Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520340763

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REVOLUTIONARY BEAUTY

THE PUBLISHER GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGES THE

GENEROUS

S U P P O R T OF T H E ART E N D O W M E N T F U N D OF T H E U N I V E R S I T Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

FOUNDATION.

REVOLUTIONARY BEAUTY The Radical Photomontages of John Heartjield Sabine T. Kriebel

rp U N I V E R S I T Y OF C A L I F O R N I A PRESS Berkeley

Los Angeles

London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university p r e s s e s in t h e U n i t e d States, e n r i c h e s lives a r o u n d t h e w o r l d by a d v a n c i n g s c h o l a r s h i p in t h e h u m a n i t i e s , s o c i a l s c i e n c e s , a n d n a t u r a l s c i e n c e s . Its a c t i v i t i e s a r e s u p p o r t e d by t h e U C P r e s s F o u n d a t i o n a n d by p h i l a n t h r o p i c c o n t r i b u t i o n s f r o m i n d i v i d u a l s a n d i n s t i t u t i o n s . For m o r e i n f o r m a t i o n , visit w w w . u c p r e s s . e d u .

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

U n i v e r s i t y o f C a l i f o r n i a P r e s s , Ltd. London, England

© 2 0 1 4 by T h e R e g e n t s o f t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f C a l i f o r n i a

E v e r y e f f o r t h a s b e e n m a d e to i d e n t i f y t h e r i g h t f u l c o p y r i g h t h o l d e r s of m a t e r i a l not s p e c i f i c a l l y c o m m i s s i o n e d f o r u s e in t h i s p u b l i c a t i o n a n d to s e c u r e p e r m i s s i o n , w h e r e a p p l i c a b l e , f o r r e u s e o f all s u c h m a t e r i a l . C r e d i t , if a n d a s a v a i l a b l e , h a s b e e n p r o v i d e d f o r all b o r r o w e d m a t e r i a l e i t h e r onp a g e or in a n a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s e c t i o n of t h e b o o k . E r r o r s or o m i s s i o n s in c r e d i t c i t a t i o n s o r f a i l u r e to o b t a i n p e r m i s s i o n i f r e q u i r e d by c o p y r i g h t law h a v e b e e n e i t h e r u n a v o i d a b l e or u n i n t e n t i o n a l . T h e a u t h o r a n d p u b l i s h e r w e l c o m e a n y i n f o r m a t i o n that w o u l d a l l o w t h e m to c o r r e c t f u t u r e r e p r i n t s .

L i b r a r y of C o n g r e s s C a t a l o g i n g - i n - P u b l i c a t i o n Data

Kriebel, Sabine. R e v o l u t i o n a r y b e a u t y : t h e r a d i c a l p h o t o m o n t a g e s of J o h n H e a r t f i e l d / S a b i n e T. K r i e b e l . pages

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 9 7 8 - 0 - 5 2 0 - 2 7 6 1 8 - 5 (cloth : a l k . p a p e r ) 1. P h o t o m o n t a g e .

2 . Politics in art.

3. H e a r t f i e l d , J o h n , 1 8 9 1 - 1 9 6 8 .

I. Title. TR685.K75

2014

778.8—DC23

2013035807

M a n u f a c t u r e d in t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s o f A m e r i c a

23 10

22

21 9

8

20 7

19 6

5

18 4

17 3

16 2

15

14

1

T h e p a p e r u s e d in t h i s p u b l i c a t i o n m e e t s t h e m i n i m u m r e q u i r e m e n t s o f ANSI/NISO Z 3 9 . 4 8 - 1 9 9 2

(R 2 0 0 2 ) ( P e r m a n e n c e of

Paper).

For my family, passed and present

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

• ix

List o f Abbreviations

• xi

Introduction: Photomontage, Paradigm of the M o d e r n

• 1

1

T h e Subject in Circulation

2

P h o t o m o n t a g e in the Age of Technological Reproducibility

3

P h o t o m o n t a g e in the Year 1932

4

Left-Wing Laughter

5

Revolutionary Beauty

• 215

Index

• 263

• 269

Selected Bibliography List of Illustrations • 323

• 105

• 167

Epilogue: To Gratify a W i s h Notes

• 19

• 303

• 319

65

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When this project began in 1997, the Cold War was still thawing and a study of a Communist photomonteur did not invariably meet with enthusiasm. I remain indebted to my earliest critical supporters: Anne M. Wagner, T. J. Clark, Martin Jay, and Anton Kaes. Crucial research funding was supplied by the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, jointly administered by the Freie Universität Berlin and the Social Science Research Council. I owe Karin Goihl particular thanks. At the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, I am grateful to Michael Krejsa, Director of the John Heartfield Archive, for his patient support; to Peter Zimmerman for his continuing scholarly generosity; and to Anita Metelka for her unfailing kindness and efficiency. Kari Dahlgren at the University of California Press has been elemental in helping this book become a reality; that the manuscript should find a home back in the location where it began is deeply satisfying. I could not have asked for a better editorial team: Jack Young and Steven Baker have helped make the book stronger and the painstaking process most enjoyable. Though embedded in its German-Californian roots, the international dimensions of support for this book have multiplied in splendidly unexpected ways. In the Republic of Ireland, I am grateful to my home institution, University College Cork, for a crucial sabbatical leave during challenging economic times. My colleagues in the History of Art Unit have been stalwart—Flavio Boggi, Simon Knowles, Ed Krcma, Jenifer Ni Ghrädaigh—as has Geoff Roberts in the School of History. The art seminar "Photography Theory," organized by James Elkins and held at the University College Cork in 2005, proved to be vital to my understanding of photography, as were conversations

i X

with Margaret Iverson, Margaret Olin, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and Joel Snyder; I am indebted to James Elkins for inviting me to write the introduction to the resultant book and for nearly a decade of critical support. T h e College of Arts, Celtic Studies, and Social Sciences, the School of History, and the History of Art department at the University College Cork and the National University of Ireland have generously provided publication grants, which I gratefully acknowledge. Laura Rascaroli, Anne O'Callaghan, and Kathleen James-Chakraborty are cherished sources of strength and encouragement. In the United Kingdom, Jo Applin, Seth Graham, John Krcma, Debbie Lewer, Jonathan Long, Frederic Schwartz, and Christian Weikop have bolstered and enriched my work in several ways. In Germany, I warmly thank Ralf Burmeister, Wolfgang Hesse, Antje Krause-Wahl, Roland März, Freya Mühlhaupt, Anne Söll, and Eckhard Siepmann. I received generous assistance at Amsterdam's International Institute of Social History from Mieke Ijzermans and Ursula Langkau-Alex. In North America, Judith Brodie, Leah Dickerman, Thomas Haakenson, Andreas Huyssen, Karen Kenkel, Katherine Kuenzli, Rudolf Kuenzli, Amy Lyford, Margaret MacNamidhe, Eve Meitzer, Bibiana Obler, Sergei Oushakine, Andreas Puskeiler, Anson Rabinbach, and Michael T h o m a s Taylor offered pivotal interventions. Anna Wexler Katsnelson provided characteristically incisive feedback on several chapters. Sally Stein's sharp observations and discerning comments shifted important aspects of my argument. Andrés Zervigón became a fellow Heartfield traveler on the journey, ensuring a stimulating trip and providing buoyant company. Stephan Koch, my most steadfast ally, has tolerated the other Berliner in our lives with good humor, curiosity, and patience for nearly a decade and deserves my deepest thanks. This book is dedicated to my family, which nourished my investment in this particular moment in history long before I went to university, and whose lives have been indelibly marked by its aftermath. To the memory of my grandparents Elfriede Kriebel and Käthe and Helmut Becker, and of my father, Dr. Horst Kriebel, whose loving presences and sad stories haunt this book. To my mother, Christa, and brother, Norbert, in Southern California, who can hold and read it. This is for you.

X

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

ABBREVIATIONS

ABZ

Arbeit in Bild und Zeit

AEAR

Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires

A1Z

Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (Workers' Illustrated

BIZ

Berliner Illustrirte

DNVP

Deutschnationale Volkspartei

ECCI

Executive Committee of the Communist International

FIFO

Film und Foto exhibition

IB

Illustrierter

KPD

Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands

NDV

Neuer Deutscher Verlag

RFB

Roter Frontkämpferbund

RPL

Reichspropagandaleitung (Reichs Propaganda Ministry)

SA

Sturmabteilung

SdP

Sudetendeutsche Partei

SPD

Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands

SS

SchutzstafFel

uww

Unser Wille und Weg

VI

Die Volks

Magazine)

Zeitung

Beobachter

Illustrierte

xi

S.M. A D O L F

flirre FIGURE

(Ewc^ \ ) e v v U d ) e n P l e i t e n

entgegen!

1.

John Heartfield, His Majesty Adolf, f r o m AIZ n , no. 34 (August 2 1 , 1932). T h e Getty R e s e a r c h Institute, Los A n g e l e s (87-S194). © I V A R O / V G Bild-Kunst, B o n n .

INTRODUCTION Photomontage, Paradigm of the Modem

In a letter dated A u g u s t 1 2 , 1 9 3 9 , one S. B. Flint posted the following f r o m A r m y Headquarters in S h i m l a , India, to John Heartfield, Esquire: Dear Sir, Seeing your wonderful photomontage pictures in the Lilliput Magazine makes me think that it is now possible to gratify an old lady's wish, which she has wanted to come true for many years, and in this I would be very grateful of your kind assistance. My mother-in-law's only son was a student in England and passed his B.Sc. (Engineering) examination but shortly afterwards got into trouble and joined the army as a ranker and unfortunately died. We managed to get a copy of a photograph of him in his uniform and had an enlargement made, but his mother cannot "picture" him in that garb. I wonder if you could, using the negative which I enclose, construct a head and shoulders portrait of him in a cap, gown, and hood, and civilian clothes, of course. Portrait to be in black and white, and size 9V2" x 12" (it would then be the same size as the enlargement we have and they would make a pair). Would you kindly let me know if you can do this for me, and if possible, give me an estimate of your charge. I am, Sir, Yours faithfully, S. B. Flint1

For a radical political artist whose incisive photomontages were by 1 9 3 9 of international r e n o w n , this undeniably good-hearted solicitation verges on insult. Flint's prosaic and

O e r a l t e W a h l s p r u c h im „ n e u e n "

Reich:

BLUT UND EISEN FIGURE

2.

John Heartfield, Blood and iron, f r o m AlZ

13, no. 1 0 (March 8, 1934). T h e

Getty Research Institute, Los A n g e l e s (87-8194). © I V A R O / V G BildKunst, B o n n .

private request w a s surely vexing for a m a n w h o had risked life and limb to produce critical art for a m a s s audience. Recently exiled to England, John Heartfield w a s the fugitive i m a g e - m a k e r of the G e r m a n C o m m u n i s t Left w h o had produced a copious supply of posters, book jackets, and satirical montages, most significantly the 237 photomontages that he m a n u f a c t u r e d for the p o p u l a r left-wing Arbeiter-Illustrierte Workers' Illustrated

Magazine,

Zeitung

(AlZ),

or

over the course of eight years. B e c a u s e of his provoca-

tive pictures, Heartfield w a s persecuted by the National Socialist r e g i m e , spied on by Gestapo agents, and twice forced into exile, once in 1933 and again in 1 9 3 8 . T h e eight photomontages that Flint saw reproduced in Lilliput m a g a z i n e in May 1 9 3 9 included

2

I N T R O D U C T I O N

FIGURE 3. John Heartfield, The meaning of Geneva, f r o m A / 2 11, no. 48 (November 27, 1932). T h e Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-S194). © IVARO/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

some of Heartfield's most trenchant critiques of Nazism: S. JVf. Adolf (fig. 1); Blood and iron (fig. 2); The meaning of Geneva (fig. 3); German acorns 1933 (fig. 89); Hurrah!

