Hitler's Last Hostages Page 7
Kollwitz faced opposition not only from the conservative establishment but also from the growing Communist Party, which was angered that while the artist supported their views, she did not want to join their movement because she saw herself as a politically inclined artist rather than a political activist. Long before communism became popular in Germany following the Great War, Kollwitz had been advocating for labor rights and increased exposure of the plight of the forgotten man and woman. After the deaths of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, she produced a woodcut of workers gathering around Liebknecht, whose face can be seen still possessing the solemnity that had been his trademark expression during speeches. A male worker bends over him in the style of a pietà, a trope used in classical art to depict female mourners of Christ.
By the end of the Great War, however, Kollwitz had retreated from the public eye and from her artistic social circle after her eighteen-year-old son Peter was killed in battle, her pain compounded by a feeling of responsibility for his death: she and her husband had given him permission to enlist—he could not have joined the military otherwise. Even before Peter’s death, Kollwitz had been intensely sensitive to the pain of mothers who lost their children, mainly due to disease and malnutrition. Her emotional 1903 work on paper Mother with Dead Child shows a lower-class German woman cradling her dead child in the manner of classical depictions of the Virgin Mary cradling a recently crucified Jesus Christ. At the war’s end, however, despite the popularity of her tribute to Karl Liebknecht, Kollwitz retreated into her mourning. This left Grosz as the communists’ primary artist, one whom the party particularly supported because he was an actual member.
Grosz, twenty-five, childless, and still partying, industriously worked on his career in daylight hours, recognizing the necessity of building his public reputation while also nurturing private connections with influential liberals who could sponsor him and give him constructive criticism. Herzfelde, as Grosz’s publisher, was still working ambitiously to promote the artist’s work, lunching with Kessler, the German diplomat who was Grosz’s patron, to show him political drawings by Grosz that the artist and Herzfelde soon distributed through vendors to students, soldiers, and universities. Grosz and Herzfelde hoped that Kessler could convince his fellow bureaucrats to reject their increasing cynicism about the new republic in favor of working to craft specific policies to enact positive change.
As cynical as they could be, Grosz and his compatriots still believed that something good could come of the Great War. “We hope that a socialist republic not only will make the situation in the art world healthy, but will create a unified art epoch for our generation,” said Max Pechstein, noting that he and Grosz hoped they could “breathe new life into the dead ideals of our age.”43
Vast swaths of the German people shared this tentative optimism: Germany’s military invincibility had been exposed as a fraud and its monarchy had collapsed, but perhaps the success of a new republic and increased civil rights for its citizens were still possible. Yet their hope acquired a foreboding sheen when the Allies chose to open the peace conference in Versailles on 18 January 1919, the anniversary of the day the German Empire had been proclaimed in 1871. Germans were stung, considering it a sophomoric jab.
Meanwhile, the postwar government continued to quash protests with violence rather than welcoming debates to establish the new republic’s goals. In Berlin, the newly appointed Defense Minister, General Gustav Noske, responded to a minor strike on 3 March 1919 by the communists by unleashing 40,000 troops who used machine guns, mortars, and howitzers and left 1,200 dead communists in their wake. As after the murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, even Germans who found communism abhorrent viewed this as excessive government force. Grosz responded to Noske’s massacre in his new magazine Die Pleite, which technically translates as “The Bankruptcy” but was also contemporary slang for “Shot to Shit.” Grosz showed the works to Kessler, who was beginning to disdain the very government that he was paid to represent.
Such drastic political mistakes meant artists were primed to skewer the nascent German republic. Artist Hannah Höch, four years older than Grosz and an open bisexual, already had created a major parody of the new President and Chancellor. That work, using a photo-montaging technique Höch invented and popularized, mocked an already notorious photograph of the two flabby-chested men in swimming trunks. Höch added childlike drawings of dolls and bouncy balls to make the men seem like oversized babies, incapable of building Germany up from the Great War’s rubble. Höch’s complicated montages, unlike Grosz’s simple drawings, were harder to mass produce, so it was Grosz’s parody of the President lolling in an easy chair, his crotch bulging and a steaming pile of dung on top of his head, that became better known.
