Hitler's Last Hostages Page 6
In one such work, the oil painting Suicides, a wealthy man in olive green pants and a cobalt blue jacket lies dead on the ground, his bowler hat askew, a gun by his side. Another man has dropped his gun before slinking off the canvas under the watchful eyes of a stray dog in the street, while a third man has hanged himself from a lamppost. A topless sex worker is standing at the window, her lips as red as her nipples, while her obese elderly customer leers at her backside. Only after taking in this spectacle does the viewer notice, far in the background, a dull-colored church with its lights off: Grosz felt that at the time the church, which was encouraging the war, was neglecting to preach against the vices that had triggered it.
Grosz’s distribution and sale of his artworks began to escalate once Herzfelde graduated from Grosz’s drinking buddy to become his business manager. After buying Neue Jugend, a two-year-old newspaper with an anti–Great War slant, Herzfelde quickly turned it into an efficiently run, profitable publication popular with both disillusioned veterans and an increasingly antiwar section of the working class. The June 1916 edition included two drawings by Grosz, while the August 1916 edition promoted portfolios of Grosz’s drawings that were affordable for the middle and working classes. Soon Grosz’s work was rising in value despite the war’s overall dampening effect on the art market.
Grosz’s increasing commercial success was interrupted when the army called him back up in the first week of January 1917. His service did not last long; army officials admitted him to a hospital after he suffered a mental breakdown within hours of entering service and was discovered partially buried in a pit of feces. Grosz found ample fodder for his disturbing drawings in the amputees who had devised a lurid pastime: throwing cigarettes into each other’s mouths. His roommate, a coachman who had been shot in the abdomen, died beside Grosz muttering, “Where are my legs? I left them somewhere,” before crumpling in on himself. Grosz flashed back to the battlefield, attacking a medical sergeant in his ward whom he mistook for an enemy.32 Exasperated by his war-triggered mental instability, the army finally sent him back to Berlin in late January and declared him permanently unfit for service.
After his return to civilian life in 1917, Grosz produced his greatest paintings to date—those that would become his most famous posthumously, work that explored the social factors leading up to the war and the reality that these issues were still unresolved. “Everything in me was gloomy protest,” he noted.33
Germany, a Winter’s Tale shows a regular German worker, middle-aged and balding, sitting down to eat a stereotypical German meal of wurst and beer. Like his napping pup, he seems indifferent to the chaos surrounding him: buildings teeter, a church surreally flies through the air, people scamper everywhere. At the bottom of the work is a triptych, evoking Catholic iconography, showing portraits of a priest, a general, and a schoolmaster. The priest, clutching a prayer book, is gesticulating wildly out a window, where the city is in flames. The old general wears an Iron Cross, while the schoolmaster appears ready to stride out of the painting to attack an unruly student. In a telling move, the general holds his sword in repose, all but the hilt off the canvas. Instead, it is the schoolteacher who is brandishing a weapon: the cane with which he plans to beat his students. The experience, tolerance, and even love of violence, Grosz seems to say, starts in childhood.
Meanwhile, riots due to food shortages were becoming rampant, and German cooks reluctantly began innovating with an increasingly despised root: the turnip. “It was obliged to do duty as cake, roast hare, and malt beer,” noted twenty-five-year-old writer Richard Huelsenbeck, a friend of Grosz. The war dragged on, depleting Germany of resources. “Military trains carried loads of fresh meat—human and porcine—to the front,” noted Huelsenbeck. By 1918, as the cities emptied and the soil became barren, confidence in the monarchy and the military began to wither, engendering a stifling atmosphere that triggered frequent knife and fist fights to which the jaded police turned a blind eye.