The

butter is finished! (fig. 4); The thousand year Reich; Have no fear, he is a vegetarian; and As in the Middle Ages, so it is in the Third

Reich.2

But if we delve deeper, looking beyond surface appearances as Heartfield's images ask us to do, Flint's entreaty not only highlights salient elements of photomontage, but also tells us something about the popular reception of the medium. Flint's request recalls a widespread wartime practice whereby infantrymen at the front affixed photographs of their faces to picture postcards of soldiers in u n i f o r m and sent them to family

PHOTOMONTAGE,

PARADIGM OF THE

MODERN

3

FIGURE

4.

John Heartfield, "Hurrah, the butter is finished!" from AIZ 14, no. 51 (December 19,1935). The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-S194). © IVARO/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

members back home. Here, that practice has been enlisted for civilian desires, for the purpose of fabricating academic rather than military authority. The operations are the same, though the uniforms are different. Flint asks that Heartfield conjure a new body, a fantasy image, cleaving a man from his military uniform with incisions that penetrate his photographic flesh—a solicitation that turns the artist into a surgeon or a magician, depending, as the philosopher Walter Benjamin observed, on the degree of awareness we accord the violence of mechanical intervention. 3 As will become evident in the course of this book, Heartfield's montages move from surgery to sorcery to induce political

4

INTRODUCTION

disenchantment in the beholder, while the wounds of his intervention evanesce with their mechanical replication. Although we do not know if Heartfield ever indulged this request, in several respects, Flint gets Heartfield's project right. Flint's letter is a request to adjust matters on the home front. Flint wishes for a reassembly of the world, predicated on fantasy and adroit recombination; he wants Heartfield to "gratify a wish" by conjuring an impossible reality with a photograph, that is, with a photochemical imprint of the transient material world. Flint commissions Heartfield to weld together a visual fiction, one that in this instance reinforces an ideal world, of a scholar in cap, gown, hood, and civilian clothes, "of course." The letter requests an image that his mother-in-law can "picture," rather than preserve a photograph that reinforces the reality of a victim, one among millions, of the First World War. Although Flint's is a wish to return the dead to a kind of eternal life (albeit frozen on photographic paper), it is also a desire to actively suppress the past. It is, we might say, an allusion to an illusion, pointing to the presence of disavowal while engaging in the rituals of memory and mourning. Vital to the juxtaposition of fantasy image (son in scholarly regalia) to real (son in military uniform) is a dialectic of truth and illusion, of Utopia and dystopia—forces that play off of each other endlessly in the space of a photographic frame. Or on a magazine page, as is the case with Heartfield's AIZ work. How ironic that an English citizen should be asking that a dead relative be brought back to photographic life by a German photomonteur, when the English soldier possibly died at the hands of a German. John Heartfield, formerly Helmut Herzfeld, may have found wry amusement in this fact as well, given that his choice of pseudonym more than twenty years earlier had been a wartime protest against German chauvinism and a symbolic alliance with the English enemy. Although this name change was not explained to Lilliput readers, Heartfield's German origins, his "intense hatred of war and fascism," and his skill and fame were. "Now, at 48, he is in England, a refugee for the second time, still devoting his gift to peace and freedom." That his devotions stemmed from radical Left politics was bypassed. Flint's letter is a vivid example of one use of photomontage as perceived in the 1920s and 1930s, namely as a pictorial antidote to modern disenchantment. Its purpose was persuasion and momentary deception (of course we know it's "only" a photograph), representing the world as we would like it to be. As such, photomontage found its place both in private amusement and in commercial advertising, in economies of play and desire. Yet this same capacity also meant that the persuasive allure of photomontage was recruited for explicitly political ends, becoming, as this book elaborates, a weapon in the struggle for power and mass consensus. Although these ideological stakes—capitalist advertising and radical revolution—are rather different from each other, their visual spectacle was very much intertwined in the 1920s and 1930s. Heartfield was among the most prominent manufacturers of political photomontage and, at the same time, was greatly admired by the commercial sector. Straddling high art and low culture, art and

PHOTOMONTAGE,

PARADIGM

OF T H E M O D E R N

5

propaganda, imagination and realism, Heartfield's photomontages actively contributed to debates about modern representation. While Heartfield's work has been dismissed as Communist propaganda, partially accounting for its long absence from art historical accounts, this book shows how integral Heartfield's photomontages were to the visual and political culture of the early twentieth century. Often treated as an amusing descendant of photography or a technological iteration of collage, photomontage offers critical purchase on photographic history and theory; photo historians overlook photomontage to their detriment. As a "message without a code," photography's meaning is at once related to its referent and radically contingent on its context, an empty sign reliant on supplemental discourse. 4 Bound to the phenomenal world and rooted in cultural systems of meaning, photography is a powerful ideological vehicle, as Heartfield and his contemporaries well understood. Photomontage, which extracts and recontextualizes photographic fragments, also distills the photographic act itself—an "instantaneous abduction of the object out of the world into another world, into another kind of time," as Christian Metz memorably phrased it—thus condensing and transforming many of photography's symbolic functions, from apotropaic ritual to hegemonic reinforcement. 5 As a synthetic, polysemic form, photomontage's conjunction of historical referents and context-driven meaning in 1930s Europe sheds new light on this decisive moment of capitalist modernity.

The interwar period in Europe marked the heyday of photomontage. Photomontage— the cut-and-paste assemblage of photographs and text—was the modern pictorial idiom, an eye-catching, technologically up-to-date visual form widely considered a powerful means of provoking a mass audience. Photomontage saturated the public sphere, appearing on commercial and political posters and book jackets, as book and journal illustrations, on magazine covers and page layouts, and in advertisements, photomurals, exhibition catalogues, industrial-product brochures, department store pamphlets, film advertisements, and large-scale exhibitions. 6 Although the construction of composite photographic images had been a popular pastime since the nineteenth century, evolving out of the beginnings of photography and appearing in a range of practices from high art to political satire, it was only after the First World War that photomontage emerged as a medium of mass persuasion. This shift of photomontage from small-scale entertainment to a medium of mass magnitude has largely to do with the accelerated development of modernity itself. Industrialization expedited urbanization, mass-production, and mass-consumption, and technological advance enabled the mechanical transfer of photographs into ink on paper. As a result, an extensive picture-based press culture emerged. Although these photomechanical processes were discovered before World War I and recruited for propaganda purposes during the war, only afterward did they become economically feasible on a mass scale. Their novelty, as chapter 2 reveals, was at once intriguing and distress-

6

INTRODUCTION

ing, prompting a critical awareness of this new medium of mass information. That photomontage took hold in Germany and Soviet Russia more extensively than elsewhere has to do, I suspect, with the concentrated modernization in these countries in the wake of World War I, coupled with the establishment of new political systems—parliamentary democracy in Germany and Communism in Russia. The exceptional energy and innovation invested in the medium of photomontage in these two countries cannot be divorced from the intense interwar climate of futuristic utopianism—or, in the case of Heartfield and other radical critics of the Weimar Republic, of fervent disillusionment combined with deep-seated idealism. Although the German commercial sector had to contend with the fragile postwar economy, there, too, hopeful expectation prevailed over current circumstance. 7 Thus, it appears that photomontage was at its most vital in the intersections of despair and desire, pessimism and longing. As a form of representation, photomontage offered a way of disassembling and reassembling the world order, deconstructing conventional representations in order to construct a new world or an ideological critique. As such, photomontage was considered the ideal form of Marxist critique, because a juxtaposition of material imprints of "the real" enabled the viewer to understand the relations between things—social relations, political relations, commodity relations—and the practice thus evolved into "dialectical montage." However, as chapter 3 demonstrates, the radical Right in Germany also mobilized photomontage during a crucial moment in its history, extending the use of political photomontage beyond leftist circles. For a short time at least, serious opponents of capitalist liberal democracy considered photomontage to be a potent agitational medium, remarkably effective in representing political relationships. It was more than just a good joke, as Georg Lukâcs famously contended in 1938. 8 More economical than film, more pervasive in daily life than the cinema, photomontage became a political weapon, a form through which to shape mass consciousness before radio and television became competitive forms of everyday information. Based on the structural principle of pictorial disruption and reassembly, photomontage is regularly described as a "symbolic form" or "paradigm" of the modern. 9 Montage, as Christopher Phillips writes, "provid[ed] a shared visual idiom that more than any other expressed the tumultuous arrival of a fully urbanized, industrialized culture." 10 In its fragmentation, discontinuity, and simultaneous competition among parts within the whole, photomontage offered a new syntax, a cipher for the accelerated social, economic, and technological transformations of the twentieth century. Paul Citroën's Metropolis of 1923, for instance, conveys the heady tempo of modern urban life in its multiperspectival reconstruction of a city and its modes of transportation (fig. 5). Elemental to the modern symbolism of photomontage is its process of manufacture, for photomontage mimics industrial production in its assembly of prefabricated, massreplicable parts. In German, the connection between montage and industrial assemblyline production is linguistically explicit, for montieren means "to assemble" or "to fit," and a Monteur is a mechanic or engineer. The Berlin Dadaists, of which Heartfield was

PHOTOMONTAGE,

PARADIGM

OF T H E

MODERN

7

FIGURE

5.

Paul Citroen, Metropolis,

1 9 2 3 . Prentenkabinet, University of Leiden.

a prominent member, seized on this semantic contiguity with manual industrial labor, aligning both their artistic labor and their politics with the proletariat and mass reproduction, rather than with the institution of high art, emblematized by the unrepeatable and private act of painting. 11 Heartfield's nickname "Monteur Dada" and his legendary predilection for wearing worker's overalls functioned as social codes for anti-bourgeois politics and artmaking.

Dada-merika,

a 1919 collaboration between Heartfield and his

fellow Dadaist George Grosz, is an assembly of readymade parts resembling a dysfunctional machine about to overheat (fig. 6). The result is the construction of a pictorial machine system, one that leads the viewer to cognitive awareness of fragmentation and totality, part and whole. For critical theorist Peter Burger, it is precisely this consciousness of pictorial frag-

8

INTRODUCTION

dada-menks FIGURE

6.

Jflljij, ^^rtfield and George Grosz, dada-merika, 1919. Akademie der Künste, fei?)?,felVfttSammlung, Inv.-Nr.: Heartfield 4486. © IVARO/VG BildKunst, Bonn. mentation and disjunction that provokes a self-aware and alienated response to the represented world rather than summoning a false, idealized reconciliation with that world. Bürger's ideas on alienated perception in visual art find their precedent in interwar theories of literature and theater formulated by Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovskii and German Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht. Shklovskii observed that rendering perception difficult by making familiar forms unfamiliar serves to prolong and revitalize perception and disrupt automatic or habitual cognition; he developed the concept of ostranenie Verfremdungseffekt

(defamiliarization) in literature, which was paralleled by Brecht's (alienation effect) in theater. 12 In contrast to what Bürger calls the

"organic" work of art, which relies on the illusionism of Renaissance perspective and unifies the relation of parts to the whole, the "non-organic" work, or fragmented picture,

