Hitler's Last Hostages Page 26

  Harris arranged for the artworks that Grosz created to be exhibited at the Dallas Museum of Art under the title Impressions of Dallas. They showed Grosz’s observational techniques at their best. During the twelve years he had spent living in the United States, Grosz had grown to appreciate African American culture to an extent that represented a significant progression from the attitude that he had shown upon first arriving in America. Though he was now an American himself, Grosz’s German roots allowed him to visit and depict Dallas’s African American community in a way that a native-born citizen could not at the time. In A Glimpse into the Negro Section of Dallas, a watercolor in bold tones of brown, gold, black, and red, the artist portrayed a crowd of black Texans as distinct, dignified individuals. In the foreground, a young black woman with a chic bob and trendy red lipstick walks toward the left; a dapper older man wearing a fedora and sporting a chic yellow and blue coat—much the type favored by Grosz himself—walks toward the right. In the background is a lively bar.

  The generous $15,000 that Grosz earned from Harris allowed him in 1953 to pay off the mortgage on his house in Long Island. Remarking on this success, Grosz wrote in his journal that buying the house for Eva and himself was a successful embodiment of the American dream.

  Still, this success came with yet another bureaucratic frustration—this time from America. At the same time as he came into ownership of his house, Grosz became the subject of a two-year investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), whose officials required him to fill out reams of forms confirming that he was not a communist threat. This enraged Grosz because he had been an early outspoken critic of communism, an ideology against which he had warned for twenty years.47 The effects of the Red Scare also extended to the American art world’s treatment of Grosz. The Whitney Museum in Manhattan curated a retrospective of Grosz that traveled to Kansas City, Pasadena, and San Francisco. Yet the curators refused to highlight the criticism of communism that had been present in Grosz’s art for years, fearing that doing so would bring attention to the fact that Grosz had briefly been a pacifistic communist in the early 1920s and cause the FBI to investigate the museums.

  After reading in a newspaper that the Metropolitan Museum of Art had paid $15,000 for a single Salvador Dali painting—a gargantuan sum at the time—Grosz contacted a lawyer to see if he could seek compensation from the German governments for not only his artworks that the Nazis had confiscated from museums but also the works they had stolen directly from his studio after he fled in 1933. He was unsuccessful. Both East and West Germany, he realized, felt it was in their best interests to discourage programs that compensated the victims of Hitler’s regime.

  By the beginning of 1956, Grosz was plummeting, despite his best efforts, into the very type of nihilism espoused by Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko against which Grosz had warned his students. For the past several years, Grosz’s disdain for Pollock had grown, particularly as Pollock was seeing more commercial success. Privately, Grosz referred to Pollock as “the dribbler” and, more wittily, “Jack the Dripper,” even as Grosz envied his seemingly perfect life.48 In that he was mistaken: within a few months, Pollock would run his car off the road in a drunken stupor, killing himself and a passenger.

  If Pollock’s destructiveness was internalized, Grosz’s was globalized. The world appalled him; his family, however, he cherished. Grosz had a wife whom he adored and who adored him in return. He was deeply proud of and close to his sons, Peter and Marty, and took solace in celebrating Christmas together with them, Eva, Peter’s wife Lillian, and Karin, the baby girl whom Lillian had recently delivered. He desperately wanted to be happy, and for those few days, he was. Yet, as he wrote in his journal, after the carols were sung, the presents unwrapped, and the children returned to their homes, it seemed so difficult. He scribbled a garbled poem on a crumpled paper about his thoughts regarding his future:

  it is all over—

  everything’s lost—

  nothing—

  NOTHING—

  is working out

  over

  it is

  Nothing49

  Grosz was now spending between $35 and $50 every eight weeks for large orders of alcohol at a local liquor store—roughly three times the amount an average family of three paid for groceries at that time. Eva encouraged him to go to local Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and he did, but he found the program ineffective. His sons tried to help, and he was open with them about needing their support.

