Hitler's Last Hostages Page 5
Grosz was fascinated with the experimentation of young artists but unsure whether his art was compatible with their goals. One prominent movement of the time, Die Brücke, took its name from the German word for “bridge” to indicate that members aimed to bridge the gap between literal depictions of objects and pure abstract expressions of emotions; they aimed to create artworks that used strong colors and somewhat distorted forms but still made obvious to viewers what objects were being depicted. Founded in 1905, the group consisted of mostly German artists, including Emil Nolde, the oldest and most respected member.
One of Grosz’s classmates brought a book to class about Nolde, then in his early forties. Nolde was skilled with paint brushes but also enjoyed using rags, which he dipped into color and slapped onto canvases with calculated precision that nevertheless exuded a primal quality. In his 1906 etching Company at the Table, Nolde depicted a group of German farmers socializing in a darkly colored style with crude lines that instantly evoke van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters, created twenty-one years earlier. In his 1909 work Young Oxen, Nolde paid homage to his home region of Frisia in northwestern Germany using the broad, short strokes of the Impressionists to create a portrait of cattle in a field. Though the cows appear charming, looking directly at the viewer, Nolde’s serious purpose was to honor the farmers of Frisia for their arduous, often unappreciated work—something Grosz admired.
Yet academy professors disdained what they interpreted as Nolde’s spurning of hard work and succumbing to primordial passions. “Such a fellow sticks his finger in his ass and smears it on paper!” said Grosz’s professor Richard Müller. “He sketches like a drunken pig with a dung fork!” Nolde’s infamy had even spread to local Dresden parents. “Look, I’m going to tell Nolde. He’ll pick you up and smear you all over the canvas!” was a popular admonishment to children.16 Grosz acknowledged that Nolde’s technique was less precise than that of the Old Masters, but he believed that this did not make Nolde’s work less significant. “The expression of one’s inner self was all that mattered,” Grosz felt.17 Sometimes feelings are brutal, he thought, so the way they are expressed also should be. Yet this raised a question for Grosz: Where would such brutality lead? “Frequently, I unconsciously felt something menacing that lay behind the peaceful things around me, inexplicable and mysterious,” he later wrote. Yet, caught up in the emotional high emanating from the shock of the new, he pushed his qualms aside.18 “Down with rules, maulsticks, and finely pointed lead pencils and crayons!” he declared.
After graduation, Grosz moved to Berlin in 1911, determined to make his mark. He lived with his roommate from Dresden, Herbert Fiedler, and the pair stayed up late drinking sherry and discussing art and sex. When they depleted their governmental and familial stipends, they would plod to Aschinger’s, where Grosz had gone with his mother a decade prior. Now he appreciated it for its cheap beer and overflowing bread baskets. “How wonderful those hot, little rolls, that seeded rye bread and those salt sticks tasted,” remarked Grosz, who conspired with Fiedler to line their pockets with them to take home.19 Berlin was cheap enough that the pair could enjoy a diverse array of nighttime adventures. “The ladies of pleasure would stand in the doorways like sentinels, dangling their handbags, the sign of their guild,” Grosz observed.
Fur-adorned operagoers and streetwalkers converged on Friedrichstraße and Berlin’s other main thoroughfares, providing ample fodder for sketches; the artists found it titillating that it was often impossible to distinguish between fashionable wives and high-class escorts, an ambiguity that respectable Germans found disconcerting. This allure of Berlin drew artists away from Dresden and into the German capital. The Bavarian-born Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a founder of the Brücke movement that Grosz had admired in Dresden, moved to Berlin at the same time as Grosz. Thirteen years Grosz’s senior, Kirchner had earned a degree as an engineer in case his artistic dreams failed him. However, increasing interest in his works throughout Germany, including from the revered Nolde, led him to relocate to the fashionable area of Wilmersdorf in West Berlin, where he founded an art school with fellow avant-garde painter Max Pechstein.
