explanatory commentary, but rather as its debunking. On both visual and textual levels, the combination of the opposing poles becomes shocking. The socio-political orientation of these works and the prominent role National Socialism plays is remarkable. The artist also created Abgelegt und Aufgehangen after extensively investigating the Auschwitz Trials and visiting the courtroom in Haus Gallus in Frankfurt, where the largest criminal trial in postwar (West) Germany took place between 1963 and 1965.11 We can assume that the bipolar structure of Odenbach’s works and their socio-political themes are intrinsically linked; that the pictorial bipolarity itself fulfills a semantic function. After all, the contrast between opposing elements of text or image is the constitutive moment of montage. Its critical character is derived from exactly this moment. A classic example are the montages of John Heartfield (b. 1891 Schmargendorf, d. 1968 in East Berlin).

Dialectical Montage To illustrate my point, I will use his well-known photomontage Der Sinn des Hitlergrußes (The Meaning of the Hitler Salute) (1932) as comparison (see Figure 8.6 in Sabine T. Kriebel’s chapter in this volume). Like Odenbach’s collages, Heartfield’s work is also based on a bipolar structure, which takes place on a pictorial and textual level. Visually, we have the combination of two images of different size and context. The man standing behind Hitler, cropped to seem anonymous, powerful, and threateningly looming, is

10

11

Marcel Odenbach, Beweis zu Nichts. Proof of Nothing, exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien, 2 February 2017–1 May 2017; see Kunsthalle Wien (ed.), Beweis zu Nichts/Proof of Nothing: Marcel Odenbach, (exhibition catalog) (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017). The work is privately owned and thus not usually tied to an accompanying text. Instead, the (orally conveyed) knowledge of the motif ’s origins replaces the informative text. In this context, Marcel Odenbach produced, a.o., the collage Der Ort ist uns näher gerückt (The Place Has Moved Closer To Us) (2010).

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putting several 1,000 Reichsmark bills into the hand of a smaller, seemingly inferior Hitler. The message is clear: In reference to the Nazi Party’s financing through Krupp and other industrialists, Hitler is debunked as a puppet of big business. The Hitler salute is re-coded from a gesture of superiority to one of dependence. The textual layer functions in analogy: Hitler’s statement “Millions stand behind me” is inverted by the work’s title, The Meaning of the Hitler Salute. Just like Odenbach’s Gute Stube, the collage is emblematically structured on its surface, with the motto and image commented on with an explanatory text. Yet, motto and subscriptio are factually in direct opposition. The textual and pictorial elements are both arranged as bipolar. However, they do not simply cancel each other out in their collision, but rather create a new, third image that produces new meaning. Sabine T. Kriebel thus characterizes Heartfield’s practice as suture, a term borrowed from film theory.12 The work goes beyond the opposition between two images; it is about the interconnection, the deep inner ties underlying the superficially visible contradiction. It is about showing something that cannot be seen, only grasped mentally. Contemporaries described this triadic figure of meaning production as dialectic. His brother Wieland Herzfelde characterized the “actual nature” of Heartfield’s montages, as “[combining] photos and details of photos to create meaning that is not conveyed by individual parts.”13 The philosopher and author Günther Anders, who had fled into American exile, pointed out Heartfield’s intention to educate in his opening speech for an exhibition of Heartfield’s photomontages in New York in 1938. He explained that the artist constructed in order to “render visible the true world that is invisible to the unarmed eye. . . . From the visible fragments that he combines, he creates signs: he creates an object, which pairs the truth of the scientific curve with the immediacy of the artistic image: He gives the eye a wide horizon of reason, he equates the eye with reason.”14 Only a few years earlier, Ernst Bloch had coined the term “dialectical montage” in his book against National Socialism The Heritage of Our Times, which he published in Swiss exile in 1935.15 Heartfield himself described his works as “dialectical photomontages.”16 US -American artist Martha Rosler (b. 1943 in Brooklyn, NY ) plays an important role in transferring Heartfield’s artistic practice to Odenbach’s and Hischhorn’s generation. In the late 1960s, she adopted the model and updated it for her own sociocritical work. One of her best-known works is the twenty-part series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967–74), which criticizes the Vietnam War. She created montages of magazine photographs, which she then re-published in print. Her design principle is simple and striking: War photographs from Life magazine are montaged

12

13

14 15 16

Sabine T. Kriebel, Revolutionary Beauty. The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014) 10–13, 56–63. Wieland Herzfelde [1962], John Heartfield: Leben und Werk (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1986), 50 (English quote by translator). Anders, “Über Photomontage,” 175 (English quote by translator). Bloch, The Heritage of Our Times. Herzfelde, John Heartfield: Leben und Werk, 48 (English quote by translator).

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into beautiful, upper-class interiors from House Beautiful magazine, creating the illusion of spatial continuity. This creates the effect, for example, of a view from a porch onto tanks and corpses strewn across the front yard (Figure 13.5). Rosler continuously employs the bipolarity of pristine American life and a gruesome war far away, montaged to result in shocking unity. With her montages, she implies a correlation between US American wealth and the horrors of the Vietnam War, but without becoming explicit. We can also detect an investigative impetus in Odenbach’s oeuvre, which he traces back to his own biography: “The idea of looking beyond the surface has a lot to do with Germany’s past, and with the 1950s, the time I grew up. I am part of a generation that had to find everything out on their own, excavate everything themselves. That deeply influenced me.”17 The bipolar structure of his collages, where meta-image and micro

Figure 13.5: Martha Rosler, Patio View. From the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, 1967–74; photomontage. © Martha Rosler. 17

Conversation with the author January 9, 2018.

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images enter a field of tension, puts them into the tradition of Heartfield’s and Rosler’s photomontages. However, Odenbach’s collages work differently. The difference begins on a technical-material level: While they all share the starting point of analog photo material, they process it using different techniques. Heartfield cropped and combined the image material in an elaborate procedure to create a reproducible template—the image reproduced in mass media became the actual artwork, while everything before was a preliminary stage. Cuts and breaks were diligently retouched to ensure material and visual unity. Odenbach practices an equally elaborate process, creating unique collages with reproduced photocopy images. The heterogeneity of the pictorial elements is barely detectable from a distance, but even more apparent up close. Cut edges are left, at times creating a relief-like spatiality. While the contradictions in Heartfield’s and Rosler’s works remain within the image, they also manifest on the material level in Odenbach’s work. This gives them a certain sense of corporeality, making their bipolarity traceable not only on a cognitive, but also sensory level. An even more profound difference is the relationship of the montaged images to each other. This becomes quite evident when we compare Odenbach’s work with Heartfield’s Alle Fäuste zu einer geballt (All Fists Clenched as One), a photomontage that is also made of many micro images set in one meta-image. The image was the cover for the German Communist magazine Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper, AIZ ) in 1934 (Figure 13.6). The worker’s clenched fist is made up of innumerable workers’ fists. The micro images completely and unequivocally support the meta-image, which in turn is a concentration of the former. At the same time, the information presented is not tautological. Instead, the micro images and the meta-image produce a third image with new meaning, which states that united, many anti-fascists are a force to be reckoned with. The historical situation behind this powerful statement was so dramatic that Heartfield and the editors of AIZ were already in exile when the issue was first published. The relation between micro images and meta-image is more complicated in Odenbach’s collages, as it does not follow a straightforward pattern. They most often express a bipolar pictorial structure, but in individual instances this polarity can vary formally and semantically. In the case of his Freiburg memorial, the bipolarity of the collage manifests itself in the ambiguous motif of the curtain, which can symbolize covering up history, but is also used in many artworks to uncover hidden histories. The micro images that constitute the curtain don’t show the victims of the National Socialists in Freiburg themselves but many other individuals, scenes, and documents manifesting the history of Jews in Germany. They present a broadened historic tableau, strengthening the memorial’s message, while also opening it up. Micro and meta-perspective are coherently entwined, without getting lost in each other. Thus, the work fulfills the didactical function of a memorial, while broadening the scope of its meaning. Gute Stube functions a bit differently, as the contrast between homey interior and the reality of National Socialism presented in the micro images is revealed in a moment of shock. However, the skulls and bones in the lampshade are not pictures taken in

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Figure 13.6: John Heartfield, Alle Fäuste zu einer geballt (All Fists Clenched as One), Oct. 4, 1934; photomontage, rotogravure: 15 × 11 in., 38.2 × 28 cm. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018.

