Hitler's Last Hostages Page 24
Grosz was furious that these graphic artworks made Americans so queasy that publishers did not want to distribute them. He wrote to Herzfelde that while he understood they were “atrocious scenes,” depictions of Nazi atrocities “require a certain truthfulness.” Still, he expressed to Herzfelde a conflicting, visceral desire to protect his native country now that he was on foreign soil, though he would soon shed this inhibition.5
Another 1934 work by Grosz, Peace, was completely devoid of the violence and sexuality that made Americans uncomfortable. In Peace, Grosz predicted that Germany would successfully pressure other powerful nations to appease Hitler’s rapacious desires, triggering a second Great War. In the work, three cars speed along a road, egged on by a back car bearing a swastika on its hood. The first three cars bear the flags of Imperial Japan, Italy, and the Second Spanish Republic. On the side of the road, an angel of peace, drenched in the stormy weather, her wings dripping, holds a reed upon which is scrawled the supplication “PEACE.” She tries in vain to flag the nations down. Grosz created the work a full two years before the Spanish Civil War, three years before the Second Sino-Japanese War, and five years before World War II. It seemed too preposterous to be prophetic, and no institution would publish or display it.6
Writing Herzfelde again, Grosz complained, “Dearest Wiz, I believe that only a very small part of [Americans] who are already intellectually inclined are interested in my ‘art,’” he wrote, noting that the struggle was even harder as Americans increasingly were turning to film for entertainment and reflection.7 Still, he wrote Herzfelde, he hoped to assimilate regardless.
Grosz risked one trip back to Europe to alleviate his homesickness, as well as to dampen his guilt at leaving behind his frail mother. She had not wanted to emigrate because she did not foresee war but still had urged her son to escape the death threats that he and his family were receiving from the Nazis. Between May and September 1935 Grosz visited France, the Netherlands, and Denmark, arranging to see his mother outside Germany. Inspired by the trip, Grosz created a series of works depicting castaways and shipwrecks as metaphors for the dislocation of European intellectuals, hoping to draw attention to the matter in the United States. Yet the works failed to sell; the topic was too depressing for Americans, many of whom saw Grosz’s immigration to America more as a strategic move to benefit his career than as a result of direct persecution, a danger that they still largely dismissed.8
Despite feeling adrift, Grosz looked on 1936 with optimism. The year promised to see the publication in the United States of Interregnum, a portfolio of sixty-four drawings made between 1918 and 1936 on the themes of fascism, antifascism, and communism, most of which neither the German public nor the American public had ever seen. He hoped that it would be just as successful in America as his portfolios had been in Germany—not only financially but also to serve as a catalyst for intellectual reflection and political change.
In The Voice of Reason, the artist mocked the idea that Nazism could be stopped with words instead of military force. In the drawing, an intellectual on a broomstick horse, wearing a dunce cap, is dwarfed by German troops passing by him, wearing swastika boot spurs. Nazism, Grosz advises, is too terrible to be stopped by rhetoric alone. In Jigsaw Puzzle Grosz warns America against considering communist Russia a possible long-term ally. The work shows the body of a man divided in half, modeled on the Roman god Janus. The right half is a scowling fascist, with a soldier’s cap, a gun slung on his back, and a knife in hand. The other half, a communist, is smiling but holds a hammer concealed in a bunch of peace reeds. Grosz’s message is clear: both communism and fascism are enemies of America and, ultimately, two sides of the same danger—violent authoritarianism. Grosz warned decades before the Cold War that after fascism was defeated, communism would pose the next threat.
Publishing such incendiary works in 1936 was risky for Grosz; holding only a German passport, he was risking extradition now that the Nazi government made criticism of the Reich a prosecutable offense for German citizens. Though the chance of this was relatively small, it was an extra burden Grosz put on himself.