Kirchner’s studio in Berlin quickly became known for its nude cavorting and fantastical orgies, reflective of Kirchner’s art, in which he celebrated female sexual liberation but also considered women primarily as beings intended to play out the sexual fantasies of men. In one lithograph he produced, Love Scene, two women embrace and kiss; yet their bodies are awkwardly turned in such a way as to expose their breasts and buttocks to the viewer; in the pastel work Two Nudes on a Bed, Kirchner uses complementary blues, reds, and yellows to depict a pair of voluptuous women lounging together. Like Grosz, Kirchner began venturing out onto Friedrichstraße at night to observe the diverse array of sex workers that Berlin had to offer, ranging from gritty streetwalkers to glamorous, high-class escorts. Grosz, with his working-class background, gravitated toward the former group; Kirchner, who came from a respected family of academics, gravitated toward the latter. After gleaning inspiration from observing the escorts, Kirchner employed his own friends to serve as models for one of his most successful artworks, Five Women on the Street. By using professional models, Kirchner emphasized the fantasy of working as an escort rather than the reality that actual escorts experienced. In the painting, five high-end sex workers wear elaborate black hats with exotic plumage and slinky black coats. Four of them stare into a department store window, themselves objects available to buy for cash that they can subsequently use to fuel their glamorous lifestyles.
Though Grosz admired Kirchner’s work from an artistic perspective, ethically speaking he sensed something eerie and empty, even nefarious, in the fascinations of his burgeoning creative class. “I think it’s the moth instinct that attracts us to bright lights of the streets and cafes,” he said of their propulsion into hedonistic self-destruction, aware that he shared this impulse.20 Moreover, he felt that his artistic career exacted a personal toll on himself. Having settled into a life of drinking and drawing, he increasingly found it difficult to observe this world without participating in it. “A dreary semi-conscious state between squalid work and alcohol. A Mess!” he summarized in a letter he wrote, admittedly, while inebriated.21
Grosz studied in Paris from August to November 1913 in a studio specializing in teaching artists to sketch scenes in five minutes, a skill that was critical for capturing the rush of city life. Grosz honed his artistic style by mixing simplicity derived from children’s art with Berlin’s popular street graffiti techniques, crafting an uncanny new style to depict these hedonistic times. He did not particularly like the French, vexed by what he considered a tendency among French artists to avoid depicting society’s problems and opt for frivolously facile subjects. His friends and classmates in Paris did not agree. The painter of the moment was Henri Matisse, famous for creating aesthetically pleasing paintings of dancers and portraits of creamy skinned young women, works that featured vibrant colors and soft, arabesque lines. Yet twenty-year-old Grosz was unimpressed, believing that Matisse, then forty-four, was concerned with promoting a “pleasant” visual style over considering whether his content was meaningful.
In marked contrast to French artists who were his age, Grosz in Paris created grisly scenes that included double suicides and even, in one instance, a man preparing to blow the head off a naked woman crouched on her bedroom floor; these were several in a series of “Lustmord” drawings that seemingly straight-laced members of Germany’s educated classes bought as lurid escapes from the burdensome rigidity of traditional morality. One of the most iconic of these gruesome images was The End of the Road, a black-and-white fantasy of a double suicide and an infanticide: a paunchy mother, her stomach slumping down toward her crotch, indicative of a recent pregnancy, has hung herself while her tiny baby and partner lie below her. No more changing diapers, no more sticky summer nights of failed postnatal eroticism. Just death.