The popularity of Grosz’s works incensed the new republican government, which jailed Herzfelde even as violence in the street escalated. The Chancellor exacerbated the situation by announcing that anyone caught in armed conflict with government forces should be immediately shot rather than given the chance to surrender and be processed according to the rule of law. He also supported rooting out and arresting peaceful protestors for objecting to the government, including artists who protested through their work. To this end, soldiers tried apprehending Grosz on the basis of his critical drawings alone. Grosz began to use false papers to sleep in different locations every night. Upon finally returning to his studio, he gratefully accepted money from Kessler and reunited with the recently released Herzfelde.
Undeterred, Herzfelde and Grosz began plotting their new issue of Die Pleite while celebrating their intrepidness with hefty doses of alcohol. On 3 May 1919, they distributed roughly 12,000 copies of Die Pleite. By this point, Grosz had decided that abstract art was irrelevant and that artists should create “message-based art.” Unlike propaganda, which tells its viewers what to think about societal problems, Grosz felt that art should expose these quandaries to prompt discussion of solutions, while also employing artistically innovative techniques.
He did not have long to wait for further inspiration. Even before its signing, it was clear that the Treaty of Versailles was designed to crush Germany’s spirit and humiliate its people for their role in the war. French Premier Georges Clémenceau led the condemnation of Germany. Nicknamed “Le Tigre,” he interrupted, shushed, and talked over representatives from smaller nations and brushed aside Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic rhetoric.
On 20 April 1919, Hitler’s thirtieth birthday, the entente summoned Germany to receive the conditions on which it had decided, a move that horrified German citizens, who had believed that their leaders would play an active role in the negotiations. The victors dashed the hopes of millions, including Kessler and Grosz, that the newly democratic Germany would join the League of Nations. Students burned the French tricolor in front of the statue of Friedrich the Great in Berlin, but the German politicians complied with French demands. On 28 June 1919, Herman Müller and Johannes Bell, the two men comprising the German delegation, arrived in the Hall of Mirrors visibly beset with jitters. There, they compliantly came forward to a table, signed the treaty on behalf of the German people, and meekly returned to their seats. Nothing was said about Germany’s future role in an increasingly globalizing world. It would not have one.
Moreover, nothing was said about the roughly ten million soldiers and eight million civilians who died during the war, observed the Irish painter, William Orpen, as he sketched the scene for a painting of the signing. In the finished work, Bell and Müller huddle over the treaty, Bell sitting in a wingback chair and facing Clemenceau and Wilson with his torso slouched over the document in a gesture of supplication. Wilson and Clemenceau both appear utterly bored, with Wilson only partially looking at the German delegation as he prioritizes reading a newspaper. It was a deliberate insult—and accurate observation—by Orpen. “Why upset themselves and their pleasures by remembering the little upturned hands on the duckboards, or the bodies lying in the water in the shell-holes, or the hell and bloody dam
nation for the four years and odd months of the war, or the men and their commanders who pulled them through from a bloodier and worse damnation and set them up to dictate a peace for the world?” noted Orpen.
Germans expected that the treaty would be contractually harsh. Indeed, its terms were similar to those Germany had given to other defeated nations. Still, Germans were flabbergasted by the humiliations that were deliberately integrated into the terms of the treaty: just as the Allies had required that the conference open on 18 January 1919, the German Empire’s anniversary, they required that the Germans sign the treaty on 28 June, the anniversary of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, which had triggered the war. Moreover, their location was the Hall of Mirrors, where the German Empire’s birth had been celebrated in 1871. To top it off, the victors added a clause into the treaty, Article 231, that placed “sole moral guilt” on Germany for starting the war—meaning no other countries bore responsibility for joining in or prolonging the fight.