Hoping for support from American cultural heavyweights, Grosz wrote to Ernest Hemingway in July 1936, asking him to write an introduction for Interregnum. He praised Hemingway’s writing and politely explained that he had undergone difficulties establishing himself after fleeing fascism, an ideology that the thirty-seven-year-old author fervently opposed. “I think a writer like you (naturally, if you’re interested) can write a much better essay than an erudite ‘Art Historian,’ or some professional bloke,” Grosz wrote.9 Hemingway never replied, and Grosz decided to publish without the support of prestigious intellectuals—the kind of support that he had received in Berlin.
The book launch failed, in large part due to overpricing by the publisher, who charged $50. The amount was far out of reach for most Americans, given that the working class, which had made up the majority of Grosz fans in Germany, earned around $14 weekly. Compounding the failure was the fact that even educated Americans were largely ignorant of European politics, making the unlabeled and unexplained pieces of highly specific social satire fall flat. Out of a planned edition of 280, only about 40 were sold. There was very little press coverage, as Grosz was still learning English, and even the New Republic declared it an unrealistically negative view of European politics.
Interregnum was Grosz’s last great portfolio of artworks. Instead of invigorating his faith in the American art world, it exposed to Grosz the large chasm between his desire to integrate and the language and cultural barriers he faced.
Grosz’s challenges grew after a December 1936 exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), titled Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism. The section on Surrealism, the genre more popular in the United States, was more thoroughly researched and laid out; visually, it was more entertaining. The section on Dada, by contrast, lacked an explanation of its origins as a movement that often purposefully made nonsensical art in an effort to demonstrate how post–World War I Europe was embroiled in illogical, chaotic policies and growing racial intolerance. Instead, the movement to which Grosz had belonged seemed pointless to Americans. Lazily, MoMA did not fully translate commentaries in German by Grosz and Herzfelde that explained Dada’s goals. Moreover, it arranged the works among famous pieces by revered Old Masters such as Hieronymus Bosch, resulting in a hodgepodge exhibition of three wildly disparate artistic movements. The tragic consequence was that Dada, a movement that staunchly supported equal rights for Jews worldwide, was poorly understood and subsequently pilloried by Paul Rosenfeld, a prominent Jewish American critic: “Dada indeed was anti-art. It was the startling continuation, by a number of hurt and embittered, or possibly merely lazy and envious artists, of the world’s perennial effort to belittle art and dismiss it.”10 It was a devastating end to 1936 for Grosz. The next few years would bring some significant successes professionally but no respite from his anxiety.
The first half of 1937 felt unbearably painful. Learning in exile about the Degenerate Art Exhibition, Grosz became depressed about his failure to stop the Nazi Party’s rise. He tried to reach out for advice from his trusted art dealer, the Jewish German Alfred Flechtheim, only to learn that after fleeing to London, the fifty-eight-year-old had become frail due to the stress and died after slipping on a piece of ice. “I’m muddled,” Grosz wrote to a friend stuck in Berlin.
Grosz drew some comfort from helping the few other German dissidents who made it to America. In July 1937, he rushed to Ellis Island to meet Hermann Borchardt, a Jewish German writer and friend who, astoundingly, had escaped Dachau. He “sat there, bewildered and frightened, without a jacket, in a raincoat over a shirt, a conspicuous figure under the scorching sun,” observed Grosz.11 He invited Borchardt to live in his home, drawing a beautiful portrait of him in chalk. The work was hopeful—the kind of happy ending Americans preferred—and masterfully showed Borchardt as frail but strong, slightly haunted yet dignified, in a lo
ose white shirt, looking forward to being part of the American dream. Still, no one wanted to purchase the work, as prospective buyers were captivated instead by more dramatic artists like Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali.