P H O T O M O N T A G E ,

PARADIGM

OF

THE

M O D E R N

9

makes clear that the image is an aesthetic artifact—subjective, partial, heterogeneous— thus destroying any sense of superordinate coherence. As such, montage finds its structural equivalent in allegory, whose essence is the assemblage of unrelated fragments famously theorized by Walter Benjamin in the 1920s. 1 3 The stakes of Bürger's argument are political, for he seeks a model of avant-garde practice that offers hermeneutic alternatives to habits of representation and reception. Offering Cubist collages and those of Kurt Schwitters as his prime examples of "nonorganic" works, Bürger argues that "they are no longer signs pointing to reality, they are reality," thereby differing from a mimetic practice that aims for a reassuring one-to-one correspondence with the world. 14 Heartfield's AIZ photomontages figure in Bürger's account as a vexing intermediary between film and painting, for they obscure, rather than lay bare, their pictorial devices. Decisive for Bürger in the non-organic work is that it offers a model for political engagement, requiring active participation with the picture. The viewer is forced to synthesize meaning in his or her mind. "This refusal to provide meaning," writes Bürger, "is experienced as shock by the recipient." 15 And that shock, he notes, is "a stimulus to change one's conduct of life" through the realization that human meaning is constructed and contingent rather than natural and inevitable. In his choice of the word shock to describe the effect of viewing disjunctive montage, Bürger summons Walter Benjamin's now well-known observations about the "moral shock effects" of Dada montage. In his 1935-36 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," Benjamin wrote, "From an alluring visual composition or an enchanting fabric of sound, the Dadaists turned the artwork into a missile. It jolted the viewer, taking on a tactile quality." 16 In 1935, the language of military artillery and shock would have resonated vividly within the broader context of European war trauma after the Great War. Dada, whose artistic provocations responded directly and indirectly to the mass physical and psychic destruction wrought by technological warfare, summoned the alienating experience of modern industrial life and war trauma in the disjunctive form and aggressive content of its montages. Not only did Dada montage articulate aspects of traumatic shock and give form to the dismembered, emasculated male body, but its reception by the beholder produced a traumatic shock of its own—hitting the spectator, as Benjamin noted, like artillery, disturbing his or her consciousness. 17 The reception of photomontage hinges overwhelmingly on the semiotics of rupture, spaces, and the subsequent discontinuities of the medium. Photomontage conjures an imagery of destruction, disjunction, and absurdity, simply because the act of taking scissors, cutting out photographic fragments and text, and reassembling them on a piece of paper with the aid of glue or paste necessitates seams, fissures, and transitions whereby the image is severed and recombined with other fragments. These seams make evident that the image has been constructed by human hands and insist on the artifice of assemblage and the infiltration of the symbolic order, rather than relying on the illusions of mimesis, presence, and "the seamless integrity of the real" summoned by a unitary

I N T R O D U C T I O N

photograph, to borrow Rosalind Krauss's evocative phrase. 18 In his coproductions with George Grosz and his covers for their short-lived magazines, Heartfield helped develop Dada montage, reveling in a pictorial field that conjured a heterogeneous, fragmented reality, disrupting photographic illusionism, and animating (or perplexing) the viewer with multiplicity, simultaneity, and contradiction. Curiously, the photomontages that Heartfield produced between 1930 and 1938 for the Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung—the works that are the focus of this book—do not consistently engage this critical aesthetics of rupture. Rather, they confront rupture by means of its deliberate concealment, repression, or sublimation, securing a virtually seamless bonding of separate pieces that I call a suture. And here, Benjamin's surgeon comes into contact with the magic of illusion. Whereas the aesthetics of rupture emphasizes the fissures between parts and revels in a discordant materiality, the language of suture, or visual seamlessness, aims to disguise them, producing an uncanny illusionism—and the potential for wish gratification that S.B. Flint identified in Heartfield's photomontage. Look again at the photomontages that Flint so admired—His Majesty Adolf, for instance, or Hurrah! The butter is finished! both of which conceal the fact that they are cut-and-pasted representations (figs. 1 and 4). Instead, they present the world as an integral and disturbing whole. For a hallucinatory moment, we suspend disbelief: Hitler is a Kaiser, and this family obligingly eats a bicycle in their ornate dining room, the decorative excess competing with their nutritive austerity. During the 1930s, Heartfield increasingly sought to eliminate traces of crafting images, flattening down the visible seams and retouching them in areas to create the illusion of a continuous reality, lending his photomontages that seamless integrity of the real. If we were to extend the line of reasoning that correlates heterogeneous photomontage with the disjunctions of modernity, then of which modern phenomenon is suture the symptom? If rupture suggests a trauma—to the represented object, to the spectator, to illusionism—what does its suppression, its suture, suggest? We have not entirely grasped the metaphoric operations of photomontage, that "symbolic form" or "paradigm" of the modern, until we have understood the role of suture and its suppression of pictorial rupture in John Heartfield's work. Given the copious attention to the tactics of Dada montage, the question of Heartfield's subsequent rejection of rupture and embrace of sutured illusionism is particularly vital, offering new insights into the modalities of this paradigmatic modern form, into leftist strategies of critical mass mobilization, and as a model of ideological critique. In invoking the term suture to discuss Heartfield's AIZ work, this book is haunted by the term's uses in film theory, reminding us to attend to the ways in which the invisible assembly of image material activates the beholder as psychological and ideological subject. 19 In film theory, suture is used to interpret how the construction of various shot-to-shot relationships bind or weave the viewing subject into the film. The viewer is made unaware of the filmic experience as constructed, for its production apparatus is largely concealed. This is what Benjamin called the "equipment-free aspect of real-

P H O T O M O N T A G E ,

PARADIGM

OF

THE

M O D E R N

ity" and the "height of artifice" in the 1 9 3 0 s , a period that witnessed the burgeoning of sound and Technicolor film in absorptive, escapist spectacles. 2 0 T h e sutured picture, it is argued, envelops the beholding subject in a fictional totality that induces passive reception. It was this fictional totality that Heartfield's C o m m u n i s t colleagues Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator reviled in theater and sought to remedy with "epic theatre," which, through direct address, interruption, and fragmentation (and in Piscator's case, multimedia stage sets often supplied by Heartfield), prompted audience awareness that it was watching a play, not duplicate reality. T h e principle of disruptive montage, in other words, provided a political antidote to passive, habitual absorption. Given the prominent use of disjunctive montage in activist avant-garde practice in the 1 9 2 0 s and 1 9 3 0 s , Heartfield's insistence on seamless homogeneity is all the more perplexing, for organic illusionism has been associated with auratic bourgeois representation, harmonious dreamworlds, and fascist aesthetics—not radical Left critique. 21 It was precisely Heartfield's pictorial (some have even argued "painterly") organicism that prompted criticism f r o m his Soviet p e e r s — G u s tavs Klucis most vocally—who asserted that Heartfield's emphasis on illusionistic space and visual narrative allied his work with traditional, bourgeois figurative easel painting and was therefore retrograde, not revolutionary. 22 Benjamin considered unified organic completeness to be, as Russell B e r m a n concisely phrased it, "a deception that imposes enervated passivity on the recipient"—a passivity that Benjamin linked to fascist aesthetics. 23 While Benjamin's theoretical construct has since been energetically countered by scholars of Italian fascism, Nazi photomontage aesthetics, f r o m Herbert Bayer's 1 9 3 6 Olympics brochures (fig. 71) to Egon Eiermann's 1937 monumental exhibition montages in "Gebt m i r vier Jahre Zeit!" certainly conjured a holistic, heroic totality, using montage's dislocations to emphasize continuity between part and whole, Filhrer and Volk, and to subordinate the beholder to its awe-inspiring spectacle. 24 This book's line of inquiry suggests that a leftist political critique, in Heartfield's case, resides in suture. In their organic illusionism, Heartfield's A / Z works, by internalizing and m i m i n g photography's m e a n s through photomontage, offer a radical Left appraisal of the mass-circulated photograph and its production of political consciousness. Through that m i m i c r y — w h i c h Heartfield exceeds or semiotically saturates with parody and caricature—these works critically intervene in a photographically reproduced reality. Rather than producing a holistic C o m m u n i s t imagery of desire, Heartfield's fictions of wholeness slide into the realm of the absurd, the hallucinatory, and the chimerical, welding together a world of psychic instability. His photomontages stage our illusory, unstable apprehension of the world by exploiting the discourses of illusion, of false cognition, by engaging in and reproducing its very terms. Heartfield's work functions within the conventions of photographic practice while subverting them, thus questioning the privileged place of photography in the construction of consciousness. Thus, the viewer experiences a constant relay between illusion and disillusionment, myth and démystification, accompanied by a baseline of seditious laughter.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Suture not only describes the insistent seamlessness in Heartfield's AIZ photomontages but also spurs a conceptual understanding of how that seamlessness weaves the beholding subject into ideological and psychological discourse. Both rupture and suture, disjunction and seamlessness, engage the beholder visually and haptically, but in terms specific to their material construction. Given that Heartfield's photomontages were produced for the readership of a mass-circulation magazine and that their aim was to provoke revolutionary consciousness through visual means, the structure of viewer address is pivotal to their understanding. Those viewers, however, do not belong to a uniform category. This book teases out just what sort of viewer is projected by Heartfield's photomontages at any given time and why. Heartfield's works employ the language of sutured illusionism, binding the viewer into the image through various psychological and corporeal tactics, at the same time that they violate suture, breaking that absorption through such devices as cognitive disjunction, word play, parody, and direct address. His aim, after all, is to produce an active subject, for his work operates in the context of agitational propaganda (agitprop), whose purpose is to simultaneously stimulate and ideologically re-educate its viewers. Pictorial suture can be understood as an urgent historical response embedded in the political economy of the late Weimar Republic, and specifically in the confrontations between a burgeoning mass culture and a polarized political landscape. While this book draws on film theory, Heartfield's sutured works remain ontologically distinct from filmic practice (even in their repeated dialogue with it). Instead, they are deeply embedded in the burgeoning photographic culture industry of the Weimar Republic, as chapter 2 elaborates. Heartfield's AIZ photomontages ask their beholder to indulge in a reality two-dimensionally staged, on a journal page held in his or her hand. Except for the rare instance of a double-page spread, the absorptive potential of Heartfield's montages is punctured by a photo-reportage on the facing page and perhaps disrupted by activity in the room. This scenario of distracted reading is fundamentally different from that of the viewer who enters a cinematic space and who, enveloped by darkness, is woven into a filmic narrative and soundtrack. Heartfield rather asks his viewer to operate in the context of the photographic press and its accompanying discourses of text and image, information and disinformation, public events and private interpretation.

In its roughly chronological investigation of John Heartfield's AIZ project, this book traces his trajectory from an artistic manufacture of rupture to one of suture. Beginning with an interrogation of pictorial ruptures and their meaning in the political culture of the late Weimar Republic, the argument proceeds to an examination of Heartfield's exploration of seamless homogeneity under specific historical conditions. Although many of Heartfield's photomontages respond to the local context of the AIZ, supplementing select stories and photo-reportage, this particular study pursues their interventions in broader cultural, political, and theoretical discourses as a productive avenue of

PHOTOMONTAGE, PARADIGM OF THE MODERN

13

inquiry, locating aspects of their meaning and impact in diachronic discursive frameworks. 25 One of the central claims of this book is that the transformations of Heartfield's photomontage adjust to, and outwit, the political, economic, and social circumstances of their manufacture. To understand the mutations in the form of and viewer address in his photomontage, every chapter excavates the attendant conditions of production: the political violence of the late Weimar Republic in the first chapter, the discourses of technological advance in the 1920s in the second chapter, the spectacle of 1932 radical politics in chapter 3, the psychodynamics of exile and displacement in chapter 4, and in the final chapter the larger discourses of the European Left after the advent and consolidation of National Socialism in 1933. Although this book is concerned with the historical development of photomontage during the interwar period, it focuses on the canny contributions of one man. I engage in sustained interpretations of individual Heartfield photomontages under the assumption that pictures are a site of historical enunciation in their own right, frequently revealing what texts occlude, be they biographical, journalistic, or scholarly. Praxis often anticipates critical theory. In the case of John Heartfield, whose verbal utterances are few and whose self-representional voice is often either subsumed by the narrative voice of his brother Wieland Herzfelde or cautiously aligned with Communist orthodoxy, I look to his photomontages as a potentially alternative site of self-positioning. Thus, images are central, not subsidiary; they propel this book. My aim is to embed politics in aesthetics. Such extended attention to the particulars of Heartfield's photomontages is rare, and critics might argue that such prolonged attention is unwarranted since Heartfield's photomontages were destined for mass reproduction and quick apprehension. Herzfelde once wrote that the photomontages were produced for a short-lived existence—"ein kurzlebiges Dasein." 26 Yet, as accounts of his working method attest, Heartfield's work is insistently material, fixated on the pictorial object as a site of attention, intention, and minute obsession. This book does not seek to offer an exhaustive account of Heartfield's life nor of his two hundred-plus AIZ photomontages. Rather, it presents a thematic examination of his AIZ work, using a selection of photomontages that represent crucial turning points in or limit cases of his project. My focus on individual photomontages also works against the trend in Heartfield literature that typologizes his work as symbolic or representative of a leftist art, or a Communist art, or an antifascist art—that is, as visually interesting examples of a certain tendency or politics. Such broad categorization fails to excavate what these works signified, and how, in the particular moment in which they were manufactured, and fails to acknowledge the nuances and complexities of left-wing politics during the 1930s, of avant-garde representation in a period of mass art and ideological mobilization, or of the paradoxical interdependence of radical Left and Nazi Right during certain crucial moments. Thus, Revolutionary Beauty carefully weaves Heartfield's photomontages back into the visual, economic, and political environment in which they circulated, relying heavily on primary documents from the late Weimar Republic. As Peter Sloterdijk

