"My Drawings expressed my despair, hate and disillusionment, I drew drunkards; puking men; men with clenched fists cursing at the moon. ... I drew a man, face filled with fright, washing blood from his hands ... I drew lonely little men fleeing madly through empty streets. I drew a cross-section of tenement house: through one window could be seen a man attacking his wife; through another, two people making love; from a third hung a suicide with body covered by swarming flies. I drew soldiers without noses; war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms; two medical soldiers putting a violent infantryman into a strait-jacket made of a horse blanket ... I drew a skeleton dressed as a recruit being examined for military duty. I also wrote poetry." — So, wrote the Weimar artist, George Grosz
Welcome to The Weimar Spectacle, where I explore the brief and extraordinary life of the Weimar Republic. I’m Bremner Fletcher Duthie, singer, actor and theatre maker. I’ve spent years performing songs and theatre from the Weimar period, and I’m inspired and maybe more than a little obsessed by that moment in time.
Listen to Bremner's two albums of Weimar Cabaret songs
https://songwhip.com/bremnerduthie/bremner-sings-weill
https://songwhip.com/bremnerduthie/bremner-sings-kurt-weill-vol-2-moon-faced-starry-eyed
What does it mean to be an artist? In 1918, in the wake of WW1, the Russian revolution, collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, rise of Fascism, the plague of the Spanish Flu and massive changes in Society, Industry and Labour…. years of murder, mayhem, revolution, rampant inflation, starvation, not forgetting the Great Depression and the rise of the Nazis. What does it mean to be an artist, do they have a place in the world? So, how must artists reinvent themselves?
Well, I’m probably biased, but yes, I’d say they do have a place but hey, it’s a moment when everybody is being forced to re-evalute how and why they do what they do, so why should artists not have to go through the same process. And so they do: in this period artists turn away from the 19th Century idea of a career in fine art: visual artists abandon the dream of formal exhibitions in Academies of Fine Arts and Galleries, and instead seek out ways to engage with society directly: appropriating techniques from the advertising world, using images from newspapers and the various media, taking advantage of new alliances emerging between politics, technology and the mass media and reaching out directly to wide audiences as advertisers, as propagandists, as actors in collective actions, designing posters and books and magazines and broadsheets, seeing themselves as important parts of revolutionary and anti-fascist movements, creating works meant to be seen on the street as multiple reproductions plastered on walls, using the power of commercial reproduction and mass advertising.
They are inspired by the revolutionary artists in the brand new worker’s paradise in Russia. In Russia, just after the 1917 revolution, for a brief beautiful moment there is a short period of artistic freedoms, before the Communist Party moves in and starts dictating the form and content. In that moment artists like Mayakovsky and Valentina Kulagina and Ellissitzky start developing a sophisticated take on graphic design, blending new typography and text and photomontage.
Valentina Kulagina’s revolutionary image: ‘We Are Building’ is a photomontage of a hand painted welder on the skyline using a picture of an actual skyscraper from Chicago or Detroit, to demonstrate the creation of the new Russian cities.
And these new methods influence how we make art today. In a way, collage is the artform of the 20th century. From the post-revolutionary Russians, to the Weimar artists and right up to Andy Warhol, cut and paste is the medium of our visual landscape, and if you have ever created a poster for an event or a birthday party on one of the drag and drop online design platforms, it’s one in which you have participated. Every day, on every social media platform people are using photomontage to get their ideas into the world, shaping the flood of images and graphics that pour over us all day.
So, as you know, my big, big absurd idea for these podcasts, is that the Weimar Republic invented everything about the modern world, and we are all still dealing with the possibilities and problems it gave to us. To prove this possibly unprovable idea, I’ll be exploring the arts, politics, science, architecture, social innovations of the Weimar period, and of course, the terrible and irresistible rise of the Nazi Party. So, if you’re an art student and wondering how to get past all the gallery gatekeepers and show your work to the people, or a street-art graffiti lover who always wondered where Banksy stole all his ideas from, well this is the show for you
So, today we’re going to look at two visual artists from the Weimar period. I think it’s fair to say that their work was formed by the influence of all the white-hot, stressful events that made the Weimar Republic such a forge for new ideas. We’ll start with George Grosz.