Not all Americans ignored Grosz’s efforts. He drew hope from receiving a coveted Guggenheim Fellowship in 1937, which allowed him to devote himself fully to his art for the next two years. He continued trying to find an artistic style appealing to Americans without eschewing his roots. The pressure to do this became more intense in summer 1938 when the Nazis stripped Grosz and his wife of their citizenship, rendering them stateless. The US State Department worked quickly to grant him a hearing for US citizenship. Though viscerally devastated, Grosz would not let himself properly process his grief once he heard of the horrors inflicted on Jewish Germans on Reichskristallnacht on 9 November, an atrocity that made him feel ashamed to have been born a German Protestant.12 Yet he was unmoored and increasingly turned toward alcohol and nicotine to cope. In a rare self-portrait, titled Myself and the Bathroom Mirror, Grosz is looking into a mirror inside a bathroom cabinet in his new home in Douglaston, Long Island, where he has stashed an assortment of wine and liquor bottles. It was a brutal confession that his alcohol dependency, artistic creativity, and stress release had become inextricably intertwined. The work was lauded by the Art Institute of Chicago, which put it on display in the museum.
Recognizing Grosz’s troubles, Eva organized a vacation for the family to Cape Cod. The time away from New York City in the summer of 1939 cheered Grosz greatly, reminding him of the trips to the Baltic Sea that he had taken as a child. “My drawings mirror my mood. I was happy again,” Grosz noted two decades later of his Cape Cod summer.13 During the vacation, he drew sketches of Peter, now thirteen, and Marty, now nine, as they frolicked in the waves. His enthusiasm for exploring the beach with his boys made them feel loved, as they delighted in the “inherent curiosity” that their father “just couldn’t turn off,” Marty observed.14 He also created a series of delicate drawings of the dunes at Truro on the cape, a subtly sexual work that he paired in an exhibition in New York with a drawing of Eva sleeping nude on the beach, the mound of her vulva echoing the shape and style of the dunes. It was meant to be a touching tribute to his beloved wife and the mother of his children, a drawing that would have been considered mild even by Hitler’s standards. Yet the sexuality, particularly that of a mother, made the general American public uncomfortable. One of his Cape Cod works was awarded the esteemed Watson F. Blair Prize by the Art Institute of Chicago, which included a much appreciated $600 award, but the others failed to sell well.
Infuriatingly for Grosz, the exhibition of his Cape Cod works coincided with a display at MoMA of Pablo Picasso’s antiwar painting Guernica, only two years old, which MoMA’s director Alfred Barr declared the sole significant antifascist work of art. It was a slap in the face to everything George Grosz had worked on and sacrificed for over the past twenty years—and a sign of Barr’s unfulfilled promise to help Grosz integrate into the upper strata of the New York art world. The Cape Cod artworks had been Grosz’s attempt to create the type of pleasant art that Americans supposedly wanted. Now, recognizing the looming threat of war in Europe, MoMA and the American public were declaring that no one was producing antifascist art except for Picasso, who in reality had spent the past several years creating apolitical art.
Dismayed but undaunted, Grosz continued creating artwork correctly predicting international military policy in ways that even the Department of War did not foresee. He was almost certain his works would not sell but felt an inescapable moral compulsion to warn the world. In one work from 1940 that languished unpublished, Grosz depicted Hitler in an armchair with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, a pistol at his side. Behind the Führer hangs a poster indicating that Germany has staged a failed campaign against Russia, a chillingly prescient image given that Hitler and Stalin had just signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939, promising neutrality; Hitler would not break it until a year after Grosz completed this work on paper.15
Straitened finances required Grosz to return to teaching in 1941, a job he enjoyed because he loved interacting with students but that made him feel like a failure for not earning enough from the sale of his art. He finally managed to publish one drawing that delicately depicted the strength of a concentration camp prisoner in Germany in his regulation pajamas, behind a barbed wire fence, gaunt and bald but determined to live. Grosz had mined the details of the piece from Borchardt, his friend who had escaped Dachau. It was far more accurate than contemporaneous journalism in America, which was largely ignoring Hitler’s atrocities.