14

I N T R O D U C T I O N

once noted, "In its extraordinary achievements in articulation, Weimar culture, in spite of many counterexamples, stands before us as the most self-aware epoch in history; it was a highly reflective, thoughtful, imaginative, and expressive age that is thoroughly plowed up by the most manifold self-observations and self-analyses. If we simply speak 'about' it, we all too easily go right past it."27 While most accounts present Heartfield as the model Communist artist, this book aims to complicate such portraits, interrogating the assumption that he was the Party's unquestioning puppet. Rather, I suggest that Heartfield's relationship to the mercurial politics of the Party and the Communist International was highly unstable, nuanced, and at times contradictory; but that slipperiness, and uneasy coexistence, is worth illuminating in all of its raw, maddening inconclusivity. The idea of international Communism was often at odds with the policies and politics of international Communism as dictated by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and enacted by the German Communist Party. Heartfield's pictorial agitation and his politics, I maintain, were a politics "on the ground," to borrow Eric Weitz's phrase, that balanced the ideological discursive terrain of the German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD) and the Comintern with a kind of Gefuhlskommunismus—a communism—in dialogue with the everyday cultural politics of the street.

humanistic 28

While most

of Heartfield's photomontages are explicitly antifascist, they are also implicitly about the survival and self-definition of the European Left, which in itself is not an undifferentiated social or ideological entity, but a diffuse, multidimensional, and often conflicted category. This book is intended to counterbalance the numerous histories of the fascist Right that, in their justifiable attempts to come to terms with Nazism and the Second World War, overwhelm the complex political and cultural history of the Left. Using Heartfield's often reproduced but rarely analyzed 1929 self-portrait as a fulcrum, the first chapter interrogates the poetics and politics of pictorial rupture in the context of the late Weimar Republic. The self-portrait not only retrospectively inaugurates Heartfield's eight-year affiliation with the AIZ but also establishes the founding fictions of his political project, which artfully balanced artifice with verisimilitude, deception with declarative assertion in the service of persuasion and left-wing community. Heartfield's self-portrait—an aggressive act of cutting, slicing, and pasting photographic likenesses—intersects with and reinforces the culture of street violence and political militancy in the late Weimar Republic, though it does so from a position of vulnerability that constitutes the terms of its assault. By returning Heartfield's selfrepresentation to its original contexts, the chapter sheds light on Heartfield's complicated relationship to the German Communist Party and the Comintern, a relationship often occluded by the affirmative representations that buttress a particular version of the tale. Through the 1929 self-portrait, the chapter also investigates the violent nature of photomontage itself, exploring the development of disjunctive form in specific political circumstances. Chapter 2 embeds Heartfield's photomontages in the flourishing visual culture

PHOTOMONTAGE, PARADIGM OF THE MODERN

15

of the Weimar Republic, which was increasingly oriented toward the authority of the photograph. Heartfield's montages mine the widespread anxiety regarding the massreproduced photograph—its perceived superficiality, in particular—to structure a critical viewer. His works stage the tension between the established rationality of the word and the new prestige of the photograph, underlining the inherent malleability of each. In attempting to understand Heartfield's move to visually homogenized photomontages in the late Weimar Republic, I look to the image economy of early-twentieth-century German capitalism, in particular the use of photomontage in the advertising industry. Heartfield's late Weimar photomontages, as it happens, were a studied response to this vibrant visual matrix, his pro-Communist, anti-capitalist photomontages in dialogue with their purported foe—capitalist commodity culture. Chapter 3 focuses on the final year of the Weimar Republic to study the use of photomontage in the service of political persuasion. In 1932, the National Socialists and the Communists battled for control of the deteriorating German nation, inundating the public sphere with provocative visual propaganda. The chapter investigates the pivotal role that photomontage played in this power struggle, and attends to the various ways its form and content were manipulated to appeal to a mass audience. As the political conflict climaxed in the autumn of 1932, the Nazis imitated Heartfield's visually sutured works to summon an even broader segment of the population. I reconsider the epithet propaganda in this context, as Heartfield asks us to rethink the role of high culture in a period of political extremism, when an apolitical "high" art seemed increasingly untenable. Indeed, vulgarity is the subject of the fourth chapter, which explores Heartfield's tactics of debasement and the production of diabolical laughter as a resistant radical practice. His montages' repeated appeals to the impure—the grotesque-bodily, the repulsive-regressive—and to adolescent humor were an elemental aspect of his leftist artillery in the 1930s, illuminating an often overlooked aspect of interwar Marxism. These were calculated attacks not only on the bodies of authority but also on the anesthetizing surfaces of mass-photographic representation, designed to mobilize and reinforce the experience of Communist community in moments of siege, displacement, and despondency. Taking a cue from ex-Surrealist Louis Aragon's 1935 essay "John Heartfield and Revolutionary Beauty," Chapter 5 grapples with Heartfield's metamorphic imagery and his conflicted relationship to Surrealism in the context of acrimonious debates regarding the nature of revolutionary art and Socialist Realism. Heartfield's hallucinatory images are also the ones that invoke death and the memory of World War I, a complex of events and reverberations that cannot be overlooked by the scholar of 1920s and 1930s political culture. This chapter examines the complex ways Heartfield mined the memory of the Great War to promote the Communist cause, and it analyzes the visual operations of Heartfield's montages and their appeal to the anxious psyche of a mass audience. Death's haunting countenance impels the accompanying investigation of photomontage and allegory, whose structural similarities bind them as elemental signifying modes of

l 6

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modernity. By emphasizing the international dimensions of Heartfield's project, this final chapter revises the dominant strain in Heartfield literature that locates his successes in a specifically German or anti-Nazi framework. This book shows, rather, that John Heartfield and his project were pivotal in the cultural, political, and intellectual matrix of 1930s Europe.

PHOTOMONTAGE, PARADIGM OF THE MODERN

17

B E N U T Z E FOTO ALS W A F F E ! ZUR AUSSTELLUNG DER ARBEITEN VON J O H N HEARTFIELD AUF DER GROSSEN BERLINER KUNSTAUSSTELLUNG

HH4KER CHINAS

JOHN MtAHTFltLD MIT POUKlPRÄSIOCNf ZÖFCItnCl

BENUETZE FOTO ALS WAFFE

In der Kunst manifestiert sich das Leben. Unsere durch Technik und Klassenkampf gekennzeichnete Zeit hat sich in Heartfields Kunst eine außerordentlich charakteristische Ausdrucksform geschaffen. Sie ist unlösbar verknüpft mit dem Wesen der heutigen Gesellschaft Angesichts der gigantischen gesellschaftlichen Konflikte, die wir durchleben, hat die ..Kunst als Privatvergnügen", hat die „reine Kunst" ausgespielt Das Gefühl für die Dinge als solche ist wichtiger als der Sinn für das Künstlerische! Lebensherechtigung und Geltung hat nur die Kunst, die die bewegenden Kräfte unserer Gesellschaft sieht und erkennt und aus dieser Erkenntnis die Folgerung zieht: Parteinahme und Kampf'

KAtiONEh

John Heartfields Kunst — Plakate, Bucheinbande, Illustrationen — ist aus dieser Erkenntnis geboren, seine Kunst ist Waffe Waffe im Kampf um eine neue, endlich menschenwürdige Ordnung, in der die Massen der Schaffenden nicht nur den Hunger nach Brot, sondern auch den nach Kultur und Kunst werden stillen können. f C Weiskopf

FIGURE

7.

john Heartfield, Self-portrait, from AIZ 8, no 37 (September, 1929): 17. Bundesarchiv, Berlin/Elke Jung-Wolff. © IVARO/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

THE SUBJECT IN CIRCULATION

The readers of the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung were formally introduced to John Heartfield and his combative art of photomontage in the second week of September 1 9 2 9 — o n page 17 of issue number 37, to be precise (fig. 7). Ceremonially clad in coat and tie as if dressed for a formal portrait, brow furrowed, fierce glare commanding the beholder's gaze, John Heartfield presented himself in the act of beheading the Berlin police chief, Karl Zorgiebel. The blade separating the police chief's head from his body was not the solitary edge of a guillotine, executing the condemned with a single merciful thwack, but the twin edges of long-handled shears, slowly decapitating the victim with a repetitive joining and separating, each gesture widening the gap between head and body, helped along by Heartfield's tugging fingers. I say "formally introduced" because the occasional Heartfield photomontage had appeared in this or that corner of preceding issues of the AIZ promoting the soon to be published book Deutschland, Deutschland tiber alles, a collaboration with the wellknown writer Kurt Tucholsky. This endorsement was a practical arrangement, since the publisher of the AIZ and that of the satire was the same: Willi Miinzenberg's Neuer Deutscher Verlag. Those earlier introductions to Heartfield's work were not particularly auspicious. Far from indicating Heartfield's popularity to come, the editors regularly misspelled his name—as Heartfieldt or Haertfield, for example—signaling not merely linguistic unfamiliarity on the part of the editorial staff but apparent artistic unfamiliarity as well. In the summer of 1929, Heartfield was overshadowed in the AIZ by Tucholsky, one of the most penetrating social critics of the time. Yet this declarative

19

self-portrait and its showcase of his tendentious art would soon help transform this unfamiliarity into celebrity. Though twice framed in the picture by the slogan "Use photography as weapon!"— once above the self-portrait and once below, in an exclamatory headline and a sober undertitle—Heartfield's commanding and violent act makes us wonder whether the Monteur's savage scissors rather than the photograph serve as the actual weapon. Heartfield's shears declare their own deed, their long blades pointing to the abrupt border of the self-portrait, where the background cedes to the incursion of the adjacent exhibition photograph. "I did this," the shears seem to say, calling our attention to the retracted frame, the mutilated edges of Zörgiebel's chin, the discomfiting rift between his neck and shoulders. The conception o f h i s 1929 guillotine-shears was apparently new. It is conspicuously absent from the array of scissors that Heartfield put on sardonic mail-order display two years previously in Schöne Be-Scherung (fig. 8). A pun on the word for scissors (Schere), the title Schöne Be-Scherung means either a plentiful bounty, often used to describe holiday gift-giving, or its ironic opposite "This is a fine mess." Although in 1927 scissors were understood as something to trim errant behavior—model no. 26, or "Gertrud," the montage announces, is ideal for reprobates, while model no. 27 is for trash—they are wielded by the state (either monarchy or new republic; the montage suggests they are continuous) against disruptive elements, and not, as in the case of the self-portrait, brandished by a citizen against a representative of that state. In September 1929, the artist asserted that this reversal was necessary. The laconic caption beneath the self-portrait, "John Heartfield with Police President Zörgiebel," names the actors but not the urgent action, an understatement that insists the work be apprehended in pictorial rather than textual terms. A paragraph penned by F. C. Weiskopf, a member of the AIZ editorial staff, fills the space inside the doorframe at the base of the page, but does little to expand on the action taking place above. Rather, Weiskopfbroadly lauds the critical intersections of art and life, declaring Heartfield's art to be a weapon in class struggle, but without elaborating how. Language, in comparison to the exigency of the accompanying images, is curiously inadequate. As this chapter reveals, text regularly falls short of the various tasks for which it was recruited on page 17, issue #37, be they descriptive, explanatory, or hortatory. Notice that the abutting images are firmly located in an architectural space. As the caption in the upper right suggests, we are to understand them as photographic documentation of Heartfield's photomontages on exhibit at the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung. The self-portrait, however, occupies a liminal space created purely for the display of Heartfield's vicious artistic performance. Retracting here, extending itself there, the image competes for space among the other photographs, which are ostensibly documentary—testimonials that veridically reflect events outside the cognitive framework of the illustrated journal. The photomontage demonstrates, by contrast, its rhetoric of artificiality. John Heartfield manufactured his self-portrait specifically for this page,

20

T H E

S U B I E C T

IN

C I R C U L A T I O N

S C H O N E

FIGURE

H E

-

S C H E R U N G

8.