GEORG GROSZ
‘I no longer hate people indiscriminately,’ wrote George Grosz in 1924. ‘Today I hate their bad institutions and those in power who defend those institutions.’ “I considered any art pointless if it did not put itself at the disposal of political struggle…my art was to be a gun and a sword”
George Grosz was born in 1893. He grew up in a drinking Bar run by his parents. When the Bar failed and his father died, the family moved to Berlin to the radical left-wing Wedding district where his mother and sisters became seamstresses to support the family and then, when his mother found a job in the army, they moved again to live close to the regiment. His earliest pictures are, ironically, filled with gallant soldiers in uniforms, sketches of imaginary adventure stories, cowboys and Indians and the wild west.
His artistic talent was evident from an early age and he was admitted to the Dresden Art Academy where he became a skilled draughtsman. But, when he left school and moved to Berlin, quickly becoming a regular at the infamous Café des Westens where the German Expressionists gathered, he spent hours sketching circus performers, prostitutes, disfigured veterans, and other incarnations of the ravages of war and the struggles of the poor.
From 1909 to 1913, Grosz sold cartoons and caricatures to magazines and spent time in Paris. Inspired by the war and adventure stories of his childhood, Grosz joined the army in 1914, but was given a medical discharge after only 6 months. We can immediately see the disappearance of idealist beliefs about army life in a painting like The Faith Healers (1916), where a rotting skeleton stands in front of the Army Doctors and is declared healthy enough to be a conscript.
In 1916, Georg Groß had his name legally changed to the English/American spelling George Grosz, which may have been an act of protest, to "de-Germanise" and internationalise his name, or, since all through his life he invented names for himself, like Count Bessler-Orffyre and George Leboeuf to Dr William King Thomas, might have just been a thing that he liked doing.
By the war’s end in 1918, Grosz had developed an unmistakable graphic style that combined a highly expressive use of line drawing with ferocious social caricature, which actually takes time honored traditions of German art history: combining the historic graphic tradition of Albert Durer, a tradition that started with the invention of the printing press, with brutally grotesque imagery that goes back to german medieval artists. Grosz used these to make his moral message very clear, and, as long as you have a very dark sense of humour, to amuse and entertain.
Albert Durer: my mother as a giraffe
He is inspired by earlier satirists like the French political cartoonist Honore Daumier and the English printmaker William Hogarth. Grosz joined the Communist Party of Germany and developed a political satire magazine called Die Pleite (Bankruptcy). In 1919, Grosz joined the Dada movement in Berlin, as his dystopic view of German society aligned with their ideals. He participated in the first Dada publications, exhibitions, and actions. He became a key figure of the Dada movement. God, I have to do an episode on Dada, but in brief: Dada started in Zurich around 1915, before spreading to other European cities as war came to an end, Dada is so hard to describe: it comes from the deep cynicism and disbelief in western ideals during and after the mayhem of World War. Dadaists concluded that the world had gone mad and that received values of truth and art and morality must be turned on their head. The made art, collages, sang wordless songs, made installations and created events that provocative stage performances — such as an obscene tap-dance routine with which apparently Grosz performed in Berlin to great acclaim. And which I would have loved to have seen!
A Dada poster
Grosz publishes collections of drawings: ‘The Face of the Ruling Class in 1921 and Ecce Homo in 1922. He is accused of pornography and fined, they caused such a scandal that Grosz felt like he needed apply for a pistol license on the grounds of self-defence. He was taken to court on charges that 52 of the book’s 100 images were pornographic, tried in February 1924 and was fined 6,000 marks and numerous plates from the publication were confiscated and banned. This was the first of three separate occasions on which Grosz was successfully sued for producing offensive artwork. I have a suspicion that each one of those occasions delighted him. The collections are filled with fat aristocracy, greedy capitalists, smug bourgeoisie as well as impoverished factory labourers, the poor, and unemployed... He says: quote: “what I had discerned from the pr-war period could be summed up as follows: human beings are swine. All the prattle about ethics is a swindle, intended for the stupid. There is no point to life than to satisfy one’s hunger for food and women. The soul does not exist”
Grosz traveled to Russia with the Danish writer Martin Andersen Nexø. Upon their arrival in Murmansk they were briefly arrested as spies; after their credentials were approved, they were allowed to continue their journey. Grosz's six-month stay in the Soviet Union left him unimpressed by what he had seen. He ended his membership in the KPD communist party in 1923.
