Hitler's Last Hostages Page 8

  In this turmoil, Grosz considered it crucial to imbue his art with political significance. In summer 1920, he featured the title work from his new portfolio in a show of several Dada artists held on Lützowufer 13. The work featured the title God with Us in three languages—German, English, and French—picked because they were the primary languages used in diplomatic exchanges in the Great War. God with Us portrayed three fat, zombie-like soldiers striding forward, the slogan on the belt buckles of German soldiers giving the work its name, a deliberate provocation meant to spur debate within society.

  Kurt Tucholsky, the eminent playwright and journalist who had praised Grosz’s ability to craft acerbic sketches criticizing the new government, considered Grosz’s work the best of the 174 pieces on display. “His portfolio ‘God with Us’ shouldn’t be missing from any citizen’s family table—his grimaces of the military majors and sergeants are infernal, true, haunting horror,” wrote Tucholsky. “The others scratch. He kills.”9

  The new government, despite its faltering political and economic plans, nonetheless decided to try to silence the tide of criticism coming from artists, especially George Grosz. The German army took him to trial over God with Us. Grosz and his publisher, Herzfelde, had the opportunity in court to attack the military, but they demurred, saying their artwork was a commentary on what some, but not necessarily they themselves, thought of the military. Tucholsky was openly disappointed. “That was your defense? You ‘didn’t mean it like that’?”10 The government destroyed the printing plates and transferred the copyright to the army. Though the case increased the German people’s awareness of Grosz as an artist, it also clarified for him and his fellow citizens that, in the young republic, freedom of expression was hardly a civil right.

  Grosz’s exploration of sexual mores increasingly contained political undertones. Dozens of sketches he made after visiting seedy clubs at night showed obese black-market dealers enjoying high- and low-class hookers, fine alcohol, and cigars. Such men were earning increased profits in currency speculation in 1922, as the gap between the rich and the poor began to widen. Citizens blamed the government for this growing wage gap fueled by illegal side deals. They specifically aimed their ire at the Jewish industrialist and German Democratic Party founder Walther Rathenau, who advocated the Fulfillment Policy, pledging Germany would pay war reparations, which by late January 1921 had been set at roughly 130 billion gold marks to be paid back by 1963. The Fulfillment Policy angered most Germans, who still felt the Treaty of Versailles was ruinously unjust.

  Kessler worried about growing anti-Semitism targeting Rathenau, a good friend who, he observed, was being attacked as “too Jewish” at home and “too German” abroad.11 On 24 June 1922, two right-wing army officers assassinated Rathenau in his car, convinced that his Judaism meant he was trying to sabotage Germany in his diplomatic negotiations. Rathenau’s murder ended hopes of better diplomatic relations abroad and helped Grosz realize that anti-Semitism was growing.

  By this point, Grosz was enjoying a sustainable income from Herzfelde’s efficient distribution of his art with an innovative pricing scale that was affordable for the working class but still profitable. Die Räuber, a portfolio of Grosz works, had four editions: five copies costing 300 marks were bound in vellum with hand-laid Japanese paper; thirty-five copies costing 150 marks were printed on lower-grade paper bound in silk; fifty-five cloth-bound copies cost 100 marks; and an unlimited run of unsigned editions in a paper folder sold for 3 marks each.12

  Grosz’s political ideology was still in flux, but by the end of 1922, he no longer believed that communism was a plausible political option for Germany. Many German communists believed that Russia was a utopia, espousing an almost religious reverence for the blue-collar worker. Grosz was increasingly bothered by this following a brief visit to Russia during which he realized that implementing communism through governmental force did not eliminate class differences; moreover, Russia’s one-party system did little to promote free thought or artistic creativity.

  “There are rich and poor just like there are everywhere else,” he decided.13 Disillusioned, he left the Communist Party. As communism jostled with other viewpoints to establish itself as a dominant movement, the young republic in October 1922 began grappling with an alarming economic issue: hyperinflation. “One had to buy quickly because a rabbit, for example, might cost two million marks more by the time it took to walk into the store,” said Grosz of the toxic combination of a disrupted supply chain and a sinking currency.14

  Millions of Germans responded by descending into a pernicious form of nihilism triggered by oversaturation with everyday problems and heated political discussions. “There was universal hatred,” explained Grosz, citing the key targets of this wrath: Jews, capitalists, communists, militarists, home owners, workers, the Reichswehr, the Allied Control Commission, corporations, and politicians. “A real orgy of hate was brewing and behind it all the weak republic was scarcely discernible. An explosion was imminent,” Grosz predicted.15

  Concurrently, Grosz’s position in the art world became more lucrative and publicized after he signed with Alfred Flechtheim, a well-known Jewish German dealer fifteen years older than Grosz who became a personal friend. “Nature made an exception in this case, just as it does from time to time in the relations between cats and dogs,” Grosz quipped about the rarity of an art dealer befriending an artist whom he represented.