John Heartfield, Schöne Be-Scherung,

f r o m Der Knüppel, A u g u s t 1 9 2 7 .

A k a d e m i e der Künste, Berlin, K u n s t s a m m l u n g ; Inv.-Nr.: Heartfield 6 7 6 . © I V A R O / V G Bild-Kunst, B o n n .

to be circulated in this C o m m u n i s t photographic magazine. It is an exhibit in and of itself—a show of Heartfield's technique, and a performance of his social identity as an artist as he conceived it in the year 1 9 2 9 . Heartfield's brother and collaborator, Wieland Herzfelde, once wrote: "John was already nicknamed the Monteur (assemblyman) during the war by his friends, not because of his working technique, but because he was in the habit of wearing overalls. He did not want to look like an artist, but he did not want to look like an adman either." 1 In his 1 9 2 9 self-presentation, Heartfield traded in his supposedly habitual u n i f o r m — worker's overalls—for more "bourgeois" attire. Is the Monteur posing as gentleman executioner, perhaps, the traces of Dada-dandy subversion still manifest? Are these

T H E

S U B I E C T

IN

C I R C U L A T I O N

21

the props of a conventional self-portrait? Or was he appealing to both working-class and white-collar constituencies? That Herzfelde should choose the triangulation of industrial assemblyman, artist, and advertising professional is not fortuitous. During the Weimar Republic, many artists sought to fuse left-wing politics with commercial advertising and avant-garde aesthetics. Photomontage would play a central role in this combination. Certainly in the instance of the 1929 self-portrait, Heartfield was doing some advertising of his own: the image promoted the exhibition of his political photomontages at the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung.

This often-reproduced self-portrait of John Heartfield has become iconic, functioning as a pictorial anchor for his artistic legacy. Appearing regularly on front covers and frontispieces of monographs, the image resonates throughout the reception history of his work. More often, it is presented in its pre-production mockup state, bearing Heartfield's clearly visible, penciled instructions to the production staff of the

AIZ.

Although reproduced more frequently than any other of Heartfield's photomontages, the self-portrait, as it appeared in 1929, has attracted little analytical attention. Instead, the self-portrait circulates in the economy of art historical images, a seemingly self-sufficient, ahistorical entity. Such dispersal of Heartfield's self-portrait, with its dehistoricization of the artist's image and its valuation of the marks of the artist's hand, stems from its utility in forwarding the cult of the artist (fig. 9). In its pre-AJZ incarnation, the image belongs to a now-familiar aesthetic category, easily accessible for a posterity in search of signifiers of artistic authenticity. We see physical traces contingent on the artist's presence: his script, his photographic likeness, and the jagged track of his incisive scissors. Relying on the posthumous reception of the preparatory mock-up, we might conclude that the montage was manufactured primarily for a life after John Heartfield's death, not conceived for a short-lived mechanical replication, as was in fact the case. As a document touted as representative—of the artist and of the artist's craft—the self-portrait has been deceptively dissociated from its discursive context, isolated from the other photographs with which it was published as if they were irrelevant to this moment of Heartfield's self-fashioning. The case is quite the contrary. As this chapter demonstrates, John Heartfield produced his militant self-portrait specifically to be disseminated on a page in a mass-market journal of the revolutionary Left, and he did so during a critical transition in Communist politics during the late Weimar Republic. One of the central tasks of this chapter is to elaborate upon what possible functions the 1929 self-portrait's ironic combination of aggression and attraction, self-assertion and subtraction could serve in the culture of late Weimar. Why did John Heartfield produce the self-portrait at this juncture and not any other? What does the picture tell us about his political subjectivity? Which cultural discourses made Heartfield's intervention possible, even determining the decibel level of its strident tone? How might a leftist audi-

22

THE SUBJECT IN CIRCULATION

FIGURE

9.

John Heartfield, Self-portrait, 1929, mock-up. Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Kunstsammlung, Inv.-Nr.: Heartfield 430. © 1VARO/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

ence have received the image? To answer these questions is to recuperate what Hans Robert Jauss has called the "horizon of expectation," or the set of cultural, political, and aesthetic expectations that the viewers of the image in 1929 might have held.2 In weaving the self-portrait into various discursive contexts, from the intricate politics of late 1920s Communist subjectivity to the semiotics of pictorial rupture, I aim to anchor its various ideological and visual operations within the particularities of a specific historical moment. Like a motif in a fugue, the self-portrait repeatedly resurfaces throughout this chapter's argument, its significance becoming more complex and resonant as I unpack the conditions of its production.

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P R O D U C I N G THE SUBJECT: B I O G R A P H I C A L

EXCURSUS

John Heartfield's 1929 image is one of the rare instances of self-portraiture in the artist's body of work. As such, it is an uncommon venue for his self-representational "voice"—a self-constructed utterance about himself and his artistic project at a particular moment. Even more remarkably, this emphatic statement was designed for a well-established mass-circulation journal of the Left. In contrast to earlier Dadaist self-portraits disseminated in short-lived artists' magazines with small print runs, this picture makes a declarative, public statement on a large scale. With an ambition for popular appeal never to be matched, this unique instance of Heartfield's artistic performance represents both the apex and the finale of a Dada theatricality gone resolutely political, for in subsequent AIZ works his embodied authorship is supplanted by his adroit photomontage, while his name retreats from the title to an occasionally ironic byline. In the historiography of Heartfield, such moments of declarative self-representation are scarce. Art historians sooner turn to his brother's narrative voice than John Heartfield's personal accounts to reconstruct a historical understanding of Heartfield and his project. Wieland Herzfelde's explanation of the social semantics of Heartfield's overalls, cited above, is an example. As Nancy Ann Roth has written, Herzfelde "functioned as a kind of authorized spokesman for his brother through most of their lives. Wieland's word, that is, largely replaces Heartfield's own." 3 Beginning with Herzfelde's 1913 letter of introduction to Expressionist poet Else Lasker-Schiiler, which was intended to ease his brother's move to Berlin, 4 culminating in his biographical account John

Heartfield:

Leben und Werk of 1961, and extending into the numerous essays after Heartfield's death in 1968, Wieland Herzfelde spent his life writing and speaking on his brother's behalf. 5 As an author, poet, and publisher (he owned the left-wing publishing house Malik Verlag, named after a Lasker-Schiiler novel), Herzfelde actively participated in the narrative construction and replication of Heartfield's life, adjusting facts, simplifying the narrative, and emphasizing expedient detail in order to promote a politically exemplary account of their lives. The brothers' differences in temperament—"as if they had come from separate planets," in Elias Canetti's words—operated simultaneously as a narrative foil and historical mandate: Herzfelde's reasonable, pragmatic, and often almost innocent disposition supplied him with a form of objective, untainted authority to narrate his brother's vituperative pictures and persona. 6 Such was Herzfelde's dominion over the Heartfield legacy that other firsthand accounts of the photomonteur and his work met with his derisive pen. For instance, Herzfelde's copy of Roland Marz's impressive Der Schnitt entlang der Zeit, an invaluable compilation of documents, testimonials, and essays about John Heartfield, is assertively reclaimed by the marks of Herzfelde's hand. 7 Scribbled notations such as "imprecise," "wrong," or "quatsch" (the last more or less translatable as "nonsense") deface the margins. A stamp bearing the name MALIK-ARCHIV brands the inside cover, as if Herzfelde wanted to take possession, in ink, of these printed words published outside his

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jurisdiction. A typewritten disclaimer cut and pasted inside indignantly declares to all readers and posterity that the book appeared without his knowledge and collaboration. Clearly Herzfelde, anticipating an archival reception of his legacy, asserted his hagiographie primacy over John Heartfield from beyond the grave. The reasons for Herzfelde's pivotal role in the production and circulation of Heartfield's artistic identity have been framed as largely biographical, rooted in the brothers' troubled upbringing. Their father, Franz Herzfeld, was a Socialist poet and playwright who published under the pseudonym Franz Held. He was convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to prison in 1895. To avoid jail, Herzfeld, his wife, Alice (née Stolzenberg) and their growing family fled Germany for Switzerland (where the third child, Wieland, was born) and eventually took up residence in an abandoned hut in the woods near Aigen bei Salzburg, Austria, in 1896. One day in the summer of 1899, as the pivotal tale goes, the four children (Helmut, nine; Hertha, six; Wieland, three; and Charlotte, one and a half) woke up to find their parents missing. (They had been placed in mental institutions; Herzfelde's recollections of his mother were published as a dream sequence in his 1 9 2 0 book, Tragikgrotesken der Nacht.) The children were discovered four days later by Ignatz Varnschein, the mayor of Aigen. As Herzfelde recounts: The youngest lay peacefully in a thoroughly wetted basket and sucked on her thumb, lodged deeply in her mouth. Her six-year-old sister stirred flour and water in a pot and explained she was making omelets. My brother began to sob uncontrollably when he was asked where his parents were, and I took no notice, but continued to trace the edges of the little lake that had collected at the base of the basket. I was so absorbed in this game that they had to cajole me at length to stop and let them get me ready for departure.8

Wieland had been painting bellfiowers with the baby's urine. The Varnscheins took the orphaned children into their foster care. In the difficult years that followed, Helmut grew up as an anxious, troubled, quick-tempered child—characteristics exacerbated by the psychological mistreatment he received as a Protestant boy raised in a Catholic household in imperial Austrian society, which was then split, even defined, by those religious differences. When the Varnscheins moved to Salzburg, a family named Bischof took Helmut in, until he was implicated in a school revolt against a despised teacher and sent to a juvenile detention home run by nuns. When the Varnscheins learned of the mistreatment at the institution, they took the boy back. By contrast, the accounts portray Wieland (who was never baptized in the Protestant church and thus spared abuse) as well adjusted and reasonable, able to speak when Helmut can only stutter. "Helmut is more shy than I am," wrote Herzfelde to Lasker-Schiiler, "for his youth was hard and lonely. To me, no one is a stranger. Everybody is my friend." 9 As a result, the brothers were "bound by a navel cord," as Canetti characterized their ties, or in John Heartfield's words, they were "two sides of the same apple." 10 Or, most likely, they were connected by a co-dependent bond lodged in a reaction formation to