So, let’s look at some of the work. You can find all of these on my website, or just through an image search.
I’ll post a series of his amazing line drawings and describe a couple here: I guess you could call them cartoons but looking at them you have to remember that Grosz is a highly trained graphic artist, since, at a glance, they seem to be the work of an amateur, but Grosz uses this deliberately naïve style to capture truths that cut to the bone of his subject matter.
The Faith Healers
This work, also known by the title, Fit for Active Service, is a line drawing cartoon, which depicts a doctor inspecting a rotting skeleton with an ear trumpet, pronouncing him "KV" (short for kriegsverwendungsfahig, or "fit for combat"). Around the two, bald-headed brutal looking officers stare into space, unconcerned with the state of the new conscript. The scene refers in part to the desperate shortage of soldiers toward the end of war, after the German forces suffered heavy losses and the re-inscription of wounded men.
Shut Your Mouth and Keep on Serving
Christ on the cross in boots and a gas mask holding out a crucifix. The image led to a trial against Grosz and his publisher, Wieland Herzfelde, who were both accused of blasphemy. Originating from set designs that Grosz created for a stage production of The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schwejk, a popular satirical novel that takes place during World War I. This Christ is the same one hanging over alters across Germany as Ministers and Priests exhorted the population to obey the Kaiser and fight for Germany.
Daum Marries Her Pedantic Automaton "George" in May 1920. John Heartfield is very glad of it.
Grosz married Eva Peter, another artist. Daum was an anagram of his nickname for her ‘Maud’. In this collage with sketching and painting on top, ‘Daum’ is dressed for seduction and Grosz is depicted as a robot, a central Dadaist motif and Futurist idea that defined the artist as machine. His publisher said the painting was about how how marriage: quote: "comes between the bride and groom like a shadow, this fact that, at the very moment when the wife is allowed to make known her secret desire and reveal her body, her husband turns to other soberly pedantic arithmetical problems. Daum was exhibited at the First International Dada Fair, along with a portfolio of satirical drawings entitled Gott mit uns (God with us). The organizers, including Grosz, were put on trial and fined for "grossly insulting the German army."
Germany: A Winter's Tale
“The bourgouisie and the petty bourgouisie have armed themselves against the rising proletariat with, among other things, ‘culture’. Among a wild tornado of images, crucifixes and coffins and naked women and chaotic street scenes and revolution, a bourgeois man sits down to eat. At the bottom three grotesque figures represent church, army and state. A Winter's Tale was named after a poem by Heinrich Heine, that was banned at the time of its 1844 publication due to its perceptive criticism of German society.
Grosz moved to the US in 1933, just a week before Hitler became German chancellor. The Nazis labelled him ‘Cultural Bolshevist Number One’, and destroyed many of the works he’d left behind and included others in their Entartete Kunst exhibition of ‘degenerate art’ in Munich in 1937.
By this point, however, Grosz was enjoying his life in the USA where he split his artistic work between street scenes of Manhattan and windswept landscapes of Cape Cod. For the former, he roamed New York by day, sketchbook in hand, creating finished versions of his scenes by night — youcan see a typical result of this process, Quick Lunch, which shows multi-racial customers of all economic backgrounds crowding around a fast-food counter.
Grosz gained American citizenship in 1938, and he had a 1941 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. But Grosz made few sales and was forced to resume teaching. He declared he was finished with social and political issues, and his style softened. However, some of his last pieces from 1958 were photomontages and recall his earlier Dadaist aesthetic and message, passing judgment on consumerism and American culture. In 1959, Grosz sold his house and moved back to Berlin. He died shortly after his return, after a fall down the stairs.
Grosz's work might be grotesque and capture the worst of humanity, but it also expressed sympathy for workers suffering in the new post-war capitalism. ‘To show the oppressed the true face of their masters is the purpose of my work,’ he once said. But he also sa ys, “in reality I myself was everybody I drew, the rich man favored by fate, stuffing himself and guzzling champagne, as much as the one who stood outside in the pouring rain holding out his hand. I was, as it were, divided in two”
JOHN HEARTFIELD
"The important man is not the artist, but the businessman who, in the marketplace and on the battlefield, holds the reins in his hands." Said John Heartfield and "There are a lot of things that got me into working with photos. The main thing is that I saw both what was being said and not being said with photos in the newspapers...”