concentration camps, but rather caricatures from Mexico. There are also street scenes, portraits, and pages from Simplicissimus. Due to the strong use of color on the images, the elements are quite difficult to recognize. Thus, the micro perspective represents the reality behind the idyllic scene, but in a rather associative fashion, ultimately keeping it ungraspable. Once we have discovered the background of the seemingly harmless Gute Stube, we look at it expecting to gain a new perspective—which is only partially fulfilled. The clash between meta- and micro perspective is transferred to the viewers’ imagination. The curtain and grid-like windows take on new meaning here, symbolizing the insufficiencies and invisibilities of the picture’s historical context. This is a moment

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where the attitude of image criticism that Stephan Berg and Christoph Schreier ascribe to Odenbach’s collages becomes explicit.18 Abgelegt und Aufgehangen offers another structure, where micro and meta-images are not set in a relationship of revelation. The disturbing moment here is rather in the streaks of color that seem like blood trickling down the edge of the table, thus creating an associative link between the Constitutional Court and National Socialism. The micro images do not support this allusion. They create a link to a further associative space in German history, thus raising the issue of (dis-)continuities that the viewers are left to contemplate. In summary, we have three different variations of relationships between the meta- and micro layer. They shift between the poles of relative coherence (memorial) and relative openness (Abgelegt und Aufgehangen). What they share is a visual ambiguity, which creates uncertainty and demands a more precise, inquisitive view. Herein lies the core difference to Heartfield’s photomontages, which rather aim for a “light bulb” moment. Odenbach’s collages refuse to satisfy our longing for such a moment. Instead, they play with the pictures’ puzzle-like back-and-forth between concealing visual information through ambiguity and triggering “floods of memory” by using iconic images.19

Confrontation or Coexistence Thomas Hirschhorn’s photo collages also draw from the seemingly endless pool of mass media images. They come from sleek magazines, and the internet. Those found online depict human bodies heavily damaged, yes even torn apart, by weapons. Images that were made in the context of war in the Middle East, most often shot and posted by anonymous sources. One example is Collage-Truth No. 20 (30.5 x 37 cm) (Figure 13.7).Two images that could not be more different are combined here—a photograph from a lifestyle magazine and what appears to be a snapshot taken in the street, showing a man carefully approaching a mutilated corpse. Hirschhorn barely cropped the photos, so the central motifs remain untouched. The two images overlap, but remain fully legible. Their different formats create a polygon shape, which is visually emphasized by the model’s cut-out foot protruding over the edge. The cutting edge creates a vertical axis from which the respective figures move outwardly. Despite the radical contrast between both images, they have some things in common. Both take place in front of a cement gray backdrop, both protagonists are moving expressively, and their clothing oscillates between white and light gray. Collage-Truth No. 20 is part of the series Collage-Truth, which consistently follows this pattern and, as the title suggests, seeks to elucidate. Truth, according to the title, is the product of confronting two contradictions.20 In a comment on his work, Hirschhorn 18

19 20

See Berg, “Camouflage and Delusion,” and Schreier, “Cutting through the Façades: The Picture and its Discourse in Marcel Odenbach’s Works on Paper,” in Works on Paper, 14–21 and 29–32. Information kindly provided by the artist [email, January 18, 2018]. See Michael Diers, “Disiecta Membra: The Collage as a Symbolic Form in the Art of Thomas Hirschhorn,” in Thomas Hirschhorn: Kurt Schwitters-Plattform: Untere Kontrolle (exhibition catalog) (Sprengel Museum Hannover, Cologne: Walter König, 2012), 32–9, especially 35f.

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Figure 13.7: Thomas Hirschhorn, Collage-Truth no. 20, 2012; photo collage: 14.6 × 12 in., 37 × 30.5 cm., private collection. Courtesy of the artist and Office Galerie Susanna Kulli, Zürich. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018.

emphasizes this claim: “I am interested in truth, truth as such, which is not a verified fact or the ‘right information’ of a journalistic story. . . . The habit of reducing things to facts is a comfortable way to avoid touching truth, and to resist this is a way to touch truth. . . . I want to see with my own eyes.”21 Touching the truth means confronting oneself with the unbearable. In fact, drastic images like these are not shown in quality news outlets to prevent serving the voyeuristic impulses of the spectacle. Hirschhorn chooses the opposite path, directing his gaze directly at the atrocities we usually close our eyes to. Collage-Truth No. 20 is a relatively benign, even fairly aestheticized example of his collages. When he began dealing with “pictures of destroyed bodies” (Hirschhorn), he chose substantially more drastic forms of presentation.22

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Thomas Hirschhorn [2012], “Why Is It Important—Today—to Show and Look at Images of Destroyed Human Bodies?” in Lisa Lee and Hal Foster (eds), Critical Laboratory: The Writings of Thomas Hirschhorn (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2013), 99–104, quote 101f. Hirschhorn [2012], “Why Is It Important,” quote 101f.

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In 2006, Hirschhorn realized the installation Superficial Engagement at New York’s Gladstone Gallery. A compilation of particularly gruesome brutalities, the key elements are body parts pierced with nails and pictures of mangled bodies from the war in Iraq he had found online. In the following year, he created The Incommensurable Banner (2007), a textile banner with an impressive size of four meters’ width and eighteen meters’ length that cannot be fully unrolled in exhibition spaces. The ostensible infinity of the banner is marked by its presentation with one end rolled up. On the textile surface of the banner, color images of mangled victims of war in different formats are arranged over and next to each other. Their dimension in relation to the viewers is enormous. Thus, the work is about creating a shock effect. If we examine the banner as a work of montage, we notice the absolute rawness with which the images are arranged. Similar to his installations, Hirschhorn creates a specific aesthetical structure by seemingly foregoing any composition. The varying size of the photos, ranging from close-ups to medium shots, creates an uneven stream of images with condensed moments and individual elements that stand out. The repeated lettering “the incommensurable,” which takes up the top third of the banner, makes the work a text-image collage. It not only addresses that the images pose a transgression, but also points out the discrepancy between image medium and represented reality, which gives the work a moment of self-reflection. Hirschhorn developed his most striking montage style in the series Ur-Collage (2008), in which he first combined photos of mangled corpses with advertisements (Figure 13.8). Unlike the banner, the intention here is to confront contrasting images, to create a visual bipolarity. He translates the rawness and conscious foregoing of aesthetical refinement, which characterize the banner, to paper collage. The simple principle applied here is to montage the image of the dead into an advertisement, setting snapshot-like war photographs in stark contrast to the framing, highly aestheticized and elaborately produced advertising motif. Gluing together two barely, or not at all edited images is the simplest form of collage—which is exactly Hirschhorn’s intention. He defines this elementary form of design with the term “Ur-Collage,” which translates as primordial collage. “They are called ‘Ur-Collage’ because they are original collages; I would like not to be able to make any simpler collage.”23 He points out himself that his collages are more simply structured than Rosler’s photomontages.24 Comparisons are to be expected due to their shared war theme and the analog process of montaging one image into another, thus disavowing one with the other. Both strive for a shock effect with the stark bipolarity of their montages, but their operating principle differs. Rosler’s photomontages usually include something like a view through a window within the main image, into which she edits the contrasting image. They unfold their disturbing effect by maintaining the illusion of the interior’s central perspective. Hirschhorn, on the other hand, montages the unedited images without paying attention to perspective.

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Thomas Hirschhorn, “Ur-Collage,” in Ur-Collage: Thomas Hirschhorn (artist statement) Galerie Susanne Kulli, Zürich, December 5, 2008 to January 19, 2009. Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Ur-Collage”: On the Occasion of the Exhibition.

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Figure 13.8: Thomas Hirschhorn, Ur-Collage 130, 2008; photo collage: 17.7 × 11.6 in., 45 × 29.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018.

This does not mean that his Ur-Collage doesn’t follow an aesthetic principle. Quite to the contrary, it is systematically followed, but only becomes tangible when we view the series as a whole. The image of mutilation is always integrated into a larger advertisement. The brand logo is hidden and the corners are filled alternately. Aesthetical factors play a role in the selection and combination of both images: Hirschhorn strategically arranges photographs in associative forms and colors. The blue of a trash bag under a dead person’s head matches the blue of a model’s handbag, while her lounging diagonal pose is arranged parallel to the corpse within the pictorial space (Figure 13.8). In another collage, the eccentrically twisted position of a corpse is mirrored by a model couple who pose in a landscape with bent arms and turned heads (Figure 13.9). And in a third collage, we can find an obvious analogy between the long, lean, brown legs of the model and the outstretched arm of a corpse whose lower body has been torn off. Colors and backgrounds are also congruent in his juxtaposed images. Criticism claiming Hirschhorn only presents images without actually working on them is therefore unsubstantiated.25 Aesthetical aspects are doubtlessly significant in Ur-Collage. But in light of their terrifying, deeply disturbing subjects they may seem misplaced. More than the use of these violent images per se, one could criticize the manner he works with them as unethical. However, this ostensibly aesthetical

25

Peter Geimer, “Die Notwendigkeit der Kritik und die Liebe zur Kunst,” in Texte zur Kunst, 87: 9 (2012), 43–61.