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25

abandonment and loss, one brother adopting the defense of a guileless child, and the other driven by deep-seated rage. Indeed, Helmut's childhood experience, according to Wieland Herzfelde, indelibly marked John Heartfield's character: "He perceives any injury he witnesses as a personal attack." 11 Heartfield has not left us his version of the tale. 12 Heartfield's choleric temperament evolved beyond a mere personality trait into an artistic legend cited regularly as a driving force for his art. "No, our Jonny [sic] had only one thing: a heavy heart that reacted with immense intensity to every adverse, unjust, sinister and degrading manifestation of our society," wrote Oskar Maria Graf in 1938. 1 3 "Produktiver Jähzorn" Herzfelde called it, naming a kind of creative fury—a descriptive term that Heartfield would later wield himself, embedding this evocative phrase in the dissemination of his legacy. 14 Characterizing impulsive irascibility as a productive vehicle for dissent deftly converts the story of personal torment into one of political value, advancing the Communist cause with passionate investment. Similarly, Canetti's not entirely sympathetic appraisal of John Heartfield (perhaps reflecting Canetti's lingering wound—Heartfield once called him a termite) suggests that the artist's volatility and his montages amounted to the same thing: "His reactions were so spontaneous that they got the better of him. He was skinny and very short, and if an idea struck him, he would leap into the air. He uttered his sentences vehemently as if attacking you with his leap. . . . [H]e could only learn aggressively; and I believe one could show that this is the secret of his montages. He brought things together, confronted things after first leaping up at them, and the tension of these leaps is preserved in his montages." 15 Brigid Doherty, in a comparable argument, links Heartfield's explosive vehemence to a larger discourse of war neurosis and, in turn, to the technique of Dada montage. "Montage, then, is a vehicle for the monteur's traumatophilia," Doherty writes; "it is a technique for the materialization of traumatic shock." 16 In this chapter, I suggest that Heartfield thematizes the productivity of hate in his late Weimar photomontages, primarily summoning the fuel for his pugnacious creativity from the invidious politics and violent street culture of the fated democratic republic, abetted by private fury. Heartfield's very name, like his self-portrait, relies on an audacious politics of protest, signaling the fabrication of an artistic identity prompted by historical and political circumstance rather than motivated by psychological necessity. "John Heartfield" came into being in 1916, as the story has it, as the pseudonym of the man baptized Helmut Herzfeld in Berlin in 1891. Anglicizing his German name in the midst of the First World War signaled a cheeky rejection of what has been called a "spontaneous and irrational" Anglophobia that took hold of Germany shortly after the English entered the war on August 4, I9I4- 17 Ernst Lissauer's popular song "Hassgesang gegen England" (Hymn of Hate against England) lent the jingoism a catchy rhythm and tight rhyme, igniting zealous hatred "like a bomb in a munitions depot," as the writer Stefan Zweig characterized it.18 "Gott strafe England!" (God punish England!) became a popular

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street greeting, to be met with an enthusiastic "Er strafe es!" (He punishes it!). The phrase was printed on mugs, handkerchiefs, pocketknives, buttons, and badges; it was rubber-stamped on letters, printed on millions of postcards, and engraved on scarf pins, cufflinks, brooches, and wedding rings. 19 Swiss authorities eventually issued a warning that letters from Germany bearing the imprint "Gott strafe England!" would no longer be handled by the Swiss post office. 20 Its omnipresence signals the nationalistic mania that seized Germany, one of the manifestations of the so-called Spirit of 1914, the collective experience of war mobilization expected to unite the German nation in the present and in the future. 21 Adopting the Anglophile name "John Heartfield" indicated Helmut Herzfeld's internationalist, anti-militarist convictions in no uncertain terms; in so doing, he provoked his countrymen by openly taking sides with the enemy during a period of virulent nationalism. That he continued to sign personal letters "Helmut Herzfeld" in December 1917, long after the asserted date of 1916, suggests that this transformation occurred erratically and intermittently rather than emphatically as the established Heartfield narrative suggests. This change in designation would parallel those of his closest collaborators, who also amended their names but to lesser degree. Georg Groß became George Grosz, fusing his Anglocentric interest with his Slavophilia, while Heartfield's brother Wieland Herzfeld made alterations for what he considered poetic rather than political reasons, appending a final e to his father's blunt surname. At the close of the war, John Heartfield, along with his brother, George Grosz, and the playwright Erwin Piscator (all of whom would later collaborate with Heartfield), signed up with the fledgling Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD). According to the brothers' recollection, they did so at its founding party congress on December 3 0 , 1 9 1 8 , receiving the Parteibuch (a booklet confirming Party membership) from Rosa Luxemburg herself—a neatly packaged story that resurfaces repeatedly. This account has come under closer examination, however, spurred by the fact that the Party congress only began on December 30, lasting until January 1, 1919, in the midst of widespread political turbulence; a published and distributable Parteibuch was hardly likely. 22 The anecdote was most likely fabricated retrospectively in the early 1950s to shore up the brothers' Communist loyalty in face of stern Party scrutiny, though Heartfield's early allegiance to the KPD remains unassailable. His subsequent involvement with Berlin Dada, whose art offered a tactical riposte to the traumatic war and the failed revolution of 1 9 1 8 - 1 9 , was an anti-bourgeois, pro-revolutionary protest that wielded photomontage as a critical weapon, to portray the first German democracy, the Weimar Republic, as a disorderly verbal-visual cacophony (fig. 6). It is in this context that Monteur Dada (as Heartfield was called) took to wearing his blue overalls (a Monteuranzug in German) in alliance with the industrial laborer. While the radical proclivities of his fellow Dadaists, including George Grosz, waned in the mid-i92os, Heartfield remained a dedicated agitator for the Communist cause, designing election posters, book jackets, and beginning in 1929, satirical photomontages for the A1Z.

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THE POLITICS OF MASS CIRCULATION: J O H N H EARTFIELD AND THE AIZ

In his 1929 self-portrait, Heartfield's arresting gaze out at the viewer, away from his activity of bloodless violence, declares its self-conscious performativity. In the instant it was captured, Heartfield's look acknowledged the camera that froze it for posterity, his eyes directly confronting the lens. In its conception, however, the gaze was intended for the viewers beyond the camera, challenging an imaginary audience to witness an execution that the photographic moment can only foresee. This declarative look insists upon a moment of caesura, a pause separating the act of summoning and the act of construction (or destruction), and indicating to us that the photomontage is equally about an alliance with the viewer in which we are made complicit, as captive to Heartfield's handiwork as Zorgiebel. Heartfield is not merely aware of his audience, but deliberately enjoins it, sparking a preternatural continuity between this static photographic likeness and the viewer. We are momentarily sutured as accomplices to this violent act, his penetrating look, in startling contrast to Zorgiebel's lifeless features, demanding that we respond. This visual summoning is a metaphor for Heartfield's subsequent project for the AIZ, a working relationship that was to endure nine years, survive forced exile, and generate at least 237 photomontages. 23 Like the self-portrait, Heartfield's photomontages labored to stimulate political consciousness through aggressive visual means; their aim was to seize the passing gaze in a visual economy saturated by the photograph, hailing viewers into place while transforming us into critical subjects enlightened by a Communist perspective. The ultimate goal was to create a community of revolutionary-minded citizens who would actively contribute to radical social change. The beholder of the photomontage completes the work, an action that is, as I argue, a cognitive operation woven into the conception of Heartfield's project. Heartfield's viewership would largely have invested in the position he advanced. The AIZ was an overtly political alternative to the illustrated magazines flooding the German market in the mid-i92os. Aligned with, but not an organ of, the German Communist Party, the AIZ was subordinate instead to the Communist International in Moscow, or Comintern. Based on the notion that, as its publisher Willi Mtinzenberg later phrased it, "an illustrated magazine is more entertaining than a lead article in a political daily," the AIZ boasted a weekly print run of 500,000 by 1931, according to its own estimates. 24 It was one of the most popular illustrated magazines in circulation, though its distribution was well behind that of the left-of-center Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ), whose readership extended into the millions. 25 Geared toward a broadbased left-wing readership, the AIZ endeavored to propagate a Communist point of view to non-Party members and the so-called homeless Left by capitalizing upon the potential of modern mass media to generate a heterotopic alternative space. The AIZ's brilliance lay in its ability to speak to the broad spectrum of Lefts during the Weimar

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FIGURE

10.

Bauhaus Students on the Canteen

Terrace,

n.d. Bauhaus Archiv, Berlin.

Republic, many of which felt disenfranchised by both the radical KPD and the more moderate Socialist Party (Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD). For instance, both Tucholsky and the artist Käthe Kollwitz contributed regularly, disagreeing with the intransigent stance of the KPD but nevertheless supporting radical left-wing politics on philosophical grounds. The diverse readership of the AIZ can be inferred from photographic materials. An amateur photograph, circa 1930, captures three young women, their hair stylishly bobbed in the Bubikopfschnitt, sitting on the ledge of the Bauhaus canteen terrace, drinking in the weak sunlight (fig. 10). One of them reads the AIZ. This snapshot of Bauhaus life provides markers of a leisured, educated, modern, urban, leftist Weimar Republic. Contrast this with the cultural codes propagated by a kaleidoscopic photomontage published in the pages of the AIZ itself in October 1931 (fig. 11). Cows and Lederhosen in the upper left inform us that the southern agrarian sector reads the AIZ; a barefoot boy in the upper right, his pale naked feet vulnerable against the cobblestones, lets us know that impoverished urban working-class people read the AIZ; men in stereotypically proletarian caps with pipes tell us that the skilled worker reads the AIZ. Another laborer, his dirty, rough hands resting on a grubby kitchen table, sits nearby, reading the AIZ with a child at his side, the girl incongruously presented in a starched pinafore and hair bow, perhaps a projection of a less taxing future. A dark-complected girl placed prominently in front signifies the AIZ's reach into the Far East. In case the assembly of

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FIGURE

11.

" A I Z readership," AIZ 10, no. 4 0 (1931). Bundesarchiv, Berlin/Elke Jung-Wolff.

staged photographs does not make their collectivism international message abundantly clear, explanatory text in the lower right-hand corner elaborates. Two very different images, two very different meanings: the latter, a self-consciously constructed image, was designed to signify within the sphere of the paper's circulation, while the former was a serendipitous portrait of an AIZ readership. The m e d i u m of montage produces the sensation of an intimately clustered reading community, as opposed to the individualized consumption conveyed in the Bauhaus photograph. Although some people might read alone—the m a n convalescing in the center of the image, for instance— the busy juxtaposition of photographs insists that atomized readers are nonetheless part of a diverse community whose members know no dividing walls. The communal ethos encouraged by the AIZ derived directly from its basic objective: to reinforce C o m m u n i s t

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political unity and cohesion by way of an illustrated journal. The AIZ also sponsored book readings, film evenings, lecture series, events for women and children, summer festivals, and sports clubs. Regularly solicited for input, readers were summoned by a "personalized" handwritten script and addressed with the informal "you" (Dm). The AIZ evolved out of an international aid campaign for the famine victims of postrevolutionary Russia, established by Münzenberg in 1921 at V. I. Lenin's behest. Its umbrella organization was the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe (IAH), or International Worker's Aid, for which Münzenberg served as general secretary. To support the IAH, Münzenberg published the monthly journal Sowjetrussland im Bild (Soviet Russia in Pictures), which was renamed Sichel und Hammer (Hammer and Sickle) in 1922. 2 6 The Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung emerged out of Sichel und Hammer in 1925, at first appearing monthly, then every fourteen days, and then, in 1926, weekly. The AIZ reached its readership by way of newsstands, local bookstores, and a posse of Kolporteure, the journal's "shock brigade." Such militarist references were used in the AIZ literature itself, as these troops not only distributed the paper but also functioned as the offensive front line, as agitators and discussants in the streets and on doorsteps. 27 Although many newspapers were sold by street hawkers during the Weimar Republic, those who sold the AIZ took on special significance. These Kolporteure were an integral part of the politicized AIZ community, often photographed within its pages; they received a complimentary propaganda pamphlet, Der AIZ Kolporteur, weekly, as well as prizes for AIZ sales, ranging from books to trips to the Soviet Union. 28 Just as the Kolporteure circumvented the difficulty of selling the AIZ from the numerous newspaper kiosks owned by Alfred Hugenberg's right-wing media cartel, readers themselves were recruited for distribution and encouraged to pass the journal along—to leave it on park benches, buses, in cafés, for the neighbor, for the milkman—thereby expanding the leftist community and liberally circulating its revolutionary message in the public sphere (fig. 12). 29 The journal was thus a political vehicle, wielded strategically and cultivating the invested intersubjectivity distilled in Heartfield's self-portrait.