John Heartfield was born Helmut Herzfeld was born in 1891. At the age of 14, he became an apprentice in a small publishing company. He then worked as a graphic designer for advertising and studied at the School of Arts and Crafts working with a well-known artist and graphic designer Ernst Neumann, who made a lasting impact on his work.
In 1913 he moves to Berlin, with the hope of becoming a painter and he immediately became part of the bohemian circles in the city. A futurist exhibition had a huge influence on him: in it he realized that artists could take a stand through their art. The drawings of Georg Grosz, to whom he would become close, were "both a revelation and a cold shower" as Helmut’s brother Wieland put it: "Until then we thought that art was what made beauty visible and audible. Grosz allowed us to stop seeing the ordinary world as dry, dull and boring, and to start seeing it as a drama in which stupidity, coarseness and laziness shared the main roles. Following this discovery, Helmut burned everything he had done until then.
When in 1914 war broke out, the brothers were both drafted, Herzfelde to the front lines. Helmut managed to avoid active service by feigning mental illness. In 1916 Helmut Herzfeld decided to change his name, as an act of protest against the war, and against German patriotism and John Heartfield is created. Heartfield joined the German Communist Party in 1918 and in that same year he and Grosz became founding members of the Berlin Dada Club, which included avant-garde artists such as Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, and Johannes Baader. Again, Dada’s emphasis on the illogical, the irrational and the absurd called out to these young artists who were witnessing a world gone mad in WW1. The nonsense of Dada was a reaction to the insistence of the ruling classes that their decisions were in some way logical and sensible. Heartfield said Dada was "an effort to disrupt the high impulses of the intellect - the spiritual, the mystical, and the subjective - but only to reach the truth behind them. "
And as an anti-art movement, Dada allowed Heartfield the freedom to experiment with new materials and forms of expression. And he starts with a clean slate with the new discipline of photomontage. Though, Heartfield prefers to call himself a "fotomonteur", a more technical word, rather than an "artist": instead using photographic material as the raw material for a final image, drawing, painting, trimming the photograph, using parts of historical pictures to change the meaning of the image. Heartfield would also stage elaborate scenes in the photographic studio to provide the raw material for his work. And Heartfield also revolutionized printing and graphic design. He broke the vertical/horizontal norms by playing with the characters he scattered in his Dada works. He poured plaster around the type blocks to hold them at a different angle during printing in order to break with the line of the texts.
During the 1920s Heartfield also designed sets for plays directed by Erwin Piscator, the founder of the Proletarian Theatre in Berlin, and befriended and collaborated with playwright Bertolt Brecht. Heartfield's overall goal was to create a community of revolutionary-minded citizen artists who would actively contribute to radical social change.
At the end of the twenties, Heartfield had achieved much success, ranging from popular appeal to mainstream approval: Especially famous are his anti-fascist montages, for which he was persecuted by the Nazis and spied on by Gestapo agents. He was hailed in the leading graphic arts journals, designed a myriad of German Social Democratic Party and German Communist Party publications, especially for the Communist Party’s magazine the Red Flag. Heartfield eventually began to work exclusively for the left-wing Workers' Illustrated Magazine: AIZ. I’ll post a series of the covers he did for AIZ. They are the most extraordinary take-downs in history, as Heartfield skewers the Nazi party and the right-wing in a series of brutal photomontages. The image of a blood spattered Herman Goering in a butchers apron is simply terrifying.
Okay, let’s talk about some of the art:
POSTER – THE HAND HAS FIVE FINGERS John Heartfield
This one is easy to describe: imagine a open, grasping hand, palm out to the viewer, fingers spread. And then look closer: this is an actual hand of a working man, calloused and rough. Underneath it the text says: “ The hand has five fingers, with five fingers we can defeat the enemy “. The image is printed and plastered over walls across Germany, taking advantage of the new possibilities of the commercial printing press and mass distribution. It is so effective that it wins awards in the trade journals of advertising in Germany and the gesture becomes an actual greeting of communist party members on the street.