In late autumn 1918, a naval mutiny in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven lead to wider mutinies, and on 9 November Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated. Soldiers began running rampant and attacking their officers. The kaiser’s abdication did not particularly shock Grosz or Huelsenbeck, who had become good friends after Huelsenbeck moved from Zurich to Berlin several months earlier. Since early 1918, Grosz had been immersed in Dada, a group that Huelsenbeck had started in Zurich in 1916. Unlike an artistic school, which aims to propagate specific techniques or technical trends, Dada was an artistic movement that aimed to reflect the chaos of the times through whatever thematic and technical approaches its supporters preferred. Dadaists, like most Germans, believed the old European order had been obliterated and felt that confidence in Germany’s artistic tradition equally had been shattered. “Something startlingly new for the first time in history has been drawn from the question: What is German culture?” the group wrote in a statement, adding “(Answer: Shit).”34 Many Berliners whom Grosz observed had entered a state of defeated torpor; Grosz and his friends moved in the opposite direction, exhibiting surges of open anger and rage.
“We simply mocked everything,” said Grosz of the Dadaists. “Nothing was holy to us. Our movement was neither mystical, communistic nor anarchistic,” said Grosz. “We spat on everything, including ourselves.”35 They also defecated, at least metaphorically. In February 1918, Grosz gave a performance where he pretended to have a bowel movement before a Lovis Corinth painting while shouting, “Kunst ist Scheiße” (art is shit), to a dumbstruck audience.
Corinth, thirty-five years Grosz’s senior, was a leading figure of the Berlin Secession, founded by Jewish German Impressionist Max Liebermann as an edgier, privately run alternative to the government-run Association of German Artists. After the association closed down a Berlin exhibition of Edvard Munch in 1892 on the grounds that Munch was morally offensive, many German artists became alarmed that it had no privately run rivals, effectively meaning that the German government had the power to censor and dictate what constituted German art worthy for the public to see. Liebermann and Corinth, who took inspiration from French artists, differed wildly from Munch stylistically. Yet in the late 1890s they feared that complacency about government censorship could have dangerous consequences.
By 1918, however, both men had grown weary of resistance; instead of being avant-garde, Corinth and Liebermann had become part of the old guard. Much of the sixty-year-old Corinth’s inactivity was due to a mild stroke he had suffered in 1911, but it angered Grosz nonetheless that he had become so apolitical during a time when German artists were in such a crisis.
Liebermann, then seventy and in good health, had long been admired by German art collectors, critics, and curators; like the French Impressionists, he used short, quickly executed strokes to create outdoor scenes that emphasized natural sunlight. Rather than asking models to pose, Liebermann portrayed their natural movements after observing them at length. In Bathing Boys, a painting from 1900, he depicted nine young boys gallivanting on a beach off the Dutch coast. Fascinated with the equestrian paintings of Edgar Degas, one of Impressionism’s founders, Liebermann created the 1901 painting Two Riders on the Beach, depicting two equestrians on lithe, chestnut horses as they prance on pristine sand in front of lightly frothing waves. He took great care in creating the work, also making a pastel version of the scene. Works like Two Riders were so popular that German art enthusiasts had lobbied for Liebermann to represent Germany at the 1904 Saint Louis World’s Fair in Missouri. Kaiser Wilhelm vetoed the idea, however, stating that Liebermann’s work looked too “French” and was thus “gutter art,” a dispute reported by the Washington Post at the time.36
As the Great War dragged on and the Germany that Liebermann had once loved was in decline, he relinquished the streak of curiosity that had inspired him as a younger artist. After the kaiser abdicated, Liebermann also gave up his position as the leader of contemporary German art, retreating to his studio to paint anodyne garden scenes. When asked by a Parisian art
newspaper why he did not seek to help rebuild German culture and serve as a mentor for young artists reeling from their country’s defeat, he replied that he had “already become too old” to take up the responsibility of reacting to the “disturbed epoch” that was the Great War. “I regret that the good old days before the war, and my old friends in France and Belgium, are lost for me,” he said.37
This defeatism from the older generations caused Grosz and his friends to adopt an attitude that Grosz summed up in two words: “Screw it.” He paraded around the semideserted streets of Berlin wearing a monocle, frock coat, and gloves and tapping a cane with a skull on it to parody a Prussian army general. He wanted to shock the public in this pallid corpse of a city into feeling anger at militarism. “I was disappointed, not because the war was lost, but because the people had tolerated it and suffered it for so long a time, refusing to follow the few voices that were raised against the mass slaughter,” Grosz lamented. It was an anger and shame felt by veterans from all sides of the conflict. D. H. Lawrence, the future author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, had fought against Germany but shared Grosz’s anger that Europeans had been too cowardly to call for the fighting to stop and referred to the war years as “the years when the world lost its real manhood.” Yet Lawrence and citizens of every country involved in the war, save for Germany and Austria, considered themselves victors. The Germans and Austrians could not. The kaiser’s abdication and the armistice made it undeniable for them that they had lost not just the war but their old monarchial order. The fate of that fallen regime now rested in a glistening, gilded, sun-drenched room, the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, where the postwar terms would be settled.