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Figure 13.9: Thomas Hirschhorn, Ur-Collage B XXIV , 2008; photo collage: 21.8 × 14.6 in., 55.5 × 37 cm. Collection Princeton University Art Museum, Laura P. Hall Memorial Fund. Courtesy of the artist. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018. indifference collides with the artist’s claim to the truth. When Hirschhorn explains that, for him, truth is about “gather[ing] the courage to also touch the negative,” this is a decidedly ethical stance that is comparable to Susan Sontag’s position in “Regarding the Pain of Others.”26 Instead of passing judgment on his ethics, I believe it is more productive to examine Hirschhorn’s practice in regard to artistic consequences. In Ur-Collage, his composition principles come into conflict with the transgressive nature of his motifs, which cross all boundaries of taste, shame, and emotion. Informative content and aesthetical form are put in opposing positions: the montaged image of the war victim not only disavows the fashion photo, even more so, it disavows the artistic practice itself. As it is unbearable to look at the maimed human, it is equally unbearable to look at the artwork. This produces a paradox reception situation, in which viewers unwittingly become witnesses.27 By forcing us to reflect the pictorial level Hirschhorn’s Ur-Collage develops a media-critical dimension. This is what separates the collages from Heartfield’s and Rosler’s photomontages, where the bipolarity of the used images aims at dialectical resolution, to be performed in the viewer’s mind. Hirschhorn’s collages do not offer any visual puzzles, but rather a 26

27

Thomas Hirschhorn, “Doing Art Politically: What Does This Mean?” in Critical Laboratory, 72–7, quote 73. See David Joselit, “Truth or Dare: On the Art of Witnessing,” in Artforum September, (2011) 50: 1 313–17.

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conflict that cannot be resolved. The chasm between the depicted objects and the artistic process is displayed as such, thus becoming part of the work’s content. Unlike activist art, where aesthetical means serve a political message, the design principle and pictorial subject matter become the problem. In 2012, Hirschhorn produced Collage-Truth, which follows the principles of Ur-Collage but differs in a few crucial points (Figure  13.7). Coloring and other associative moments are not as important as in the former series. Instead, spatiality becomes key: often we find a deeper view into the pictorial space, so that models act in the foreground, while gruesome sceneries unfold behind them. This is an approximation to Rosler’s montages, where we also have views opening up and contrasting foregrounds and backgrounds. By going deeper into the pictorial space, the wounded bodies become less drastic. Another change is that the chosen photographs are edited now, allowing for an eye-catcher like the model’s swinging leg. Compared to Ur-Collage, Collage-Truth is more esthetic and thus less disturbing. The artist tries to dampen this tendency to aestheticize by presenting the montages wrapped in plastic foil and nailed to the wall. I would like to briefly mention two further collage series by Hirschhorn. In Easycollage (2014), the artist translates his montage principle to the format of billboards. These digitally produced montages offer the development of more refined forms of juxtaposing pictorial space. And since 2015, Hirschhorn has been working on the series Pixel-Collage, in which the models in the foreground are pixelated. This method applied in news media to protect the identities of individuals, or blur extreme situations, is inverted in order to lead the gaze to the corpses in the background. The pixels are so large that their absurdity becomes apparent. Hirschhorn programmatically speaks of “de-pixelation.”28 This term implies a resistant attitude towards what he considers limiting and belittling in massmedia reporting.

Dialectic at a Standstill In conclusion, I will compare the montage styles of Thomas Hirschhorn and Marcel Odenbach, examine their potential for social criticism and apply two theoretical models to their work. In their paper collages, both artists employ the bipolarity of images. In Hirschhorn’s work, contrasting images appear simultaneously, whereas in Odenbach’s work they shift from macro to micro perspective, emphasizing the temporal dimension of perception. They share the need for bipolar looking, where the gaze moves back and forth between the contrasting images and relates them to each other. As the images enter a relationship of reciprocal commentary, they gain new meaning: What at first appeared harmless, banal, or purely aesthetical, loses its sense of innocence. Moreover, the bipolarity has a strong affective effect, inviting viewers to approach the work and engage in the interplay of perspectives. Employing images that have been widely spread in mass media reproduces the effect of being flooded by trivial 28

http://www.gladstonegallery.com/exhibition/14525/press [accessed February 27, 2018].

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or gruesome images on one hand, while enabling the feeling of being deeply touched by iconic images on the other. Bipolar structures and the subject of war and National Socialism move both artists closer to Heartfield and Rosler with who they share the fundamental structure of surface and pictorial depth and the investigative impetus. In fact, Heartfield and Rosler were strong influences for both: Odenbach has shared the childhood memory that he spent many hours intensively studying books with works by George Grosz and Heartfield at his grandfather’s house and “basically grew up with Martha Rosler.”29 Hirschhorn’s connection is expressed in his “Emergency Library” (2003), a collection of thirty-eight human-sized books, which also features a book on John Heartfield.30 And yet, the montage works of both artists fundamentally differ from those of their predecessors. Heartfield’s montages produce an intricately incorporated chain of associations, which leads to a predetermined conclusion. The creation of a new, third meaning is dialectical montage as described by Anders and Herzfelde. Rosler also aims for a moment of insight, but a much less specified one than Heartfield’s. She does not predetermine any conclusion, but rather inspires thought. So her montages also present an elucidating moment, albeit one that is not didactical. In this sense, she is halfway between Heartfield on the one hand, and Odenbach and Hirschhorn on the other. Hirschhorn’s and Odenbach’s montages also nudge recipients towards a truth beneath the surface, but without offering any final conclusions. The bipolarity of their paper collages rather enforces an ongoing, inconclusive back and forth of gaze and perspective. Reception is never concluded; instead, the tension of simultaneity is upheld. Therefore, the montage works of both artists are media reflective in their own way. Hirschhorn’s collages do not aim to reveal or expose, but rather to learn to bear contradiction. Instead of exposing the lies of mass media images, they are ascribed a moment of truth, however unbearable it may be. As the incommensurability of image, text, and reality becomes evident, the artworks themselves become the problem. The critical attitude towards images that is rightly ascribed to Odenbach’s work is the product of an increased complexity in its contrariness. The images reciprocally relativize each other and produce an associative overall picture, which is neither dissolved in unequivocality, nor in arbitrariness. In both artists’ collages, the pictorial organization of contrary images leads to structural ambiguity. In other words, instead of artificially resolving the conflict in higher meaning, it is not, or at least not completely, dissolved and subsequently remains in continuous oscillation.31 Not the clash between contradictions is the subject, but rather their coexistence.

29 30

31

Conversation with the author January 9, 2018. Christina Braun, Thomas Hirschhorn:—A New Political Understanding of Art? (Dartmouth: University Press of New England, 2018). See Verena Krieger, “Modes of Aesthetic Ambiguity in Contemporary Art: Conceptualizing Ambiguity in Art History,” in Frauke Berndt/Lutz Koepnick (eds), Ambiguity in Contemporary Art and Theory, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, special edition 2018, 61– 105, especially 99–103.