  Signing with Flechtheim not only marked thirty-year-old Grosz’s entry into the established art world that the artist long had loathed but also made him more familiar with the growing hatred in Germany of both French art and those who admired it. At Flechtheim’s home, he enjoyed sumptuous dinners paired with lovely Rhineland wine. Gazing up at Flechtheim’s walls, Grosz noticed, much to his chagrin, that Flechtheim had covered them with French, not German, paintings. Grosz quipped that Flechtheim treated the paintings by Germans that he personally owned as “stepchildren,” compared to his more “legitimate” French artworks.16 Those Germans who were aware of Flechtheim’s prestige in the art world increasingly saw the Jewish German dealer’s preference for foreign artwork as evidence of something nefarious in his “blood.”

  Meanwhile, among Berliners, it became a sardonic joke that those too old to have served in the war, particularly those who had profited from it through arms dealing and speculation, were now quite literally tripping over the Great War’s casualties. Grosz created one well-distributed work with the sarcastic caption Caution, Don’t Stumble, showing a wealthy man and his fur-clad wife about to trip over an amputee’s leg. For the 80,000 amputees who came back to Germany without support from the military that had sent them off to war, Berlin was a place to flock for the chance to beg and, if lucky, elicit some cheap or free sex.

  As Grosz began seeing unprecedented success after signing with Flechtheim, his artist compatriots during the wartime years also worked to establish themselves in the uncertain postwar market while simultaneously grappling with their personal demons.

  Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, now in his forties, struggled the most both psychologically and professionally. After doctors admitted him to a Swiss sanatorium in 1917, numerous medical professionals observed his dependency on Veronal, a powerful sleep-inducing drug, contrasted with “nervous excitation” when experiencing withdrawal; his service as a soldier caused him now to exhibit increasing signs of paranoia, though his doctors said that much of this “excitation” likely had been present long before the war. Kirchner struggled to lift himself out of depression, an endeavor he dubbed “grasping all the lovely things” as he moved into a new home in Davos to stay close to his doctors.17 It was a maxim he repeated to himself as he tried creating artworks that seemed moving but still positive; yet he struggled with making this his natural style, given the emotional turmoil he was fighting. In Winter Landscape in Moonlight, Kirchner portrayed the snowy alpine landscape around his home in fantastical hues of fuchsia and turquoise. Residents of the small town, then quite provinci
al, were impressed by his gramophone and readily came to socialize at his house, where he sketched them as they danced.

  Still, he suffered from a dependency on morphine, which doctors considered a safe drug to prescribe for a patient to self-administer at home. “If I manage to stop taking the drug [morphine] in the spring, then we shall be on quite a different plane and can make decisions,” he wrote a friend. Increasingly, Kirchner created artworks such as Sick Man at Night, in which a man closely resembling Kirchner, with the sickly pallor of a drug addict, sweats in a nightshirt under his bedcovers even as an open window above his bed reveals an Alpine snowscape outside.

  Max Pechstein, Kirchner’s cofounder of the Berlin art school during the war, now struggled to find a place in postwar Berlin without his friend, particularly as the art school was shuttered, given that Kirchner was unable to help teach. Rather than dwell on his unpleasant wartime experiences, Pechstein created scenes of the Palau Islands, a former German colony that he had visited in 1914. Disturbed by his military service in Somme, Pechstein found solace in rekindling his Christian faith, though he worried that the church was not sufficiently reaching out to jaded veterans. To counteract this, he created twelve woodcuts illustrating the Lord’s Prayer’s major tenets, using a primitive style with thick, jagged lines inspired by his trip to the Palau Islands.

  Living in Berlin after the Great War, Grosz’s friend Otto Dix was in a far more stable emotional state than his rival Kirchner; yet Dix still struggled with the consequences of having spent more time on the front lines than any other artist of note. After his career as a machine gunner on the Somme, in Artois and in Flanders, the twenty-eight-year-old Dix now scoffed at his younger self for having been naïve enough to think that going to war could be an academic exercise, laughing at the fact that he had brought the Bible and Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings into the trenches. Yet he had still found time to make some preliminary sketches on which he now hoped to expand, though he first focused on depicting the chaos he observed around him in Berlin.