B L O O D Y MAY 1929

The readers of the AIZ would have delighted in Heartfield's staged fantasy of beheading Police Chief Zôrgiebel. Zôrgiebel, a Social Democrat, was the figure held accountable for the unprecedented police violence against the Communist demonstrators on May Day 1929, soon dubbed Blutmai, or Bloody May, by the radical Left. Five months earlier, in December 1928, Zôrgiebel had prohibited all outdoor meetings and demonstrations in order to crack down on the increasing number of violent street clashes between and among Communists, Socialists, and National Socialists. He then extended the prohibition to include the May Day marches, a highly symbolic annual tradition, for both Socialists and Communists, that demonstrated working-class pride and solidarity. The Communists, taking this gesture as (another) provocation by the regime, appeared

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UmAte A r t x t t e r | A o l o g r a p h e n . die i o i B r r itj&n amf deui Po»ten »ind. » t a n et gilt, gute* B i l d m a t e r i a l f ü r d i e A - J - Z und d i e ü b r i g e prol e t a r i a A i e Pre«»e t u b e i e h a f f e n , h a b e n »ich d i e s m a l e i n e beaond e r e A u f g a b e ge*tellt. Sie «ind mit i b r e r K a m e r a durch B e r l i n gel a u f e n , um f r t l r ü t t e l t e n , » i » d e r K n f c i , der Abonnent der A J - Z , mit »einer Z e i t u n g a n f ä n g t , w e n n e r üe g e l e t e n h a t . Da» E r g e b n i * war erfreulich. Ea xeigtr d i e iaaige Verbundenheit, die Liebe rar A-J-Z, d i e p r o l e t a r i » c b e Solid a r i t ä t d e r L«»er mit i h r e n Koll e g e n , d i e n i c h t i m m e r in d e r L a g e sind, »ieh d i e A - J - Z regelm ä S i g t u k a u f e n . G e h e n wir einm a l z u s a m m e n m i t den A r b e i t e r photograpben durch die Betriebe. M i e t » k a « e r n e n u n d S t r a ß e n Berlin«.

ei e i n e r A u g u i t h i t z e v o n 31 G r o d im S c h o t t e n ••d P a r k b ä n k e n i c h t nur n a c h 10 Uhr a b e n d » n g e n e h m e A u f e n t h a l t s p l ä t z e . Die a b s i c h t l i c h ver:t$ene A-J-Z wird nicht l a n g e a u f e i n e n F r e u n d v warten brauchen

S c h o n g r e i f t e i n a n d e r e r n a c h ihr, nach »ich v o r h e r n a c h o l l e n S e i f e n um^esefl k e i n e r in d e r n ä h e r e n U m g e b u n g « t , l r e c h t i g t e r e B e s i t i o n $ p r ü c h e o n sie i u »feile

MAH«j

Dicnttog nochmiltog out einem d«r vi»'«n Hinterhof« m Boriin N . M u f l n . die neu« A ) l ilt dal Wenn du mit loich n poor antlàn•9« Fullen mo cht I, bring ich ti« io«! Son«» let" Ich ti* «rjt hier unJenl" Ab«« Mut »er macht ihm lieber «in poor ordenti ich« Slull««.

S

F I G U R E

Ii Zweck«« de» Mittelitpnde» Soche

Dann «ii ou>hong4$, 1 5 2 - 6 0 , 153-55, 157-5«, 1 6 0 - 6 2 ; and kitsch, 1 6 0 ; and typography, 135, 158, 159, 163; in Unser Wille und We g

95, 1 0 0 , 208, 211 realism: grotesque, 187, 188; modernist, 212; socialist, 16, m—12, 225, 231, 233, 249, 251, 258, 259, 2 6 0 recontextualization, in photomontage, 6, 39,

(UWW), 135-37 Pinkus, Theo, 49, 2 7 5 ^ 4 , 2 7 6 ^ 5 Piscator, Erwin, 12, 27, 201

4 1 . 97

Red Unity will make you free! (Heartfield), 140,

plants, photographs of, 238, 239

1 4 0 - 4 1 , 164

Poe, Edgar Allan, 1 9 9

Regards (periodical), 228

Pogodin, Nikolai, 116

Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, 41

Poland, Nazi invasion of, 2 6 2 , 2 6 5 - 6 6

Reichspropaganda Ministry (RPL), 1 0 6 , h i ,

Popular Front, 252

135-36

postcards by Heartfield, 2 2 5 - 2 6 posters: by Heartfield, 27, 4 2 - 4 3 , 4 4 , 45, 121, 125, 126, 139, 141, 163, 164; for

Reichstag: burning of, 159, 169; elections for, 1 1 8 - 1 9 , 139, 140, 141, 1 4 3 - 4 4 , 151—52, 164; Münzenberg as member of, 49

Hindenburg's candidacy, 123, 126; for

Reiss, Wolf, 81, 84

National Socialist (Nazi) Party, 1 2 1 - 2 2 , 1 2 6 -

Reitmann, Erwin, 136, 137

27, 127, 141, 143, 158, 163; sandwichmen's,

Die Reklame (periodical), 75

123, 123; for Socialist Party (SPD), 142

Remarque, Erich Maria, 234

Prague: German leftists exiled in, 47, 50, 59, 161, 164, 165, 167, 1 6 9 , 174, 2 0 2 , 2 2 5 - 2 6 ,

Renger-Patzsch, Albert, 72 Rimbaud, Arthur, 203, 231, 232

2 2 9 , 2 6 4 , 3 0 1 m ; Mânes Art Association

Rivera, Diego, 3 0 i n i 2 6

exhibition in, 2 1 5 - 2 1 , 217, 223

Robin, Régine, 258, 259

propaganda: and advertising, 101, 1 0 6 , 123; defi-

Rodchenko, Alexander, 1 1 , 1 0 1

nition of, 16, 1 0 5 - 6 ; Heartfield's work as, 6,

Roh, Franz, 87

13, 16, 36, 4 4 , 62, 1 0 5 - 9 , 1 2 0 - 2 1 , 178, 198,

Röhm, Ernst, 1 7 3 - 7 4 , 177, 218

2 0 2 , 2 0 6 , 233, 251; left-wing, 31, 35, 36, 44,

Ronsdorf, Carl, 87, 89, 9 0

47, 62, 63, 73, 93, 1 0 5 - 1 1 , 1 2 0 - 2 1 , 139, 174,

Rosenhaft, Eve, 38, 63

208; right-wing, 16, 62, 1 0 6 , 1 0 9 - 1 1 , 119,

Die Rote Fahne (periodical), 41, 4 4 , 47, 48, 70,

120, 1 2 1 - 2 3 , 135—37. 145, 159

102, 117, 118, 273n3o

Proust, Marcel, 232

Rote Frontkämpferbund (RFB), 41

pseudo-photomontage, 87, #9

Der Rote Pfeffer (periodical), 174, 178

psychological relations: and advertising, 8 9 -

Das Rote Sprachrohr (periodical), 2 7 3 ^ 0

90; and Communist critique of subjectiv-

Der Rote Stern (periodical), 44, 47, 276x17^

ism, 232; and Heartfield's "Cabbagehead,"

Roth, Nancy Ann, 24

234-36; and Heartfield's theme of traumatic

rotogravure, 70, 78, 79, 82, 278ni4

memory, 2 4 4 - 4 7 , 2 5 ' .

2

52

public sphere, 6, 16, 31, 35, 38, 78, 88, 91, 103, 1 0 9 - 1 1 , 120, 123, 2 8 7 n g 6

RPL. See Reichspropaganda Ministry (RPL) rupture, pictorial, 7, i o - n , 3 9 - 4 0 rupture, pictorial, in Heartfield's work, n ; and Self-portrait (1929), 23, 3 9 - 4 0 , 56-57; and

Rabelais, François, 187, 1 9 1 - 9 2 , 201 Rabinbach, Anson, 169, 171

Soviet montage, 114—15 Russian Formalism, 9

race: and Communist politics, 98, 100; and Heartfield's Whether black or white, 98, 99,

SA. See Sturmabteilung (SA)

100; and Nazi ideology, 1 8 1 - 8 2 ; and Nazi

Sander, August, 6 6

photomontage, 156

sandwichmen, 123, 1 2 3 - 2 4 ,

12

INDEX

4

333

satire: in left-wing publications, 178; Lukâcs on, 1 8 2 - 8 4 ; L u n a c h a r s k i i on, 1 8 4 - 8 7 , 2C)in7o; in Nazi photomontage, 137

Sichel und Hammer

(periodical), 31, 1 9 4 ,

273n26 Siepmann, Eckhard, 4 9

satire, in Heartfield's work, 2, 6, 27, 4 4 , 50, 6 2 , 9 1 , 1 1 2 , 1 7 8 , 183, 1 8 4 , 1 8 6 , 1 8 8 , 2 0 2 ; and collaboration with Tucholsky, 1 9 , 9 2 , 1 9 4 - 9 5 scatology: in D a u m i e r ' s work, 1 9 1 - 9 3 ; in

Signac, Paul, 2 2 0 , 2 2 1 , 2 2 6 Simplicissimus

(satirical m a g a z i n e ) , 1 9 3 , 1 9 4 ,

2 1 8 , 2 3 9 , 241 Sinclair, Upton, 54

Heartfield's work, 1 8 9 - 9 1 , 1 9 5 - 9 7

Six million Communist

Schlecht, H e i n , 137

votes! (Heartfield), 1 5 1 -

52, 152

Schleicher, Kurt von, 1 3 9

slapstick film, 2 0 6 , 2 0 8 - 9

Schmitt, Carl, 1 7 8

Sloterdijk, Peter, 1 4 - 1 5 , 1 2 0 , 1 4 7 , 188

Scholz, G e o r g , 2 0 3

social democracy, 31, 43, 57, 6 1 , 6 2 , 2 7 4 n 4 3

Schöne Be-Scherung,

20

Social Democratic Party (Sozialistische Partei

S c h o p e n h a u e r , A r t h u r , 256

D e u t s c h l a n d s [SPD]), 2 9 , 35, 4 1 , 6 2 , n o , 117,

Schubert, Walter, 87

1 4 0 , 1 4 1 , 142, 2 3 6 - 3 7 , 237, 2 7 3 n 3 0

S c h u s c h n i g g , Kurt, 2 5 6

social f a s c i s m , 35, 4 1 , 50, 59, 6 2 , 1 4 1 , 1 5 0 , 2 0 2

S c h u t z s t a f f e l (SS), 1 3 9

social i m a g i n a r y , 2 1 6 , 2 2 5 , 2 3 4 , 2 5 9

S c h w a r t z , Frederic J., 8 9 , 2 7 9 ^ 3

Socialist R e a l i s m , 1 6 , 1 1 1 - 1 2 , 2 2 5 , 2 3 1 , 233, 2 4 9 ,

Schwitters, Kurt, 1 0 , 77, 7 8 , 2 5 6

251, 258, 2 5 9 , 2 6 0

s e a m l e s s n e s s , pictorial. See s u t u r e , pictorial S E D . See Sozialistische Einheitspartei

Soviet Union: artists' organizations i n , 1 1 2 13, 115; avant-garde in, 8 4 , 1 0 1 , 1 1 2 , 1 1 6 ; First Five-Year Plan in, 1 0 5 , 1 1 2 , 1 8 4 , 185,

D e u t s c h l a n d s (SED) Seghers, Anna, 227

1 8 6 , 231; food shortages in, 2 0 7 - 8 ; and

Seidel's

G e r m a n - S o v i e t N o n - A g g r e s s i o n Pact, 2 6 6 ;

Reklame

(periodical), 4 4 , 2 8 o n 6 6

Self-portrait

(1920) (Heartfield), 51, 52

Heartfield's valorization of, 1 0 5 - 8 , 117, 1 4 8 ,

Self-portrait

(1927) (Heartfield), 5 2 - 5 4 , 54

151; Heartfield's visit to, 4 6 , 51, 6 8 , 1 0 5 ,

Self-portrait

( 1 9 2 9 ) (Heartfield), 15, 18, 23;