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This significant difference in the manner montage principles are applied must be examined with the context of their respective historical and political development in mind. Heartfield created his photomontages for AIZ, which appeared monthly and was closely tied to the Communist party’s political and agitational agenda. He was able to reach a relatively large audience—in its peak phase AIZ sold 500,000 copies—more interested in politics than art, but sympathizing with his message. The function of these montages was to educate, affirm, and mobilize readers. The political situation at the time was strongly influenced by the growing National Socialists who ultimately came into power. From 1933 onward, the editors had to continue their work in exile in Prague, from where messengers, risking their lives, smuggled a strongly reduced number of copies into the German Reich.32 Heartfield’s photomontages were created in the context of a highly tense situation of political oppression, which called for resistance. This explains the collages’ didactical and propagandistic character. They are activist art in the sense that aesthetical means served to convey a specific message. During the student movement of the late 1960s, Heartfield’s oeuvre was re-introduced to the West German public for the first time. Its shift to the art context resulted in the musealization of his photomontages.33 Rosler’s collages were made in a climate of political protest against government propaganda aimed at downplaying war crimes. The artist herself was not personally subject to persecution or oppression. Rosler also published her montages in flyers and political journals, but she was not backed by the instruments of a powerful political party.34 Later, her work was predominantly received in the art context, and today her montages are considered part of the canon of Western, postwar art, shown, for example, at Documenta 12 in 2007. Hirschhorn’s and Odenbach’s collages, on the contrary, are predominantly produced for the autonomous art context; with the exception of the memorial—which holds a special status in Odenbach’s oeuvre—all of the works are gallery art, received by a specific segment of the art audience. They neither serve politically propagandistic causes, nor were they produced under circumstances of oppression and persecution. Thomas Hirschhorn says of himself that he does not want to make political art, but to make art politically.35 In general terms, both Hirschhorn and Odenbach are undoubtedly politically engaged artists, but their works are not activist art in the conventional sense. They address socio-politically relevant issues and conflicts, but their approach is fundamentally different as they replace clear messages with aesthetical ambiguity.36

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35 36

On the history of AIZ see Marcel Bois/Stefan Bornost, “Kompromisslos auf der Seite der Unterdrückten: Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung,” in Bernd Hüttner/Christoph Nitz (eds): Weltweit Medien nutzen: Medienwelt gestalten (Hamburg: VSA-Verlag, 2010), 185–94. See Arbeitsgruppe Heartfield (work group Heartfield) at Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (NGBK ), John Heartfield). (exhibition catalog) Berlin (West) 1969/70 Inka Schube, “A Different Kind of War-Reporting/Eine andere Art Kriegsberichterstattung,” in Inka Schube (ed.), Martha Rosler: Passionate Signals (exhibition catalog) Martha Rosler: If Not Now, When? (Sprengel Museum Hannover, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005), 270–83. Hirschhorn, “Doing Art Politically.” See Verena Krieger, “Ambiguität und Engagement: Zur Problematik politischer Kunst in der Moderne,” in Cornelia Klinger (ed.), Blindheit und Hellsichtigkeit: Künstlerkritik an Politik und Gesellschaft der Gegenwart (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 163–92.

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By no means is this to say that their criticism is too soft, or that art produced in the context of constitutionally protected freedom of artistic expression is necessarily commercial, conformist, or without bite. To the contrary, a resistant aesthetic in the sense of Peter Weiss can rightly be ascribed to Hirschhorn’s and Odenbach’s montages. In his monumental literary trilogy Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance) (1975, 1978, 1981), Weiss developed a new perspective, which concedes an autonomous potential for social opposition to art without reducing it to the mere vehicle of critical content.37 The artworks discussed in the novels, ranging from the Pergamon Altar (2 bce ), to Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1819), to Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), do not draw their resistant quality from being produced outside an art context or in danger of persecution or oppression—Guernica was even a national commission—but rather touch upon critical points of social resistance in both their subjects and aesthetics. The novel’s protagonists read them as inspiration, as affirmation and strengthening of their own resistance. Today, resistance in art means irritation, shock, and enabling autonomous conclusions. These points are all realized in Hirschhorn’s and Odenbach’s collages. How can we translate this manner of producing aesthetical ambiguity in a sociocritical context into theory? French philosopher Jacques Rancière offers an approach that addresses the issues arising in classic forms of “critical art.” He argues that its two main strategies—“the politics of the becoming-life of art” and “the politics of the resistant form”—became entangled in a state of aporia—an unresolvable internal contradiction— and have subsequently been fated to fail.38 He claims that only in the in-between of these “two great politics” is there a politics of art. Rancière sees a shimmer of hope in the montage principle. Even though it is the most common form of critical art, he asserts it has the potential to be “the principle of a third political aesthetics” and thus a means to escape the defective polarity of the two outmoded politics.39 A “politics of collage,” he continues, is able to supersede the polemic “clash” of heterogeneous elements and “combine the two relations and play on the line of indiscernibility between the force of sense’s legibility and the force of non-sense’s strangeness.”40 With this he marks the core of ambiguity that Hirschhorn and Odenbach produce in their collages in such similar, yet different manners. Another approach to these new forms of montage can be found in a re-reading of Benjamin’s thoughts on montage. In his examination of Brecht’s Epic Theater he places emphasis on the principle of “interruption” (Unterbrechung) triggered by montage. By disrupting the context, “superimposed elements” create a sudden shock-like change in perception.41 Social conditions suddenly become visible in still images, defined as “dialectic at a standstill” by Benjamin.42 Montage allows recipients to autonomously 37

38 39 40 41 42

Peter Weiss [1975, 1978, 1981], The Aesthetics of Resistance, 3 vol. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 44. Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 44. Ibid., 47; Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2009), 26. Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 778. Walter Benjamin [1931], “What is Epic Theatre?” (First Version), in Walter Benjamin,Understanding Brecht (London/New York: Verso, 1998), 1–13, quote 12 and 13.

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discover “situations” (Zustände) and “compels” the viewer to “adopt an attitude vis-à-vis the process.”43 Herein lies the political dimension of montage’s ability to change perception and awareness. With the expression “dialectic at a standstill,” Benjamin formulates an alternative to conventional models of dialectic. Montage by his definition refuses synthesis and through interruption produces ambiguous images, which elucidate precisely because of their unresolved contrariness.44 “Dialectic at a standstill”—and not dialectic synthesis—is the manner in which Odenbach and Hirschhorn productively employ aesthetic ambiguity. It is remarkable that Rancière’s reflections on contemporary issues arrive at similar conclusions as Benjamin once did. With his emphatic assessment of montage’s potential, the former follows a long tradition of montage theory. In spite of fluctuations in its influence, the montage principle proves that it has found new ways of contributing to today’s aesthetics of resistance in Odenbach’s and Hirschhorn’s works. Translated by Margarethe Clausen

43 44

Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 778. Later Benjamin adopted this strategic use of ambiguity as an epistemological method for his opus The Arcades Project. See Verena Krieger, “Die Ambivalenz der Passage: Dani Karavans Gedenkort für Walter Benjamin,” in Burcu Dogramaci and Elizabeth Otto (eds), Passagen des Exils/Passages of Exile (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2017) 168–91, especially 181–91.

List of Contributors Deborah Ascher Barnstone is Professor of Architecture at University of Technology Sydney. She is series co-editor of the Visual Culture and German Contexts series and on the editorial board of The Art Journal of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand. Barnstone’s primary research interests are in the origins of classical modernism and exploring the relationships between art, architecture, and culture more broadly. New books are The Break with the Past: German Avant-Garde Architecture, 1910–1925 (Routledge: 2017) and Beyond the Bauhaus: Cultural Modernity in Breslau, 1918–1933 (University of Michigan Press: 2016). Kevin Berry is a PhD candidate in architectural history and theory at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds an MA in philosophy from Boston College, where his research focused on nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophy. He has taught as an adjunct professor of philosophy at Indiana University, Northeastern University, and Boston College. His current research focuses on German social theory and architecture culture from 1890 to 1930. Joy Calico is Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Musicology at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of two monographs (Brecht at the Opera and Arnold Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw” in Postwar Europe, both from University of California Press) and editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society. Her work has been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy in Berlin, the Berlin Program, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD ), the Howard Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Sacher Stiftung. She is currently writing a book about opera in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Peter Chametzky is Professor of Art History at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Objects as History in Twentieth-Century German Art: Beckmann to Beuys (University of California Press: 2010). He has published in such journals as Art in America, The Art Bulletin, The Oxford Art Journal, Kunstchronik, The Massachusetts Review, Modern Intellectual History, and Museum and Society. His major current project book, with the working title,“Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art,” investigates diversity among contemporary German artists and in contemporary German art. James van Dyke is Associate Professor of Modern European Art History in the School of Visual Studies at the University of Missouri. He has published extensively on