The stakes were high, exerting crushing pressure on the Germans, who burned with a hope that drove them into frenzied anxiety. “If peace and orderly economic conditions can be upheld, Germany will emerge from defeat stronger and happier than before. But if the entente reduces us to wage slaves, that will mean a fresh war,” warned one friend of Grosz, Harry Kessler, a noble-born German diplomat based in Berlin who spent his leisure time cultivating and appreciating German art.38
Kessler, who worked a few blocks from the imperial palace, made periodic visits there to take notes during the winter of 1918. A close friend and new patron of Grosz’s, he could not have been more different from the artist. Grosz, now twenty-five, felt comfortable in burlesque clubs, hosting wild parties, admiring buxom women, and swilling beer. Kessler, who demurred when Grosz invited him to his parties, was shy and discreetly gay, preferring to drink in moderation. Yet the two formed a friendship based on extreme respect, a love of the styles invented by Grosz and his artistic compatriots, both male and female, and a mutual desire to see Germany learn from the disastrous mentality that had enabled the war.
Kessler visited the ruined palace on Christmas Eve and observed how its windows gaped like the eye sockets in a skull. Looters had smashed the balcony from which the Emperor had made his call to arms in August 1914. A grenade had landed in the Hall of Pillars and damaged a painting by Franz Skarbina, a German artist who had died in 1910 and whose street scenes were popular with the middle classes. Kessler was shocked that the paintings on the walls were so banal that looters had not even bothered to take most of them. The monarchy had neglected to nurture German culture for decades, and now the nation had not just a power vacuum but also a cultural one. “The Emperor’s and Empress’s mementoes and artworks are so insipid and tasteless, so philistine, that it is difficult to feel much indignation against the pilferers. Only astonishment that the wretched, timid, unimaginative creatures who liked this trash and frittered away their life in this precious palatial haven, amid lackeys and sycophants, could ever make any impact on history,” he wrote in his journal.39
Dada’s nihilism had given Grosz a voice for his grieving as the war drew to a close, but he realized toward the end of 1918 that he needed to transition from nihilism into developing a concrete set of principles. Both Grosz and Herzfelde began considering the idea that Grosz’s art and Herzfelde’s publishing house should promote communism, particularly the form that German communists espoused, which emphasized the separation of church and state, basic human rights, freedom for adult men and women to express their sexuality with other consenting adults, career equality for women, and both distrust of and disgust for moneyed individuals, particularly those who had inherited their wealth.
In the weeks leading up to Christmas 1918, the gun violence that had played out on the battlefields was brought home to German cities, whether on the streets or in popular hangouts like Grosz’s favored Romanisches Café on Kurfürstendamm. Gun violence was commonplace enough that urban Germans began referring to it as “this shooting business.” Firefighting lit up the night sky. Still, the telephone system functioned and the trams ran punctually.40 Yet Germany incrementally was entering a period in which a disdain for and distrust of establishment politicians would become the new normal.
A disorganized communist putsch in Berlin on 6 December left several dead. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, both forty-seven-year-old communists and activists for social and women’s rights, harnessed sympathy for the victims with a demonstration. Pallbearers carried the victims’ coffins, while several thousand men and women clad in gray in orderly rank and file carried red banners high. It was a well-timed and aesthetically striking spectacle. Only a few minutes’ walk away, the Emperor’s abandoned palace was, quite literally, a crumbling symbol of absent political authority.