These “Lustmord” drawings both fueled and reflected Gros
z’s queasiness about Germany’s widespread and growing militarism and political bellicosity, movements that Grosz considered gravely deleterious. Rampant sex, alcohol, and drugs or religious fanaticism seemed to be the unsustainable responses. Eventually something would twist, break, and explode. Grosz began experiencing fantasies during which water swaddled him and lulled him into a trance—even as pressure from above was slowly crushing him. “It was as if I were going somewhere very, very slowly—but where I could not say,” he described. “It was gloomy but mysteriously beautiful and dreamlike at the same time.”22
When drinking or smoking in bars, eventually stumbling home in the cockcrow hours, Grosz was struck not with paralyzing despair but with the assumption that daily life would soon return to a reassuring, humdrum normalcy. As simplistic as it sounded, the theory seemed probable to him: things could not fully shatter for the Germans, because they had never done so before. “Through the mad whirl of parties and balls there crept persistent rumors of oncoming war, but we did not take these rumors too seriously,” Grosz wrote in regretful retrospect. When Germany declared war and Hitler reveled with other war-hungry Germans 360 miles away in Munich, Grosz realized how Berliners were vastly underestimating the havoc it would unleash. “Those who were not enjoying life craved war. I was not one of them.”23
While they also did not crave war, many other young artists welcomed it once it became inevitable, convinced that serving in the military would lead to exciting adventures that could provide the type of artistic inspiration that would jump-start their nascent careers. Max Beckmann, a thirty-year-old artist and etcher from Leipzig who admired the French Impressionists and was frustrated that his career had yet to bloom, volunteered for the medical corps. The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 had fascinated Beckmann, who thought of it not as a humanitarian tragedy but as the perfect, opportune subject matter for an epic-sized painting that romanticized an adventurous struggle between mankind and nature. Beckmann’s mammoth oil painting The Sinking of the Titanic focuses on three boats crammed with passengers from various social classes dramatically battling to stay afloat. Several passengers in the water around them struggle to straddle pieces of wreckage while, in the background, the gargantuan ship sinks into the Atlantic. The idea that he could now participate in a war on the front lines thrilled Beckmann, who viewed it as a chance to experience “something intoxicating, wanton and savage—cruel, exuberant life.”24
Otto Dix, twenty-two, was a student at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts when the war broke out. He had created one promising work at the academy, Landscape with the Rising Sun, but, frustrated with his studies, volunteered as a soldier. Heading to the front, Dix carried with him a Bible and a well-worn copy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1882 book Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (originally The Gay Science in English but translated now as The Joyful Wisdom), famed for containing the German philosopher’s statement “God is dead.” Dix hoped to reread the two books after battles to compare his combat experiences with the texts.
Everyone Grosz knew seemed to have embraced the war. As his friends voluntarily enlisted, Grosz, initially wary, ultimately reckoned that the war could provide interesting source material for his art, so he enlisted also.
Yet what he experienced was not merely biblical: it was apocalyptic.
Several months after his enlistment, Grosz, now back in Berlin after having been discharged in spring 1915, began contemplating the mass enthusiasm for war that had swept up conservative and liberal Germans, including his artistic friends. Why exactly had they joined? What had been the consequences? What would the future bring?
By enlisting, these men had voluntarily relinquished their wild sex parties, cocaine binges, and alcohol-fueled evenings. They had hoped for artistic inspiration, which now seemed humiliatingly naïve. They had been utterly unprepared for the psychological seriousness of war, not to mention the reality that the combination of military technological development and international involvement made this a war of immense proportions and lethality, unprecedented in world history.
Major German artists with whom Grosz was friendly, having indulged in these fantasies of a romantic war devoid of gore, were rapidly discharged from duty and returned to Berlin psychologically damaged. Beckmann had suffered a nervous breakdown, and Dix, still on the front lines as a machine gunner and platoon leader, was consumed with self-loathing for having foolishly thought the war would be an artistic experience. At Halle an der Saale in the central-east German region of Sachsen-Anhalt, Kirchner trained as a member of the cavalry, working well with the horse he was assigned but apparently suffering a serious mental breakdown nonetheless. His riding instructor arranged for a provisional discharge until he made a full recovery, and he returned to Berlin. Though not physically wounded, Kirchner was mentally ill; mixing drugs and alcohol, he created Self-Portrait as a Soldier, an intentionally hyperbolic portrayal of himself as a severely maimed veteran.