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twentieth-century German art, artists, and critical debates, with a particular focus on modernism and anti-democratic, nationalist ideology and politics in the 1920s and 1930s. His first book, Franz Radziwill and the Contradictions of German Art History, 1919–1945, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2010. He is currently writing his second on critical details in the work of Otto Dix, and the realities of professional practice in interwar Germany. Kathleen James-Chakraborty is Professor of Art History at University College Dublin and the former Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History at the Yale School of Architecture. She has also taught at the University of California Berkeley, the Ruhr University Bochum, and the University of Minnesota. Her books include Modernism as Memory: Building Identity in the Federal Republic of Germany (Minnesota: 2018) and Architecture since 1400 (Minnesota: 2014) as well as the edited collections Ireland in Art in India (Routledge: 2016) and Bauhaus Culture from Weimar to the Cold War (Minnesota: 2006). She is a member of the Royal Irish Academy, and serves on the board of the Chester Beatty Library and of the National Museum of Ireland. Jennifer Kapczynski is Associate Professor of German at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on the intersections of German cinema and politics, with a special emphasis on the era of postwar democratization in the West. Her current book project explores how, in both governmental and commercial contexts, West German film culture of the 1950s sought to represent and nurture democratic subjectivity. She is the author of The German Patient: Crisis and Recovery in Postwar Culture (University of Michigan Press: 2008), and co-editor of three volumes: Die Ethik der Literatur, with Paul Michael Lützeler (Wallstein Verlag: 2011); A New History of German Cinema, with Michael D. Richardson (Camden House: 2014); and Persistent Legacy: The Holocaust and German Studies, with Erin McGlothlin (Camden House: 2016). Sabine Kriebel has published widely on the intersections of aesthetics and politics, focusing on the medium-specific interventions of matter, from the subtle infiltrations of sutured montage to the incisions of the drawn line to the unifying affect of queer soundscape. Her work has appeared in journals such as Oxford Art Journal and New German Critique, and in exhibition catalogues and edited volumes. Her books Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield (University of California Press: 2014) and Photography and Doubt, co-edited with Andrés Zervigón (Routledge: 2016), interrogate photographic interventions in consciousness. She teaches modern and contemporary art at the University College Cork, Republic of Ireland. Verena Krieger holds the chair of Art History at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena in Germany. Beforehand she taught at universities in Vienna, Austria; Bern, Switzerland; and in Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, and Munich. Her main areas of research are modern and contemporary art and art theory. In particular, her research focuses on the political engagement of art, gender constructions, ambiguity in art, art as commemorative

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culture, cartography as artistic medium, concepts of artistry and creativity, and the temporality of art. Recent publications include “Die Ambivalenz der Passage: Dani Karavans Gedenkort für Walter Benjamin” in Burcu Dogramaci and Elizabeth Otto, eds., Passagen des Exils/Passages of Exile (2017) and “Modes of Aesthetic Ambiguity in Contemporary Art: Conceptualizing Ambiguity in Art History” in Ambiguity in Contemporary Art and Theory, edited by Frauke Berndt for Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (2018). Nina Lübbren is a Principal Lecturer and Deputy Head in the Department of English and Media at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. She is the author of Rural Artists’ Colonies in Europe, 1870–1910 (Routledge: 2001), and the co-editor of Visual Culture and Tourism (Bloomsbury: 2003) and Painting and Narrative in France: Poussin to Gauguin (Routledge: 2016). She first encountered German Expressionist sculpture as an undergraduate at the University of Heidelberg and recently rediscovered it after many years spent on the nineteenth century. She is at present writing a book on German sculpture from 1910 to 1940. Patrizia McBride is Professor of German and Director of the Institute for German Cultural Studies at Cornell University, where she is also a member in the field of Film and Video Studies. Her research areas include modernism and avant-garde studies; the intersection of literary theory, philosophy, and political theory; and visual and media studies. She is the author of The Void of Ethics: Robert Musil and the Experience of Modernity (Northwestern: 2006) and The Chatter of Visible: Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany (University of Michigan Press: 2016), and the co-editor of Legacies of Modernism: Art and Politics in Northern Europe, 1890–1950 (Palgrave: 2007). Recent articles examine the understanding of the human within German Constructivism; the visual pedagogies of the interwar avant-garde; and the relation between text and image in the feuilleton of the early twentieth century. Barbara McCloskey is Professor and Chair of the Department of History of Art and Architecture and Director of the University Art Gallery at the University of Pittsburgh. Her publications focus on twentieth-century German art and politics. She is author of George Grosz and the Communist Party (Princeton: 1997), Artists of World War II (Greenwood: 2005), and The Exile of George Grosz: Modernism, America, and the One World Order (University of California: 2015). She also co-edited with Deborah Ascher Barnstone The Art of War, volume 5 in the German Visual Culture Series (Peter Lang: 2017). Elizabeth Otto is Executive Director of the Humanities Institute and teaches Modern and Contemporary Art History and Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Her books include Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt (Jovis: 2005), Global Bauhaus Women (with Patrick Rössler, Palazzo [German edition: Knesebeck]: 2019), and the forthcoming Haunted Bauhaus. In addition to Art and Resistance in Germany, she has co-edited The New Woman

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International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s (with Vanessa Rocco, University of Michigan Press: 2011), Passages of Exile (with Burcu Dogramaci, Edition Text + Kritik: 2017), and Bauhaus Bodies (with Rössler, Bloomsbury Visual Arts: 2019). Noah Soltau is Director of the Linguistics Program and Assistant Professor of Linguistics and German at Carson-Newman University. Recent publications include “The Aesthetics of Violence and Power in Uli Edel’s Der Baader Meinhof Komplex,” in Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies 5:2 (2014). He received his PhD from the University of Tennessee in 2014. His research interests are primarily focused on the political roles that German history, art, and literature play in American popular culture.

Index Aceves, Gustavo, 15–16 Lapidarium, 15–16 activism, political, 6, 26, 73 Adorno, Theodor, 120, 123, 127, 213 AIZ (Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung), 140, 141, 142, 143, 155, 199, 203, 204, 206, 241, 250 Altdorfer, Albrecht, 158 Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, AfD), 131 Anders, Günther, 231 Andersen, Hans Christian, 220, 223, 225, 228 Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, see AIZ Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Workers Council for Art), 69 Ausstellung Karlsruhe DammerstockSiedlung, 40, 41, 47, 50, 51 Avant-Gardes, radical, xvii, 135 Auber, Daniel, 218 Baader, Johannes, 26, 27 Baader-Meinhof Gang, 10, 217, 221 Bakker Schut, Pieter H., 223 Baldung-Grien, Hans, 157, 158, 159, 160, 172 Basic Law, 200 Bauhaus, 40, 44, 46, 94, 100, 183 Baumeister, Willi, 98, 195, 196, 198, 200, 203, 206, 207, 208–10, 211, 216 Altered Avenger, 196–8 Jokkmokmädchen (Maiden from Jokkmok), 195–6 Bavaria, 1, 2, 80, 163, 238 Becker, Howard S., 219, 220 Behne, Adolf, 42, 52 Neus Bauen, Neus Wohnen (New Living, New building), 42 Bell, Robin, 213, 214 Belling, Rudolf, 73

Benjamin, Walter, 91, 97, 140, 204, 212, 223, 231, 251, 252 Angel of History, 97 Bergius, Hanne, 23, 25, 29, 20, 31, 34 Bergmann-Michel, Ella, xvii, 209 Erwerbslose kochen für Erwerbslose (Unemployed Cook for the Unemployed), 1932, 106 Fliegende Händler in Frankfurt am Main (Flying Dealers in Frankfurt), 105 Wahlkampf 1932 (Letzte Wahl) (Election Campaign 1932), see Chapter 6 Wo wohnen alte Leute (Where do the Elderly Live), 100 Berlin Avant-Garde, 26 Berlin Club Dada, 26 Berlin Dada, xvi, 23, 25–6, 33, 36, 37, 206 members of, 32 Berlin Litffassäule, 104 Berlin Secession exhibition, 12 Berlin Wall, 15, 176, 189 Berlin-Wilmersdorf, 63 Berliner Skulpturenfund (Berlin Sculpture Find), 71 bipolarity, 238, 240, 241, 247, 248, 249 Bloch, Ernst, 223, 231, 232, 239 Bowling Green Massacre, 146–7 Brandenburg Gate, 14, 15, 16 Brantley, Ben, 120, 129 Bräunert, Svea, 225 Brecht, Bertholt, 116, 119–31, 218, 231, 251 Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny), 218 Dreigroschenoper (Three Penny Opera) 218 Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children), 115–16, 118–31,