  The final straw for Grosz came after he served on a jury for a local art show in Huntington. He did so as a favor to his community but became infuriated after hearing the other jurors ridicule art on display that was not abstract while complaining that Grosz’s art was outdated. Afterward, Grosz told Marty that he felt like an inadequate and weak father, husband, and grandfather. “I’m honestly just a dumb dog—I could just throw up,” he told his son.50

  George Grosz was teaching the next generations of art world luminaries. Among the students at the Art Students League were Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and James Rosenquist. Yet he felt that he belonged to the past.

  So it was that in autumn 1958, George and Eva Grosz decided to move back to West Berlin, a tentative step toward repatriation after twenty-five years in exile. Eva’s family was still in the city, and while she had appreciated all that America had provided her, her husband, and her children, she had never shaken off an intense feeling of homesickness. George’s strength to work temporarily returned. He climbed atop piles of rubble still left over from the war, sitting for hours and furiously drawing the city’s ruins.

  Grosz’s politically infused sense of humor also returned. Now, he aimed it at the postwar government that wanted to forget the origins of the catastrophe. He wrote an op-ed in Berlin’s Telegraf newspaper, weighing in on the debate over what to do with the bombed-out Kaiser-Wilhelm Memorial Church in West Berlin. Some West Berliners wanted to fully restore it, while others wanted to tear it down. Grosz had a different, stinging suggestion: “One should, I think, leave the single remaining [church] tower just as it is, as a sign of remembering and reality, instead of fully restoring it.” He then went on, in a scathingly sarcastic tone, to propose turning it into a tourist attraction. Perhaps, he suggested, the remnants of the war could be bedecked in gold and silver coins: “Everyone will speak of the ‘ideal city,’ and the few million in costs will quickly be recouped,” he quipped.51 He may not have intended his suggestion to be taken seriously, but apart from the flourish with gold coins, the West German government adopted exactly the policies that Grosz predicted they would implement. Visitors to the church, its last remaining tower carefully stabilized and officially designated a memorial to the horrors of the war, would eventually carefully wind their way through market stalls hawking gaudy jewelry, souvenirs, and trinkets for an oversized profit, a portion of which they paid to the government.

  Back in Long Island, as 1958 came to a close, Eva wrote to Herzfelde about Grosz’s depression, arguing that the permanent move back to Berlin was the best solution. Eva acknowledged that Grosz’s depression significantly stemmed from his feeling that the German governments under which he had lived had robbed him of his possessions and career. She wrote to the German government pleading for restitution of some kind. “It was horrible for us to know that Germans had destroyed most of my husband’s [artistic] output,” she wrote, adding, “I can only claim—rightfully so—that the Nazis have ruined our lives.” She pointed out that emigration had “fully changed” George Grosz from the vibrant man she had married in the 1920s into someone depressed and broken. “When we received the news that a large portion of his life’s work had been burned up by the Nazis, [he had] a total breakdown. From that day forward, his psyche changed,” she wrote, concluding, “I am of the opinion, that the Nazis did not only destroy a large portion of his life’s work, but completely destroyed his health.”52 The West German government eventually awarded George and Eva Grosz 117,437 marks and se
nt its sincerest condolences. It was a fraction of the monetary loss that Grosz had suffered.53

  By the end of 1958, Eva felt that the family had sacrificed enough for George and that a return to Germany would benefit her marriage.54 The couple had several talks and decided to move back to Berlin, selling their cottage in Long Island for around $20,000 to finance the move.

  In May 1959, the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York awarded George Grosz the Gold Medal for Graphic Arts, a tremendous achievement for any American artist, especially a foreign-born one. Grosz took the podium to speak to the audience, which included the playwright Arthur Miller, who was accompanied by his glamorous wife, the actress Marilyn Monroe.

  The acceptance speech that Grosz gave was a rousing, articulate swan song, a scathingly honest, witty, and self-deprecating entreaty to encourage improvement in the nation that he had grown to love. He had, Grosz reminded his audience, come to New York twenty-six years earlier as a German. He was now leaving as an American.