Inspired by the demonstration and searching for political meaning, on 31 December 1918 Grosz and Herzfelde joined the Communist Party and rang in 1919 together as a year of hope, receiving their membership cards from Rosa Luxemburg herself.
The German communist movement’s push for broader labor rights and women’s rights proved controversial for many Germans. If one believed in traditional, conservative family values, communism represented a moral threat. Elfriede Friedländer, an acquaintance of Grosz, did little to assuage this fear of the moderates by writing in her 1919 book Sexual Ethics of Communism that the sacrament of marriage was nothing short of the “evil spawn of capitalism.” Communism, Friedländer argued, would eradicate stigmas against abortion, homosexuality, and bigamy and legitimize incest for men and women of all social classes.41
Just days after Grosz joined the Communist Party, members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), then leading the country, began fighting on the streets with the communists. The absence of a moderate middle had given way to vicious conflict among factions of the Far Left and smaller groups on the Far Right, in particular anticommunist supporters of the military. It became impossible to tell who represented which group during brawls. “Berlin has become a witches’ cauldron wherein opposing forces and ideas are being brewed together,” said Kessler, observing one altercation.42
On 15 January, Waldemar Pabst, a commander in the Freikorps, a Far Right, anticommunist paramilitary group backed by SPD leader Friedrich Ebert, carried out his personal plan to assassinate Communist Party leaders Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Government-backed paramilitary soldiers drove Liebknecht to a spot on a highway in the respectable western Berlin district of Charlottenburg and ordered him to take a step forward. He complied, and a soldier promptly shot him, registering Liebknecht as “shot while trying to escape.” A military official struck Luxemburg unconscious with a rifle butt, and another subsequently shot her repeatedly in the head in the back of a government car, dumping her body into Berlin’s Landwehr Canal; it was never recovered. Many Germans, including Grosz’s patrician friend and patron, Kessler, were unsympathetic to the communist cause, viewing it as destructive, distracting, and disorganized. This violence, however, particularly toward a woman, shocked them. More broadly, it fueled distrust of the establishment because government officials had assassinated the pair for political purposes without due process and in complete disregard for the rule of law.
Herzfelde felt that Grosz’s cold, incising, and jagged lines were perfec
t for creating images depicting these feelings in a work on paper that could be easily reproduced. He created In Memory of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, depicting the pair’s corpses wrapped in shrouds and placed in open coffins. A menacing judge, with the face of a demon, hovers like a ghost above them. Grosz used ink and a tinted wash to create an eerie, soft effect in transparent haunting lines. Grosz’s use of a judge in traditional German robes was tactical. In not showing a policeman or military official, Grosz was drawing what many Germans were thinking: it was not just the police and the military that were rotten—the nation’s problem extended to the justice system itself.
Grosz was quickly becoming one of the most prominent artists who supported the communist cause in Germany, but he was not the only one. Longtime communist supporter Käthe Kollwitz, who had joined the Berlin Secession with Corinth, created her own homage to the assassinations that paired well with Grosz’s artwork.
Born in 1867, Kollwitz had grown up with progressive parents who encouraged her academic and artistic education. Before the war, she pioneered the notion of creating artwork specifically intended to portray the plights of workers and women to empower them, while also informing the government and higher economic classes so they could enact change. Kollwitz’s series A Weavers’ Uprising, created between 1893 and 1897, humanized the consequences of increasingly industrialized factory and agricultural technology for both urban and rural workers. The series even had appeared in the prestigious 1898 Great Berlin Art Exhibition at the Lehrter Bahnhof in central Berlin, making Kollwitz the first woman and one of the first leftist artists to gain exposure among both academics and ordinary museum visitors. Kollwitz’s series was in the running to win the exhibition’s top prize, but Kaiser Wilhelm II, who privately derided it as “gutter art,” declared that a woman could not be eligible to win.