257

258

Index

Breker, Arno, 56, 57, 61, 64, 67, 68, 194, 197, 198 The Avenger, 197–8 Broszat, Martin, 5 Brüning, Heinrich, 103 Bushart, Magdalena 63, 64–5, 69, 73 capitalism, 27, 44, 45, 49, 53, 86, 88, 94, 124, 140, 144, 159, 218 communicative, 212 Carswell, Simon, 146 Cassirer, Paul, 12 Castillo, David R., 200 Castro, Fidel, 219 Cauer, Hanna, 55, 58, 61–6, 69, 73, 74 Allegretto, 64–6 Moderato, 64–6 Chancellor Helmut Kohl, 189, 226 Chaplin, Charlie, Great Dictator, The, 2 Chenoweth, Erica, 4 Clark, T. J., 141, 157 class (social class), 53, 78, 220 class inequities, 103 class inferiority, 86 classicism, 15, 16, 63, 64, 72, 207 Clinton, Hillary, 19 Club Dada, 206 Cologne, 163, 219, 232 comic relief, 144 Communist Party, 8, 26, 79, 86, 89, 90, 159, 250 Communist Resistance in Nazi Germany, 155 Conway, Kellyanne, 146 Corinth, Lovis, 206 Courtauld Institute, 70 Covfefe, xv, xvi Cowan, Michael, 31, 32 critique, social, 8, 164, 218, 219 Cubists, 231 culture industry, 118, 120, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129 DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), 205 Dada, xvi, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 90, 141, 206

Dada Berlin, 25 Dada Fair in Berlin, 23, 26, 27, 34 Dadaism, 25, 26, 29 Dadaists, 25, 26, 27, 32, 34, 37, 38, 231 Dahlgren, Peter, 212 Däubler, Theodor 36 Dawes Plan, 42 Dawkins, Richard, 146 Deamer, Peggy, 44, 53 Dean, Jodi, 212–13 Dell, Floyd, 89 democracy, xvii, 3, 77, 97, 111, 113, 117, 149, 200, 206, 212, 221 new German, 18 Denkmal für Euthanasie-Opfer (Monument for the Victims of Euthanasia), 188 Dewey, John, 1, 19 Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag), 27, 87, 89 Ditzen, Rudolf, 193 Dix, Martha, 161, 169 Dix, Otto, 89, Barricade, 153 Der Senn Jacob (Jacob the Dairyman), see Chapter 9 Der Senn Joseph (Joseph the Dairyman), see Chapter 9 Flanders, 153 Interregnum, 156 Jewish Cemetery in Randegg, 153 Trench, 152, 153 The Triumph of Death, 153 War Cripples, 152 Woman before a Mirror, 153 Documenta, 250 Döblin, Alfred, 107, 108, 113, 231 Berlin Alexanderplatz, 231 Dogramaci, Burcu, 252 Down, Mark 221, 225 Dresden, 17, 87, 152, 153, 161, 165, 166, 239 Dresden Art Academy, 78, 152, 156 Dritten Reich, 56, 57, 69, 152, 153 Dualismus, 158 Duchamp, 151 Duncombe, Stephen, 7, 73, 118 Dürer, Albrecht 158, 159 Düsseldorf, 153, 155, 156, 165, 186, 231, 237 Duterte, Rodrego, 2

Index East Berlin, 186, 238 East Prussia, 69 Easterling, Keller, 53 Egginton, William, 200 Einstein, Albert 30, 31, 32 Einwohner, Rachel L., 4, 5, 199, 226, 227 Eisenman, Peter, 20, 175, 179, 187 Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 181–3 Eisenstein, Sergej 231 Engels, Friedrich 41 Ensslin, Gudrun 217, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 227 Entartete Kunst, 70, 71, 152, 195, 210 Entmachtung, 56, 73 Epic Theater, 122, 231, 251 Eustis, Oskar 115, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 131 Ewig, Isabelle, 195, 207 exhibition, degenerate art (see also Entartete Kunst) 73, 194, 195 Existenz-Minimum, 41, 42, 48, 51 Expressionism and folk art, 63 Expressionismus, 63, 69 Expressionist idiom, 60 Expressionist phase, 72 Expressionist work, 82 Facebook, 4, 144, 148, 202, 203 Fake News, 140, 148, 203 Fallada, Hans 193, 194 Jeder Stirbt für sich Allein (Every Man Dies Alone), 193 Fanck, Arnold, 105 Faschisierung, 198 Faschismus, 67, 155, 194, 199 fascism, xvii, 2, 119, 138, 151, 185, 219 Femininity, 65 feminist, feminism, xvii, 38, 45, 67, 82, 86–7 First World War, 8, 10, 12, 23, 26, 36, 63, 68, 77, 79, 82, 89, 159, 206, 231 Flanders, 153 flash mob, 19 Frankfurt-am-Main, 42, 43, 47, 48, 51, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 113, 221, 236, 238 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 225 Frankfurt-style kitchens, small, 51

259

Freud, Sigmund 197, 204 Friedländer, Salomo, 29, 30, 31 Friedrich, Ernst, 89 Front National (National Front), 3 gay rights, 115 Géricault, Théodore, 251, 204 German Democratic Republic, 3, 186 German Lyceum Club in Berlin, 70 German Resistance, 61 Germany, divided, 7 East Germany, 176, 186 Federal Republic of Germany, 3, 173, 176, 179, 185, 200 West Germany, xvii, 10, 186, 194, 217, 221 Giroux, Henry, 116, 117, 123 Goebbels, 64, 161, 165 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 17, 236 Göring, Hermann, 61 Great German Art Exhibitions in Munich (Grosse Kunstausstellung), 56, 57, 62, 64, 72, 73, 194 Great War (see also First World War), 31, 69 Gropius, Walter, xvi, 100, 183 Dammerstock, see Chapter 3 rationalization, 45 “Sociological Principles,” 47–8, 54 Grosz, George 8–10, 29, 36, 155, 157, 159, 172, 204, 206, 249 Ecce Homo, 9–10 God of War, 92, 93–4 The Secret Emperor, 204 grotesques, 4, 146, 149 Haesler, Otto, 40 Hagen, 68, 70, 72 Halbouni, Manaf, 16–17 Monument, 17 Hallman, Heinz Topography of Terror, see Chapter 10 Hamburg, 223, 225, 228 Hammer, Peter, 42 Hampel, Elise and Otto, 193–4, 199, 200 Hanfstaengl, Eberhard, 164 Harnack, Arvid, 176

260

Index

Haug, Wolfgang Fritz, 198 Hauptmann, Elisabeth, 218 Dreigroschenoper (Three Penny Opera), 218 Hausmann, Raoul, 23, 26, 27, 29–31, 33, 34, 36–8, 139, 206, 231 Hays, Michael, 53 Heartfield, John (Also known as Helmut Herzfelde), 79, 82–3, 90–1, 94, 140, 141, 149, 200, 201, 203, 204, 205, 206, 213, 239, 241, 247, 249, 250 Adolf der Übermensch (Adolf the Superman), 107–9 Alle Fäuste zu einer geballt (All Fists Clenched as One), xvii, 241, 242 Benütze Foto als Waffe (Self Portrait with President Zörgiebel), 136 Der Sinn des Hitlergrusses (The Meaning of the Hitler Salute), 142–4, 238–9 Märchen den Armen (Fairy Tales of the Poor), 90 Nach Zehn Jahren: Väter und Söhne (After Ten Years: Fathers and Sons), 89 Wer Bürgerblätter liest wird blind und taub! (Whoever Reads Bourgeois Newspapers Becomes Blind and Deaf), 141–2 Werkzeug in Gottes Hand? Spiezeug in Thyssens Hand! (Instrument in God’s Hand? Toy in Thyssen’s Hand!), 204 Heidelberg, 99 Herberts, Kurt, 194–6 Maltechnikum, 194, 195, 196 Himmler, Heinrich, 181 Hemmleb, Maria, 97, 99, 100, 105 Hepp, Andreas, 201 Herberts, Kurt, 195, 196 Hercher, Jutta, 99, 100 Herzfelde, Helmut, see Heartfield, John Herzfelde, Wieland, 26, 36, 78–9, 82–3, 86, 89–91, 94, 239 Heydrich, Reinhard, 181 Hildebrandt, Hans, 99 Hindenburg, Paul von, 107, 109–13 Hirschhorn, Thomas