  Pacing along the stage, Grosz simultaneously made his audience feel entertained and uncomfortable. “The life of an artist is a story of constant growth, constant curiosity, and of observations and explorations,” he began. Grosz argued that contributing to culture necessitated creating artworks that stood the test of time. “The thing is, for the general public, a drawing without a history is uninteresting,” he noted, before transitioning into a criticism of abstract art. In a remarkable show of constraint, Grosz kept his remarks earnest but polite. “The decisive rejection of reality is a dangerous thing,” he warned of the movement’s nihilistic tendencies. “I’ve experienced the hidden joys and the horror and the angst of [life],” Grosz noted. Pausing to contemplate his career, however, Grosz pointed to a moment in time that had made him feel truly content and fully loved: the summer he had spent with Eva and his sons at Cape Cod. “I was filled with joy and inner peace,” he noted.55 The crowd had no way of knowing that his allusion to that summer was his way of paying tribute to Eva’s love and loyalty over the past forty years. It was their special secret.

  A week later, Eva and George Grosz left for West Berlin. They arrived carrying the same suitcases with which they had fled to America, now a bit more battered and faded.56 Eva expected—and George hoped—to join a community in Berlin that was at least somewhat similar than the one they had left.

  It was nowhere to be found.

  Otto Dix, who had made his name creating works depicting the graphic horrors of World War I, had been conscripted into the Volkssturm in 1945 while in his early fifties. He had been captured by the French and returned to Berlin emotionally shattered, one of Grosz’s few friends still living in Germany. Many of Grosz’s friends were now resigned to living in the countries to which they had been exiled. Erwin Blumenfeld—the friend who many years ago had woken up seminaked in Grosz’s bathtub—had moved to New York and become a successful fashion photographer. Given the decline of Berlin’s status in the art world, he had no intention of returning. Oskar Kokoschka had fled to Prague after Hitler took power and then to London. He was also mired in depression, regretting that he had not done more to be part of an anti-Hitler resistance movement and feeling personally responsible for the atrocities that his society had committed.57 Kokoschka had received British citizenship and did not want to move back to Germany.

  While dealing with the shock of reentry, George and Eva also were forced to confront how many of their friends and compatriots were now dead, mostly as a result of Hitler’s policies. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner had fled to Switzerland, fallen into a depression, and shot himself in June 1938. The diplomat Harry Kessler, Grosz’s patron, had stayed out of Germany after Hitler took power, spending time in Mallorca, scared to return to the Reich given his homosexuality and anti-Nazi sentiments. He had died in a clinic in Lyon in November 1937. Käthe Kollwitz had her home destroyed in a bombing in 1943; she held on until two days after Hitler’s death in April 1945 before she died herself, having never really recovered from the loss of her son in the Great War. The Jewish German author Kurt Tucholsky, who had widely and publicly praised Grosz during the Weimar Republic, had fled to Sweden and become depressed, overdosing five days before Christmas 1935 in the southwestern village of Hindås. Max Beckmann had left Germany after the opening of the House of German Art in Munich, realizing that his life and livelihood were at stake. The Art Institute of Chicago had tried to offer him a position teaching a summer course; yet, by that point, the US government was severely restricting visas, and he was unable to obtain one. He fled instead to Amsterdam, where Hildebrand Gurlitt had visited him during the war. Beckmann finally had been able to move to the United States where, unable to take the stress of exile, he died of a heart attack on a New York sidewalk two days after Christmas 1950. He had been on his way to see one of his own paintings finally hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He went to his grave unaware that so many of his confiscated and dubiously acquired works were part of Gurlitt’s ill-gotten trove.

  Back in Berlin, Grosz also tried to locate the hundreds of works of his that had been confiscated from museums and stolen from his studio. He knew that many of them had probably been destroyed by bombings or neglect but that some were probably still intact. Like Beckmann, Grosz had no idea that Hildebrand Gurlitt had acquired dozens of his artworks and hundreds of works by other artists.

  Unlike the artists of whom he took advantage, Gurlitt had escaped the postwar period unscathed. In the late 1940s, he had become director of the Kunstverein, or “art association,” in North Rhine-Westphalia, an organization that agreed with him that the activities of its members during the Third Reich should simply be ignored.