Initially after his own discharge, Grosz had felt elated. “Hey, I’m free!” he wrote to a friend. “Free from the Prussian military!” Yet elation gave way to a wrenching depression, a sense of purposelessness, compounded by the collapse of the art market. Grosz felt rudderless at home, filled with a growing disdain for the monarchy, the generals, and German society in general. “I had utter contempt for mankind in general. I drew drunkards; puking men, men with clenched fists cursing at the moon; men who had murdered women, sitting on their coffins,” he later reflected of this nihilistic phase.25
His mood continued to sour as the summer of 1915 came to an end. “I’m abysmally depressed,” he wrote in September 1915, realizing he was creating personalities like the “Dutch merchant” he had used with Wieland Herzfelde and Ludwig Meidner to escape from himself. “I’ve ripped three different personalities out of my imaginary lives, I myself am beginning to believe in these imaginary alter egos.”
Grosz felt complicit in furthering the war’s pointless violence by having volunteered to serve. “When war was declared there was mass intoxication,” he reflected, adding, “The appeal of gun and helmet soon wore off and war represented only the grim and the horrible.”26
The vast majority of Hitler’s artwork at this time showed war eerily devoid of humans—buildings, empty battlefields, or lifeless nature. Grosz sketched soldiers with their noses blown off, war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms, a pair of medical soldiers suppressing a struggling infantryman with a straitjacket fashioned from a horse blanket, a colonel having sex with an army nurse, a medical orderly casually dumping a pail with assorted human body parts into a trash can. To maintain sanity, Grosz depicted the painful reality. Hitler, by contrast, sketched a bizarre calm.
Grosz became depressed by what he deemed pointless heroism. Heroism was noble when tied to a noble cause, but by 1915 what was the point of all this heroism? He felt convinced that Germany had entered the war too deeply, too quickly, too tenaciously. Moreover, the unelected officials who supported the war viewed it as a game, a social experiment, while the common soldier trudged on. “I saw heroism but it seemed to be blind,” he lamented. “What I saw more was misery, stupidity, hunger, cowardice and horror” from military superiors, he added.27
Once discharged from the army, Grosz spiraled into an alcohol-fueled, manic state of artistic creativity. Like Grosz, Berlin had come unhinged. The pallor of death appeared on the faces of mothers who had lost their sons. The frenzied nightlife persisted, but what was once drinking to reminisce became bingeing to forget the loss of innocence. Soldiers, sex workers, grieving parents, and war profiteers all mixed at the same clubs. It struck Grosz as grisly; yet he felt compelled to take part.
One typical work he created at this time showed a cross section of a tenement house. In one window, a man is beating his wife with a broom; in another window, an enraptured couple is having sex; in a third window, a man who has committed suicide is hanging stiffly with flies swarming around his corpse, his neighbors oblivious to his passing. Other drawings showed puking d
runkards or men with clenched fists ranting to themselves under moonlight.
Berlin felt like a ghost town, the prosperity of the early 1900s drained by the war. In its place were the elderly, the decrepit, and contumacious military rejects like Grosz. “What I see around me, now that there are no more foreigners living in Germany: unkempt, fat, deformed ugly men and women,” he wrote. “It’s hard to remain within the bounds of decency when one begins to draw.”28
“Being German always means being tasteless, stupidly hateful, fat, inflexible,” he criticized. “Being German means being reactionary of the worst sort.”29
Little wonder that, weeks after being discharged, Grosz was in danger of plummeting into nihilism. He began feeling a despair he would never fully shake regarding the purpose of artists. “What do we artists, we insignificant little ants, have to say? We, who are nothing more than blown up frogs?” he mused. “Do we change the general picture in the slightest?”30
Yet, when he met Herzfelde at Ludwig Meidner’s studio that summer, Grosz found a friend whose business acumen and philosophical mind-set made him consider possible constructive purposes for his art. Herzfelde wanted to establish a publishing company for art portfolios with Grosz as his main talent, which gave the artist a goal toward which to work.31
Grosz’s drawings were not mere visual diatribes: by sketching murder fantasies, laymen and policemen ignoring suffering and crime, right-wing bullies provoking it, and children influenced by it, he was exposing the emotional origins of the war into which Germany had entered. It was this aspect that would make his work so politically inflammatory in the years to come.