Collage-Truth No. 20, 243–4, 248, see Chapter 13 Ur-Collage (primordial collage), concept of, 245–8 Ur-Collage 130, 246 Ur-Collage B XXIV, 246 Hitler, Adolf, 5, 63, 64, 72, 73, 77, 109–11, 113, 142–3, 147, 149, 204, 205, 207, 238 artists under, 67 Hitler Salute, 142–3, 238, 239 Hitler’s dictatorship, 113, 151, 156, 189 overthrow, 172 Hitler’s regime, 114, 153, 156 Hitler Youth, 72, 91 Höch, Hannah, 206 Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dad Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany), 16, see Chapter 2 Höcke, Bjorn, 20 Hoffmann-Axthelm, Dieter, 177 Hogarth, 197 Hohenstoffeln, 168 Hollander, Jocelyn A. and Rachel L. Einwohner, 5, 199, 226, 227 Holocaust, 5, 6, 20, 180, 200 homosexual, 197 House Beautiful, 239, 240 House of German Art, 64, 72, 194 housing progressive, 100 rationalized, 41 housing crisis, 43 housing problem, 42, 45 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 26, 27 Human Rights Campaign, 116 Hungary, 3, 91 IBA (Internationale Bauausstellung, International Building Exhibition), 176, 177, 178, 179, 182 ideology, 43, 48, 50, 52, 53, 54, 63, 68, 116, 128, 129, 205

Index architectural, 53, 54 political, 67, 139 IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices), 121 image world, 212, 213 Imhof, Anne, 17–19 Faust 17–19 immigrants, xv, 206, 226 Independent Film, 100 Innere Emigration (inner emigration), 55, 153 Inneres Exil, 152 Instagram, 4, 144, 148 installations, 5, 7, 14, 16, 17, 20, 91, 178, 232, 245 insurgent spectacles, 116, 118, 121, 124 Iraq, 118, 121 invasion of, 116, 118, 121 war in, 116, 118, 245 Iraq war, 115, 120, 121, 124 Ivens, Joris, 105 Der Brug, 105 Jewish Museum, 173, 174, 175, 179, 181, 187 Jewish resistance, 5–6 Jews, representations of, 155–6, 165–9, 172, 197, 241 Joman, xv–xvi Mein Covfefe, xv–xvi, 147 Jones, Jonathan, 149 Justi, Ludwig, 159, 163 Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, 58, 158, 159 Kállai, Ernst, 140 Karlsruhe, 39, 40–1, 43, 53, 159 Kershaw, Ian, 5, 151, 156, 172 Kiel revolt, 32 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 165 Klee, Paul, 97, 153, 158 Klein, Richard, 72 Kleihues, Josef Paul, 177 Kline, Kevin, 124 Kolbe, Georg, 73, 158 Kollwitz, Käthe, 12, 13, 14, 32, 89 Krieg, 12–14 KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, German Communist Party), 26, 27, 79, 82, 87, 90, 91, 101 Kracauer, Sigfried, 26, 31, 116, 139

261

Krause, Franz, 195, 206, 207, 208–10, 216 Kreiner, Artur, 65, 66 Kremer, Phillip, 144, 145 Kriebel, Sabine, 204, 213, 239 Kulturbund, 193 Kunsthalle Wien, 238 Ladd, Brian, 14 Lachenmann, Helmut Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (The Little Match Girl), 217–29, see Chapter 12 Lahiji, Nadir, 53 Lang, Fritz, 104–5 Lang, Nikolaus 178 Langhanns, Carl Gotthard, 14–16 Lapidarium, 15, 16 Lenin, Vladimir, 36, 219 Lenk, Franz 153, 163, 164, 165 Leonardo da Vinci, 15, 217, 221 Life, 239 Libeskind, Daniel, 174, 179, 181, 182, 187 Liebermann, Max, 206 Lukács, Georg 87, 144, 145 Luther, Martin, 124 Marburg, 99 Märchen, 82, 87, 89, 91, 92 Martin Gropius Building (also Martin Gropius Bau), 183, 184, 186, 188 Marx, Karl, 32, 36, 37, 44, 219 mass culture, 120, 123, 129 May, Ernst, 42, 43, 47, 48 Mayer, John, 144 McCarthy, Joseph, 131 McDermott, Phelim, 221, 225 Mecklenburg, 103 Meckseper, Josephine, 8, 10–11 RAF Tray 10–11 media digital, 118 mainstream, 121 mass, 25, 90, 236, 241, 248 shared, 215 traditional, 6 Medusa, 251 Mein Mampf, 1 memory, 103, 173, 175, 182, 184, 185, 187

262

Index

memoryscape, 173 Mendl, Michael, 220 Merkel, Angela, 15 Merson, Allan, 155 meta-image, 235, 236, 240, 241, 243 Metzer, David, 220 Michel, Ella Bergmann-, see Bergmann-Michel, Ella Michel, Robert, 99, 100, 101, 106, 209–11 micro images, 235, 236, 238, 241, 243 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 182 Mietskaserne (tenement housing), 42, 46 militarism, 14, 87, 89, 117 Minsk, 207, 209 Mitchell, Mike, 213, 216 modernism, 26, 141, 153, 173, 182 modernist, 194, 217 Modernity, 41, 210 symbolic form of, 233 Moholy-Nagy, László, 98, 231 Mommsen, Hans, 5, 61 Monbiot, George, 122 money economy, 44 moneyed classes, 218 montage, see also photomontage montage, dialectical, 103, 238, 239, 249 montage principle, 31, 231, 232, 233, 248, 250, 251, 252 movement civil rights, 189 physical and virtual, 215 student, 221, 223, 236, 250 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 218 Müller, Heiner, 63, 129 Müller-Lyer, Franz Carl, 44, 48 Mumford, Eric, 44, 45 Munich (München), 27, 56, 57–8, 70, 152, 153, 155, 157, 193, 194, 195, 231, 232 Municipal Museum in Hagen, 70 Napoleon (Bonaparte), 16 Nationalgalerie, Berlin (Also National Gallery), 28, 70, 159, 164, 169 nationalism, 8, 54, 94, 131, 199 resurgent, xvi self-serving, xv

National Socialism, 55, 56, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 73, 77, 91, 95, 119, 187, 199, 200, 236, 239, 241, 243, 249 victims of, 236, 237 National Socialist, xvi, 5, 17, 18, 55, 58, 61, 63, 72, 73, 91, 97, 98, 103, 109, 142, 157, 161, 165, 173, 176, 196, 197, 202, 205, 206, 207 National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi Party), xvi, 62 National-Socialist Germany, xvi, 5, 55, 56, 58 63, 68, 77, 151, 155, 193, 194, 195, 199, 200, 201, 203, 215, 216 Nationalsozialismus (National Socialism), 56, 57, 63, 70, 163, 164, 166, 172, 195, 199, 236, 237 Nazi dictatorship, 152, 154, 163, 166 Nazi Germany, Nazi Germany and Trump America, 201 Nazi period, 6, 7, 207, 211 Nazi regime, 151, 193 neoliberal late, 131 corporatism, 18 globalized, 53 order, 8 Neo-Nazis, 1 Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin (New National Gallery), 182, 231 Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), 163, 164, 166, 172 Neues Bauen, 40, 42, 56 Neues Wohnen, 42 New Frankfurt, the (Das neue Frankfurt), 42 New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), 153, 157, 159, 169 New Romantics, 159 New Woman, 197 Nierendorf, Josef, 163, 164 Nierendorf, Karl, 163, 164 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 29, 31, 33, 166 Nietzsche’s vitalism, 26 Nixon, Richard, 147, 148, 149 Nono, Luigi, 217, 219, 223 Noske, Gustav, 32 Nuremberg statues, 65 Nuremberg Trials, 236

Index Obama, Barack, 200, 205 Occupy Movement, 202 October Group, 210 Odenbach, Marcel Abgelegt und Aufgehangen (Put Down and Hung Up), 233–6, 238, 243, see Chapter 13 Die Gute Stube (The Nice Parlor), 236–8, 239, 241–2 Mahnmal für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus unter Freiburger Universitätsangehörigen (Memorial for the Victims of National Socialism among the Students, Staff, and Faculty of the University of Freiburg, 236–7 Office of War Information (OWI), 91, 93 Ong, Walter, 212 opera, 218–29 oppression, class, 220, 228 oppressors, 7, 47, 52 Osborn, Max, 68, 69 Pegida, 17 performance, flash-mob, 19 performance art, 20 interactive, 17 Pergamon Altar, 251 Petropoulos, Jonathan, 67 Peter, Benedikt von, 220 Peukert, Detlef, 5, 151, 156, 172 Photo collage, 232, 244, 246, 247 photomontage, 25, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 149, 206, 240, 241, 242, 250 Picasso, Pablo, 165 Pickelhaube, 10 Piscator, Erwin, 231 Poland, 92, 169 Pola Negri, 36 policies, xv, 6, 43, 69, 73, 116, 118, 199, 203, 205, 215 cultural, 58, 73, 74 political action, 121, 122, 124, 126, 131 political agency, 43, 52, 131 political arenas, 115, 121, 131 political culture, 113, 151, 189 Political Dissent, 5, 151, 172