1 0 7 - 8 , 1 1 1 - 1 6 , 1 1 7 ; Heartfield's work in, l

a n d C o m m u n i s t politics, 2 2 - 2 3 , 3 ^ . 4 >

1 1 2 - 1 6 , 114, 115; homophobia in, 1 7 4 ; photo-

4 2 - 4 3 , 4 4 , 45, 4 6 , 50; c o m p a r e d to earlier

m o n t a g e in, 7, 1 0 1 , 1 1 2 - 1 6 ; satire i n , 1 8 4 - 8 5 ;

s e l f - p o r t r a i t s , 5 1 - 5 5 ; critical r e c e p t i o n of, 22-23;

an

d D a d a , 2 4 , 51, 5 6 - 5 7 ; as declara-

S t a l i n i s m in, 4 6 , 185, 2 0 8 , 2 9 2 n 7 9 ; writers' c o n g r e s s in, 2 3 1 , 2 8 4 ^ 4

tion of artistic identity, 2 1 - 2 2 , 2 4 , 2 8 , 51,

Sowjetrussland

5 4 - 5 5 ; a n d m a s c u l i n i s t politics, 56; m o c k -

Sozialistische Einheitspartei D e u t s c h l a n d s

u p o f , 2 2 , 23; p u b l i s h e d in A1Z,

1 9 - 2 0 , 22,

im Bild (periodical), 31, 2 7 2 n 2 Ö

(SED), 51

2 4 , 31, 35, 4 1 - 4 4 ; a n d r u p t u r e , 23, 3 9 - 4 0 ,

S p a r t a c i s m , 59, 61

5 6 - 5 7 ; a n d violence, 15, 1 9 , 2 0 , 2 8 , 37,

SPD. See Social Democratic Party

3 9 - 4 1 , 4 2 , 54, 56; W e i s k o p f ' s text accom-

(Sozialistische Partei D e u t s c h l a n d s [SPD])

p a n y i n g , 2 0 ; W i t t o r f A f f a i r as context for,

s p e e d , signification of, 4 4 , 59, 6 6 , 6 7 , 6 9 , 7 1 ,

50; Z ö r g i e b e l d e p i c t e d i n , 1 9 , 2 0 , 2 8 , 31,

7 6 , 8 2 , 83, 8 9 , 251 spiritualism, 2 4 4 - 4 5

35. 37. 3 9 - 4 1 sensory perception, 7 1 , 1 0 0 , 1 9 6 - 9 8 , 2 0 8 - 1 1

S S . See S c h u t z s t a f f e l (SS)

Seppla (Nazi artist), 157, 158, 158, 159, 1 6 0 , 160,

Stalin, Josef, 35, 4 6 , 4 8 , 51, 1 0 5 , 2 0 3 , 2 1 6 S t a l i n i s m , 4 6 , 47, 4 8 , 1 1 2 , 185, 2 0 8 , 2 9 2 ^ 9

161 S e y s s - l n q u a r t , A r t h u r , 256 Shadow

over Europe (Heartfield), 2 4 7 - 4 8 , 248

Shaw, G e o r g e B e r n a r d , 1 8 6 Sheppard, Richard, 2 0 1 Shklovskii, Viktor, 9, 2 7 o n i 2

334

INDEX

Steig, Michael, 2 0 8 Stinnes, H u g o , 1 7 1 - 7 2 streets, u r b a n , as locus of political activity, 35, 38-39, 108, 109, 120, 124 Strobel, H e i n r i c h , 2 8 i n 9 9

Der Struwwelpeter (children's book), 198, 199, 204

Thüle Society, 181 Thyssen, Fritz, 166, 1 6 7 - 6 9 , 172, 175

studio photography, 82

Till Eulenspiegel, 178, 188, 1 9 6

Sturmabteilung (SA), 41, 63, 109, 127, 139, 154,

Toller, Ernst, 227

173, 176, 177, 218

Tolstoy, Leo, 227

subjectivity: and collective laughter, 210; and Communist ideology, 22, 23, 46, 55-56; and Dadaist humor, 201; and socialist realism, 231-32; and visual technology's effect on perception, 2 1 0 - 1 1

touch, and photomechanical replication, 1 0 0 tragic drama (Trauerspiel), Benjamin on, 2 4 7 49 traumatic memory, as theme in Heartfield's work, 16, 2 4 4 - 4 7 , 2 5 ' '

2

52

Sukajev, B., 217, 218

Tret'iakov, Sergei, 51, 85, 1 1 2 , 131

Surrealism, 16, 76, 101, 199, 203, 230-33, 236,

Trotsky, Leon, 259, 3 o i n i 2 6

238, 243, 2 4 4 , 251, 256, 259, 3 0 i n i 2 6 suture, pictorial, in Heartfield's work: and "Cabbagehead," 78, 8 6 - 8 7 ; and On the Crisis Party Conference, 236, 238; and critical subjectivity, 211; and critique of the everyday, 212; and Forced supplier of manpower, 78; and negative imagery, 258-59; and shift from rupture, 11, 1 2 - 1 3 ,

8 7 - 8 8 ; and

truth claims: left-wing, 120; right-wing, 137, 142 Tschichold, Jan, 77, 87 Tucholsky, Kurt, 19, 29, 4 4 - 4 5 , 9 2 - 9 4 , 1 9 4 95 typography, 77, 84 8 5 - 8 6 , 90, 135, 158, 159, 163 Tzara, Tristan, 2 2 6 , 227, 2 2 9

Surrealism, 233, 243; and temporality, 238,

Uhlman, Fred, 264

2 4 9 - 2 5 5 ; and visual metamorphosis, 225

uncanny, the, 199, 244

Swift, Jonathan, 186, 203 symposium on Heartfield's work, in Paris, 229-32

unconscious, the: and Aragon's work, 230, 231; and collective unconscious, 230, 233; and Heartfield's work, 55, 169, 2 2 2 , 232, 233, 2 6 6 ; and optical unconscious, 2 0 9 - 1 1 , 238;

Tarnow, Fritz, 236 technological progress: and filmic perception, 2 1 0 - 1 1 ; and Heartfield's artistic identity, 84; photography as indicator of, 6 7 - 7 0 Teige, Karel, 2 g 6 n 2 8 Tempo (newspaper), 65, 66, 2 7 7 m , 2 7 9 n 4 2 temporality, signification of, 40, 44, 78, 82, 9 0 , 128, 157, 2 2 2 , 2 2 4 - 2 2 5 , 246, 2 4 9 - 2 5 5 , 2 6 0

and Surrealism, 230, 231, 259 unemployment, in Weimar Republic, 35, 38, 4 2 , 109, 119, 120, 126, 138, 141 Unser Wille und Weg (UWW) (periodical), 13537. 153 USSR in Construction (periodical), 113, 114, 114, 1J5, 116 utopianism, 188, 189

terrorism, 63, 139 TES (Nazi artist), 145-47, >46, '4$, 1 6 0

Vaché, Jacques, 203

text-image relations: in Heartfield's work, 20,

van der Lübbe, Marinus, 159

57, 59, 6 2 - 6 3 , 78, 85-87, 9 5 - 9 8 , 1 0 0 , 168,

Vandervelde, Emile, 57

179, 1 9 5 - 9 6 , 202, 245; and Nazi photomon-

Vandervelde or the absolute lack of shame

tage, 135, 158, 159, 163

(Heartfield), 57, 58, 59

Thalmann, Ernst, 46, 47, 107, 121, 1 2 4 - 2 5 , 141

Vanek, Karl, 156

Theosophy, 181

Varnschein, Ignatz, 25

Theweleit, Klaus, 2 4 4

verticality, in Heartfield's work, 81, 87, 88, i n

Third Period policy, 35, 38, 46, 47, 49, 56, 59,

violence: and Blutmai (Bloody May), 31, 34-35,

112, 171, 178, 194, 2 0 2 This is the salvation that they bring! (Heartfield), 252,254 The thousand year Reich (Heartfield), 3

41; and Dada photomontage, 56; KPD's policy on, 37-38, 63; and slapstick film, 2 0 8 - 9 , 210; and Weimar politics, 15, 34-35, 38, 41, 56-57, 63, 1 0 9 , n o , 126, 139

INDEX

335

violence, in Heartfield's work: and critique of

109, n o , 126, 139; propaganda prevalent in,

Nazism, 212; influenced by slapstick film,

16, 1 0 6 , 1 0 9 - 1 1 , 120; truth claims in, 120;

2 0 6 ; and One must have a special disposition

unemployment in, 35, 38, 4 2 , 1 0 9 , 119, 120,

to suicide . . . , 59, 61, 63; and Self-portrait

126, 138, 141

(1929), 19, 20, 28, 37, 3 9 - 4 1 , 42, 54, 56;

Weiskopf, F. C., 20

and shift from rupture to suture, 78; and

Weitz, Eric, 15, 35, 37-38, 55, 56, 107, 108

Vandervelde, 57, 59; and war neurosis, 26

Welt am Montag (periodical), 174

Völkischer Beobachter (periodical), 181

Die Weltbühne (periodical), 68, 74, 92, 174

Die Volks Illustrierte (periodical), 252, 2 6 4

Wessel, Horst, 177

Vorwärts (periodical), 59, 65, 6 6 , 75, 279n42

Westheim, Paul, 2 2 9

VU (periodical), 228

Whether black or white (Heartfield), 98, 99, 1 0 0 Wiene, Robert, 1 9 9 , 2 4 4

War and corpses (Heartfield), 112

Wilde, Oscar, 1 9 9

war neurosis, 26, 235

Wilhelm II (king of Prussia), 1 4 4 , 193

Wegener, Paul, 198, 1 9 9

Willmann, Heinz, 273n26, 274n43, 275n7o,

Weißenberg, Joseph, 195 Weimar Republic: Article 48 enacted in, 120; Blutmai (Bloody May) in, 34-35; as context

276n86 Winkler, Heinrich August, 141, 150 Wittorf Affair, 4 6 - 4 7 , 108, 112, 2 7 5 ^ 0

for Arbeiter llustrierte Zeitung (AIZ), 2 8 - 2 9 ,

Witzblätter (satirical publications), 1 9 4 - 9 5

120; as context for Heartfield's MacDonald

Wolff, Fritz, 194

Socialism, 95; as context for Heartfield's

Wolff, Theodor, 6 1 - 6 2

Self-portrait (1929), 22, 41; crisis of significa-

Wolfgram, Willi, 79

tion in, 96; economic crisis in, 109, 120;

World War I, 16, 1 2 9 , 193, 2 0 6 , 233, 234, 252

elections in, 1 1 8 - 1 9 , 121, 126, 139, 140, 141,

World War II, 233, 2 6 2 , 2 6 6

1 4 3 - 4 4 , 1 5 1 - 5 2 , 164, 174; Goebbels's history

Wundt, Wilhelm, 89

of, 163; Hitler appointed chancellor of, 159;

Wyland, George, 91

KPD suppressed in, 4 1 - 4 2 , 177; martial law declared in, 140; mass culture in, 67,

Zentrum Party, 139

71, 75, 84, 1 2 0 - 2 1 , 129; occultism in, 181;

Zervigón, Andrés, 2 9 3 n i o 8

paramilitary organizations in, 41, 109, 139,

Zipes, Jack, 255

154, 177; parliamentary politics in, 62, 109,

Zörgiebel, Karl, 19, 20, 28, 31, 35, 37, 3 9 - 4 1 , 40,

1 1 8 - 1 9 , 139, 141, 1 4 3 - 4 4 , 1 5 1 - 5 2 , 164; political violence in, 15, 34-35, 38, 41, 56-57, 63,

336

INDEX

273n30 Zweig, Stefan, 26

TEXT: DISPLAY: COMPOSITOR: INDEXER:

9.5/14 Scala Scala Sans BookMatters, Berkeley Andrew Joron