The treaty reduced the status of the infant republic in the eyes of other nations to that of a bastard born out of shame and sin. Germany’s standing among nations that were once her peers was crushed in perpetuity. While two politicians, Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann and Foreign Minister Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, resigned in protest, other leaders of the fledgling German government acquiesced. The republic became synonymous with defeat, humiliation, and injustice, and the German public perceived its leaders not only as spineless but as unwilling to put the needs and interests of their constituents first.
It was a republic that no one wanted.
This is what devastated Grosz and his artistic compatriots. During the months before the war ended in November 1918, they, along with millions of other Germans, had known defeat was inevitable. Yet they never thought that this defeat would be so humiliating or that so many other nations would respond with praise to this shunning of Germany from the international community of influential nations, an ostracism that had no end date. “My friends and I believed in a future of progress as if there were some preconceived international agreement upon that score,” Grosz lamented.
The right-wing Völkische Beobachter, which would later support Hitler, summed up the treaty in two words with which people of many political persuasions would agree: it was a “syphilitic peace” that, like the dreaded disease, began with a small sore but would slowly attack the limbs and joints, even all the flesh, down to the heart and brain of the new German government.44
In his diary, Kessler jotted down a passionate but prescient line about the long-term consequences of the treaty: “A terrible time is dawning for Europe, a sultriness before the storm which will probably end in an even more terrible explosion than the World War.”45 Grosz was more succinct, summarizing the years from 1914 to 1919, the resulting government, and the state of German society with the words “this shit show.”
CHAPTER III
ECLIPSE OF THE SUN
“We wanted something more, but what that ‘more’ was we could not exactly say. Though we could find no solution in the purely negative, we denied all existing values.… I thought the war would never end, and it never really did end.”
—George Grosz
ONE MORNING DURING THE EARLY days of the Weimar Republic, Erwin Blumenfeld, a rather louche Jewish German photographer, roused himself from a groggy sleep only to find himself severely hungover. The twenty-one-year-old Blumenfeld, a gaggle of women, and eleven men, including Wieland Herzfelde and Richard Huelsenbeck, had split sixty bottles of wine with the pack’s leader, George Grosz. It was the latter who had advertised the costume party around Berlin with a poster reading, “Well-built young society girls with film talents invited to a studio party, Studio Grosz, 8 p.m.”
About fifty women arrived, many stripping and drinking with the men. After realizing he had been slumbering for a full two days while curled up in Grosz’s bathtub, Blumenfeld discovered he was missing his new blue suit. Drinking more to forget this loss—and the throbbing in his head—seemed the sensible solution.1 This was the attitude exuded at Grosz’s parties. As Grosz put it, “It was contentment and suicide in high style.”2
The fourteen years between the empire’s fall and Adolf Hitler’s rise saw a dazzling diversity of sexual preferences, social perspectives, artistic approaches, and political convictions to an extent never before been seen in Europe. Like the elaborate costumes worn at Grosz’s infamous parties, German opinions on sex, art, feminism, violence, and spirituality were myriad. German political views were communist, apolitical, feminist, and racially prejudiced; it was as if Germans were playing some version of ideological hopscotch.
Grosz’s friends garnered admiration and derision from both art world elites and regular Germans for their morally, sexually, and politically charged creations. Yet it was Grosz who became a household name for combining all three aspects into easily distributable works on paper that were instantly recognizable for their trenchant, often sparse style of jagged, taunting lines. “I know no one who has grasped the modern face of the holders of power right down to the last alcoholic veins as Grosz has. The secret: he not only laughs, he hates,” asserted prominent Jewish German playwright Kurt Tucholsky.3
Grosz’s widely distributed works reflected his seething hatred of corrupt government officials, unchecked crime, and Germany’s neglect of its wounded war veterans. Though he descended into a near nihilistic despair during frequent bouts of depression, Grosz always retained the blend of wit and cynicism that he had honed since art school.