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political efficacy, 127, 203 potential, 204 political engagement, xvi, 90, transformative, 25 Postwar Germany, 18, 85, 173, 184, 185, 226 power, political, 4, 10, 40, 47, 53 power structures, 5, 17, 18, 38, 43, 131, 229 Prince Albrecht Palace, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183, 186 propaganda, 56, 64, 70, 101, 154, 194, 198 socialist realist, 204 propaganda tactics, 141 propagandistic work, 38 protest, political, xvii, 10, 20, 250 Quadriga, 14, 15, 16 Quakers, xvii racism, xvi, 5, 19, 63, 151, 139, 147, 199, 205 Radek, Karl, 32, 36 Radical Pedagogy, xvii, 77 RAF (Red Army Faction), 6, 10, 11, 186, 217, 221, 222, 223, 225–6 Rancière, Jacques, 251, 252 Randegg, 153, 161, 165, 166, 167, 168 Red Army Faction, see RAF Red Orchestra, 58, 61, 176 Reed, John, 10 representations, 12, 122, 161, 165, 181, 228 conservative visual, 163 Résistance, 151 resistance aesthetics of, 251, 252 attempted, 228–9 cultural, 5, 7, 58, 73, 120, 121, 135 everyday, 3, 4, 5 levels of, 200, 216 missed, 228, 229 organized, 151, 155, 172 overt, 4, 227, 229 resistance groups, 58, 61, 155 resistance movement, 58 Resistant Aesthetics, 231, 232, 233, 235, 237, 239, 241, 243, 245, 247, 249, 251 Reuter, Ernst, 15 right wing, xvi, 15, 131, 147 right-wing activists, 1

264 right-wing populism, xvi right-wing populists, 2 Riis, Jacob, 42 Robespierre, 157 Roma, 187, 197 Rome Prize, 62, 69 Rosler, Martha, 239–40, 241, 249, 250 Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, 239–40 Patio View, 239–40 Rossi, Aldo, 176, 177, 186 Rote Armee Fraktion, see RAF Rote Kapelle, see Red Orchestra Roussel, Violaine, 121 Rutherford-Johnson, Tim, 220, 227 Ruttmann, Walter, 105 Sinfonie der Grossstadt, 105 sachlich (objective), 41, 53 Sagebiel, Ernst, 186 Sander, August, 161 Sarajevo, 36 satire, 8, 145, 202, 205 tuneful, 219 Schad, Christian, 156 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 15, 177 Schlemmer, Oskar, 195, 206 Schock, Kurt, 4 Schoenberg, Arnold, 219 Schönlank, Bruno, 79, 81 Sonniges Land (Sunny Land), 79–81 Schottmüller, Oda, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 68, 74 Alraune (Mandrake), 58 Studie zu einer Gartenskulptur (Study for a Garden Sculpture), 59 Tänzerin (Dancer), 60–1 Schütte-Lihotzky, Margarete, 48 Schwarz-Semmelroth, Ellen, 56 Schwesig, Karl, 155 Schwitters, Kurt, 40, 98 science, political, 3, 5, 6 Scott, James C., 3, 5, 199 Scott Brown, Denise, 54 sensationalism, 148 Service, Tom, 217 sexism, 19, 25, 37, 48, 127 Sharp, Gene, 20

Index Sharp, Ingrid, 12 Simmel, Georg, 26, 31 Simplicissimus, 242 Sinclair, Upton, 82, 90 Sinti, 197, see also Roma Situationist International, 6 Snyder, Timothy, 77, 78 Sontag, Susan, 247 Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands, 79 Sozialistische Republik, 89 Sozialpolitik, 42, 43, 49 Spartacus Revolt, 27, 32 Spencer, Douglas, 53 Spicer, Sean, xv SS (Schutzstaffel), xvii, 10, 173, 180, 194, 207, 209 Stammheim Prison, 222 Steger, Milly, 55, 58, 67, 68, 70–4 Female Half-Figure, 70 Jephtha’s Daughter, 68 Kniende (Kneeling Woman) 70 Sinnende (Sitzende Figur) (Musing Woman [Seated Figure]), 72 Walking Girl, 70 Steinweis, Alan E., 67 Stimmann, Hans, 186 Streep, Meryl, 115, 118, 120, 121, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131 Stuttgart, 166, 168, 195, 206, 209, 222 subversion, 139, 144, 172 subvert, 36, 141, 148, 183 suture, 139, 239 symbolic forms, 136, 200, 233, 243 symbols, 7, 14, 15, 17, 20, 45, 46, 48, 49 appropriation of, 4 art that critiques, xvii cultural, 7 enduring, 193 national, 14 political, xvii, 14 Syrian Civil War, 17 systems, political, 10, 218, 221 Tafuri, Manfredo, 43, 453 Taut, Bruno, 43 Teige, Karl, 45 Terpsichore, 195, 196

Index terrorism, spectacle of, 116–18, 121, 123, 217, 221, 223, 225, 228 Tesori, Jeanine, 120, 125, 129 Theater of War, 123, 126, 127 Theweleit, Klaus, 197, 225 Third Reich, 5, 77, 91, 151, 176, 186, 189, 197 Threuter, Christina, 72 Tiergarten Park, 14 Till, Nicholas, 220 Timberlake, Justin, 19 Tost, Raimund, 32 Total Architecture, 44, 45, 47, 49 totalitarianism, 97, 111, 113, 200 Tret’iakov, Sergei, 206 Trübner, Wilhelm, 206 Trump, Donald, xv, 2, 19, 131, 135, 145, 147, 149, 200, 201, 202, 205, 212, 214, 215 Trump International Hotel, 214, 215 Trumpism, 200, 201, 206, 213 Tschichold, Jan, 98 tweet, 4, 200, 201, 203, 205 Twitler, 202, 215 Twitter, 148, 202, 203, 212, 214, 215 typology, 48, 218 sociological, 227 Übermensch, 107 Ungers, Oswald Matthias, 176 Utopianism, 210 Velázquez, Diego, 235–6 Venice Biennale, 17 Venturi, Robert, 54 Verfremdungseffekt (alienation), 122 Verism, 164 Vienna, 36, 238 Vogeler, Heinrich 91–2 Volk (people/nation), 12, 65, 66, 163, 196, 197, 198 Wagner, Martin, 43, 47 Walter, John, 129 Warhol, Andy, 149 Watergate Scandal, 147 Wedekind, Frank, 116

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Frühlings Erwachen: Eine Kindertragödie (Spring Awakening), 116, 118 Wehlte, Kurt, 156 Weidemann, Hans, 165 Weigert, Hans, 56 Weill, Kurt, 217, 218 Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny), 218 Dreigroschenoper (Three Penny Opera), 218 Weimar, xvi, 5, 46, 56, 63, 78, 89, 91, 94, 100 Weimar era, 99, 104 Weimar Germany, 23, 25, 27, 31, 36, 37, 42, 43, 49, 78, 90, 162 Weimar Republic, 3, 8, 29, 37, 38, 62, 68, 78, 97, 154, 157, 159, 169, 217, 218 Weiss, Peter, 251 Wenk, Silke, 67 Wenzel, Jürgen, 178 West Berlin, 176, 189 West German, 10, 99, 194, 219, 221, 228, 250 Wigman, Mary, 58 Wilhelm II, Emperor, 30, 31, 32, 63 Wilms, Ursula Topography of Terror, see Chapter 10 Wirtschaftswunder, 6 Wodiczko, Krzysztof, 214 women’s liberation, 33–3 women, National Socialist, 56, 60, 70 women’s rights, xv, 33–8 Wunsiedel, 1, 2 Wuppertal, 42, 195 Wuppertaler Arbeitskreis, 195 Yad Vashem, 6 Young, James E., 187 YouTube, 148 Zervigón, Andrés, 206 Zetkin, Clara, 87 Zille, Heinrich, 42 Zimmermann, B. A. 217, 219 Zipes, Jack, 83, 217, 223 Zumthor, Peter, 173, 179, 180, 187

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