Months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Grosz had predicted that an attack by the Axis powers, quite possibly an aerial attack, would force President Franklin D. Roosevelt to enter the war, making Americans feel foolish for not recognizing the threat earlier. In A Handful of Don Quixotes, an ink-and-pen work on paper, an American man on a tiny horse waves a banner urging “KEEP AMERICA OUT” of the war, even as swarms of Axis airplanes come to bomb the mountain on which he is standing. Author Ben Hecht published the drawing in one of his books, but US involvement in the European war still seemed like a fantasy to many Americans. Grosz resisted the urge to publicly declare “I told you so” after the attack in Hawaii on 7 December 1941 killed over 2,300 people.16
Characteristic of his fearless nature, Grosz was open with journalists about his depression, his anxiety in exile, and his persistent hopes in the face of what he perceived as his current failure. Despite appearing in over fifteen exhibitions in 1942 and 1943, Grosz was unable to sell much artwork. In February 1943, he gave an interview to Helen Boswell, a leading journalist for Art Digest, in which he was blunt about his torment. “I am torn in two,” he told Boswell. “It is like living in a haunted house, you can’t escape it and you can’t forget.”17
At the end of the year, the New Yorker published three lengthy articles focusing on Grosz. The series, by Richard O. Boyer, opened with the declaration that “George Grosz is one of the world’s great artists,” chronicling his success at integrating into America. Grosz had, Boyer noted, a “handsome, buxom” wife, a two-story house with a lovely garden and a new lawnmower, and a feisty Scottish Terrier named Punch.18 The article also noted that Grosz had successfully reared two intelligent and polite sons who attended the esteemed Dwight School and Phillips Andover Academy. Unbeknownst to Boyer, Grosz now had enlisted his son Marty in not only mastering English but also understanding what the artist considered the pinnacle of subtle American satire: New Yorker cartoons.19
Yet Boyer indicated some of Grosz’s inner turmoil: describing him as “a taut, and troubled German of middle age, with suspicious blue eyes in a brick-red face,” Boyer noted that Grosz felt anxious and under pressure as an immigrant artist.20 He felt a burden that an “artist must find and identify that extra something for which there are no words.”21 Boyer referred to “demons in the suburbs,” noting that Grosz had become obsessed with dissecting the nature of evil. The journalist described the artist as a man who had thrown himself into learning how to successfully integrate without taking time to mourn the shock of exile.
At night, Boyer observed, Grosz bounced between trying to relax by reading inspiring books, such as Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, and absorbing horror books and nonfiction works on serial killers; his literary pursuits were part of the artist’s never-ending search to identify the “it” that results in evil like that of Adolf Hitler.22 He decorated his studio with reproductions of art by Norman Rockwell, only one year his junior, as symbols of a reassuring normalcy. Rockwell’s works contrasted strikingly with his own creations, which were filled with trauma, death, and destruction.23
“When Grosz does talk about himself, he has the gingerly, tentative manner of a man fingering a bruise,” wrote Boyer.24 The series observed the signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, but it was a full nine years before the first Diagnostic an
d Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I) would attempt to identify this type of stress that victims of trauma often exhibit.
There simply was no set of terms available to Grosz to begin to describe his pain. The artist angrily vented to Boyer that Hitler’s rise to power and thus the slaughter of millions could have been prevented. It was a point that the New Yorker article addressed in a dismissive quip without acknowledging its veracity: “Grosz feels that if the rest of the world had been as psychically observant as he was, everybody would have known as early as 1919 that Fascism was coming,” wrote Boyer, as if Grosz were speaking from the benefit of hindsight rather than having warned about this for years.25
Boyer introduced his third and final installment, titled “The Yankee from Berlin,” by announcing that he would focus on Grosz’s current work. Throughout the entire article, however, the journalist continued to focus on Grosz’s life before Hitler’s rise to power. In fact, in all three articles, Boyer did not describe any artwork that Grosz had created after coming to America in 1933. Though his profile was an astute, if flawed, observation of what brought the artist to America, it did little to educate readers about Grosz’s contemporary work and the decade he had spent in America attempting to sound the alarm about the threat that Hitler posed to the United States.26