Harry Kessler, the diplomat who was Grosz’s patron, wrote after a postwar studio visit that Grosz rejected abstract art as irrelevant and advocated making visually striking, politically motivated artwork to trigger talk about the republic’s flaws and thus galvanize change. There “are complex events of an ethical character which perhaps art alone is capable of conveying,” noted Kessler.4 Grosz considered his work to be a blend of reporting and opinion, a visual version of political punditry.
After the Treaty of Versailles’s ratification, Grosz and his friends spent 1919 and the beginning of 1920 unsuccessfully trying to reverse the traumatic effects of the Great War. Determined not to become a lost generation, they deliberately careened between productivity and hedonism, assiduously documenting the republic’s chaos by day and passionately partying by night.
Grosz and his friends published a manifesto outlining their goals for both their lives and their art. In it, the group of twenty acknowledged that the majority of young Germans were traumatized and had retreated to the insularity of their homes, wary of political activism. “All these are characteristic of a young generation, which has never understood how to be young,” they wrote. Grosz and his companions aimed to be a vibrant minority pushing forward a wilder notion of a new German culture, declaring an end to Expressionism, which they now considered outdated.5
At art school in Dresden, Grosz had grown to admire the Expressionists, including Oskar Kokoschka. Yet now Kokoschka, at only twenty-eight, had moved away from the revolutionary and populist ideals that had imbued his early paintings. On the eve of the Great War, in 1914, Kokoschka had created his last masterpiece, The Bride of the Wind, a portrait of the artist embracing Alma Mahler (née Schindler), the widow of the Jewish Austrian composer Gustav Mahler, who had died three years earlier. After losing her husband, Mahler had connected with Kokoschka, and the two had embarked on a passionate, loving affair. The work was the epitome of the Expressionist style that Grosz, as a student in Dresden, had admired in Kokoschka: the couple embrace, their legs and bedsheets intertwining in swirls of soothing dark green and navy brushstrokes, floating in a dreamy atmosphere. Now, however, Grosz accurately suspected that Kokoschka, instead of nurturing young artists or creating his own works expressing Germany’s turmoil, had stagnated after becoming a professor in Dresden at the end of the Great War.
Grosz’s suspicions were confirmed following a 15 March 1920 rally in Dresden that turned bloody when the
Reichswehr fired on aggressive workers demonstrating for better employment conditions. In an op-ed published in Die Aktion, Kokoschka ignored the fact that 59 people were dead and 150 wounded due to a government-provoked attack. Instead, he focused on how bullets had flown through the window of the centrally located Zwinger Gallery and damaged a painting of Bathsheba by Peter Paul Rubens. Kokoschka suggested, without irony, that the workers arrange duels with the Reichswehr outside town. Grosz was incensed, particularly because Die Aktion, a cultural periodical founded in Berlin in 1911, had been vital to legitimizing the Expressionists. Kokoschka’s response seemed proof to Grosz that the Expressionists had grown complacent.6 Grosz was furious that Kokoschka, once passionate about creating art that angered the authorities, was insouciant now that his works were so prized by the government-sponsored academic establishment from which he had received tenure. Grosz lashed out, publishing a paper mocking establishment painters who created “securities” that “aesthetic fops” could buy as investments. “We’re all familiar with the cult of stars,” he wrote. “Your brushes and pens, which should be used as weapons, are nothing but hollow straws.”7
Across the country, tensions between the military and civilians only increased. In the Ruhr region, fighting erupted in April between communists and the Freikorps, the civilian paramilitary group that had murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Traumatized veterans were not ready for the adrenaline rushes of the Great War’s battles to dissipate. “We shoot even the wounded. The enthusiasm is terrific,” wrote one fighter, describing how he and his comrades shot ten Red Cross nurses. “We shot those little ladies with pleasure, how they cried and pleaded with us to save their lives. Nothing doing!” he bragged.8