AIZ cover, The Meaning of Geneva, Peace Cannot Live Where Greed Capital Exists!
This photomontage focuses on a white dove, a symbol of peace, impaled by a bayonet. Published on the cover of the November 27th issue of the Workers' Illustrated Magazine, Heartfield reacts to the Geneva disarmament conference that took place on November 9, 1932, as well as comments on the police's violent reaction against protesters who demonstrated against fascism in front of the palace of the United Nations. Heartfield was inspired by the Swiss stamp issued on the occasion of the disarmament conference, showing a dove freely hovering over a broken sword. Heartfield subtracts the sword and added the bayonet.
1929 photomontage "Self-Portrait with the Police Commissioner Zörgiebel,"
Heartfield depicted himself cutting off the head of Berlin's police chief, Karl Zörgiebel, with scissors, a satirical critique of Zörgiebel's policies and a visual representation of Heartfield's photomontage technique. This is also a mock execution, a satirical critique of this police commissioner's ruthless policies - for example, the unprecedented police violence unleashed against the Communist demonstrators on May Day, 1929 in Berlin
And then one of his most recognized photomontages from around 1932: Adolf the Superman Swallows Gold and Spouts Tin,
which is a picture of Hitler with his mouth open and with a photomontage of an X-ray superimposed over his torso, revealing an esophagus made of gold coins and a pile of coins in the pit of his stomach
In 1933, with the election of Hitler, the Gestapo is after him. He flees (on foot) to the Czech Republic where he contributed 36 photomontages to the Third International Caricature Exhibition in Prague in April 1934. The Germans demanded they be removed from the front display windows and then demanded they be removed from the exhibition all together. When he flees to France, the Gestapo demands that he be transferred back to Germany and he escapes again to England where he continues to work and exhibit. When England goes to war in 1940, he is imprisoned for several months as a political refugee, but eventually begins work again as a freelance illustrator for Penguin books. He lives for almost twenty years in the UK, but returns to Berlin in 1950. In the first years there, he was not permitted to work, since photomontage was still forbidden among the orthodoxy of soviet socialist realism." Bertolt Brecht, another returning Weimar exile who started his own theater The Berliner Ensemble, offered Heartfield a job designing his theater posters. Heartfield passed away at the age of 76 in 1968.
I’ll finish with a quote that is so unbelievably timely that it makes me shiver:
“There are a lot of things that got me into working with photos. The main thing is that I saw both what was being said and not being said with photos in the newspapers... I found out how you can fool people with photos, really fool them... You can lie and tell the truth by putting the wrong title or wrong captions under them, and that's roughly what was being done.”
The legacy of Heartfield and Grosz is huge. Both in the way they addressed their subject matter: taking it upon themselves as artists to confront the largest political subjects of their day and seeing themselves as vital parts of movements for change, and also for the technical aspects of their work: photomontage, collage, and for Grosz, taking the cartoon into the 20th century and making it into a vital satirical form.
So, once again, if some of the concerns and desires in these stories seem familiar, well they should, because I believe the Weimar Republic helped give birth to the modern world.
Thanks for listening. Hit subscribe or follow if you want to know when the next episode appears. I don’t have any advertising budget for this show or really a budget at all, I’m just some obsessed singer repurposing an old microphone, so if you leave a review on your app, or hit the star button, it really encourages the podcast to be found by other listeners, or just forward a link to a friend, that’d be great. And I hope you’ll join me in the coming months as I explore more about the strange birth, life and death of an experiment in creating a new society.
I’ll put images for this episode onto my website: bremnersings.com.
And who am I to discuss Weimar? Well, I’m not a sociologist, a political scientist or an historian. I’m an obsessive artist. A singer, play-write and cabaret performer who has been obsessed with the arts and music of the Weimar republic all my life. I’ve recorded three albums dedicated to the music of this time and particularly the music of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. If you want to listen to them, just search for Bremner Fletcher Duthie in any music streaming site, and you’ll find all my albums. And if you want to know more about my work, see the images from the period, or suggest a specific Weimar subject for an episode, check out bremnersings.com
Join me next time for another walk through the amazing creative madness of 1920’s Germany.