  Only one family had learned that works of theirs were in the Gurlitt collection: the descendants of Jewish German lawyer and art collector Albert Martin Wolffson. In December 1938, Gurlitt had bought twenty-three drawings by Adolph Menzel, a revered nineteenth-century German etcher. The sale had occurred under duress; the family had desperately needed money to escape deportation to concentration camps and pay their way to New York. Gurlitt had knowingly taken advantage of this, paying only a fraction of the collection’s actual worth. Immediately after acquiring the Menzel pieces, he sold one, Roofs, to Cologne’s Wallraf-Richartz Museum for 1,400 reichsmarks—he had paid the Wolffson family only 300 reichsmarks for it. After the war the Wolffsons reached out to Gurlitt directly, asking for help in locating Roofs and their other artworks. Gurlitt responded to them only through his lawyer to say he had no knowledge of the collection’s existence.58

  By the time George Grosz returned to Germany in early 1959, it would have been too late for him to interrogate Gurlitt, even if he had learned that the dealer was hoarding a substantial number of his artworks. After a meeting with a publisher in Berlin, Gurlitt, who had always refused to have his poor vision corrected by an optometrist, crashed his car on the Autobahn after careening into the opposite lane and hitting a truck. He died on 9 November 1956. The sixty-one-year-old dealer left behind his wife Helene, twenty-three-year-old son Cornelius, and twenty-one-year-old daughter Benita.

  Eerily, his death came thirty-eight years to the day after the 9 November 1918 revolution that ended the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm following the Great War, thirty-three years to the day after Adolf Hitler’s failed 9 November 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, and eighteen years to the day after the 9 November 1938 Reichskristallnacht—The Night of Broken Glass—that set off the officially sanctioned persecution of Jewish Europeans that enabled Hildebrand Gurlitt to amass his gargantuan art trove.

  Struggling to solve the mystery of what had happened to his artworks, Grosz tried to support Eva’s desire to relocate but felt alienated from his native country. It seemed to be a completely different place. Walking along the streets, he was painfully aware that he was one of the few men left; so many of them, ranging from the youthful to the elderly, had been conscripted by Hitler in the final days of the war. Grosz felt angry that most Germans claimed that they had been completely un
aware that Hitler had physically harmed Jewish Europeans and others whom the Führer considered subhuman. The artist referred to them, often to their faces, as “piously meowing” liars.59 It was not the most advisable way to make friends, but Grosz was correct: Germans were wistfully entering into a period of collective amnesia.

  Three decades after his “Merchant of Holland” prank during World War I, Grosz created a scene in June 1959 in a German restaurant as a way to force Germans to confront the reality that the vast majority of them had either cooperated with or been complicit in implementing Hitler’s policies that caused the deaths of millions and ruined the lives of millions more. Making sure that all around him could hear him, Grosz began loudly lauding Adolf Hitler as Germany’s savior, its protector. He specifically used the phrases and catchwords that the Nazis had used during their time in power.60

  The room went silent. Yet no one spoke out.

  Grosz was miserable, but he once again proved that his political and psychological instincts were acute. He could see the demons with which Germany had to grapple.

  He was, however, unable to continue struggling with them himself. On 5 July 1959, Eva, George, and a few close friends went out for dinner and drinks. After the meal, they drank schnapps as Grosz puffed away on a Havana cigar. When Eva announced she was headed to bed, the group hailed a taxi. Eva got out at their temporary home on Savignyplatz, in the Charlottenburg district of the divided city. She gently suggested to George that he come home with her. He declined.

  The rest of the group continued to Dieners Restaurant, a cultural mainstay of Charlottenburg. Grosz was a regular there and had a pleasant exchange with the proprietor. Yet the artist seemed melancholy. More alcohol flowed. Eventually, he and the others headed back to Savignyplatz. Grosz hugged his friends and opened the door to his apartment building. Turning around, he lifted his hat, and said, “Ladies and Gentlemen!” before winking as the door closed.61