  Dix’s 1920 oil painting The War Cripples shows four crippled veterans walking past a bourgeois shop selling fancy footwear. Bitterly, the impoverished former soldiers trudge on, one in a wheelchair, one missing one leg, and another hobbling along on crutches with sticks attached to the stumps where his legs once were. Concurrently with The War Cripples, Dix created Skat Players, which shows three severely disfigured war veterans with horrifically burnt faces playing the popular card game in the corner of a dimly lit café. Two of the men lack legs, though one still wears his Iron Cross, struggling to play his cards with a new prosthetic hand. Dix had quietly sketched the scene while observing the men in a bar, and though the work was a masterpiece, this brush with the reality he experienced in the trenches made him temporarily turn to observing the burgeoning sex industry in Berlin, particularly its seedier aspects; though also an unsavory topic, it was easier for Dix to focus on nonconsensual sex work and the exploitation of young girls than on the unforgiving brutality of his wartime experiences.

  He quickly created two of the most iconic and incendiary works of his career: Leonie and Girl Before a Mirror. In Girl, a prostitute appears young and beautiful from the back, wearing a classically simple white corset that appears to be in impeccable condition on her youthful skin. Gazing into the mirror, however, the viewer can see the front of her body is actually aged, gaunt, and decrepit; her sagging breasts droop out of the corset, and her ribcage protrudes prominently. The reflection reveals to the viewer that her corset is actually ragged; faded pink ribbons and tattered lace are the only signs of a once glamorous piece of lingerie. Girl was a brazen commentary on the reality that, even as he was creating the work, young girls were being forced into the world of child prostitution, a business in which they would most likely be trapped for the rest of their lives. Like his compatriot Grosz, Dix created the piece in order to trigger changes in the government to protect these young children. Although the government did not deny the veracity of the work, the Berlin police confiscated Girl nonetheless and charged Dix with indecency. The painting disappeared forever.

  For many homeless men, particularly veterans, brothels like those depicted by Grosz and Dix provided not just a place for sex but also a temporary shelter. Jewish Austrian journalist Joseph Roth, a distinguished reporter for the respected Frankfurter Zeitung, covered the horrifying conditions at a typical homeless shelter in Fröbelstraße, a center in the eastern district of Prenzlauer Berg. Grotesque figures, “as though hauled from the lower depths of world literature,” shivered on wire-mesh iron beds, he observed. Women in brown rags slept apart from men, though that didn’t stop the place from crawling with sexually transmitted diseases. Hundreds of injured and displaced veterans were turned away at the gates, prompting riots.18

  The government, Roth also observed, publicly displayed images of the anonymous corpses of the physically vulnerable who perished on the streets from disease, suicide, or murder. Tidy rows of photographs in cabinets on the ground floor of the police headquarters showed snapshots of the bodies as they had appeared when found. White slime oozed from eyelids; drowned bodies encrusted in slime were puffed up, resembling, Roth thought, poorly mummified pharaohs. “They stand there open mouthed, their dying screams are still in the air, you can hear them as you look,” he wrote, noting that this “anonymous misery” was redacted from newsreels for cinemagoers who did not want their entertainment sullied.19

  Germany’s moral divide was widening, with citizens crowding toward the financially extreme ends of society. The middle class generally did one of two things to survive: ignore the news or look for those whom they could blame for the increasing chaos. Grosz picked up on this phenomenon, captioning a sketch of a middle-aged German man “Juden raus!” or “Jews, Get Out!” Grosz’s work was prescient. Rather than a social outcast, the man in the work was a member of the bourgeois, sporting spectacles and a proper suit and a tie. Right-wing politics and anti-Semitism, Grosz was warning, were becoming acceptable among all economic classes.

  Adolf Hitler was in his early ascendancy, his influence growing. Grosz recognized the threat. He created a drawing that took aim at the aspiring dictator’s obsession with Teutonic warriors and his belief that he alone could “fix” Germany. In Hitler the Savior, a pen-and-ink drawing, Grosz drew Hitler with his head held high and his arms behind his back. Puffing out his chest to appear more muscular, Hitler wears a one-shoulder, fur-lined tunic, complete with the sword and chained belt of a Teutonic folk hero. It was a hyperbole of the archetypical Aryan warrior. Grosz gave Hitler muscular arms that the skinny, petite politician clearly lacked; he even mockingly adorned Hitler’s right bicep with a tattoo of a swastika over an olive branch. Grosz took the title Hitler the Savior from Hitler’s own supporters, who, disillusioned with the state-sponsored church, brazenly began comparing him to Jesus Christ. “He shatters fetters, sweeps the rubble heaps back into order, scourges stragglers home,” described Hitler follower Stefan George, predicting that Hitler would usher in an era of “Lord once more Lord. Rule once more Rule.”20

  Scoffing at Hitler’s virility was also a tactic that Dix employed this same year in his own work Pimp and Prostitute, which showed Hitler with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, a buxom topless prostitute lounging in the background. There was no evidence of Hitler’s ever visiting prostitutes, but the work was a metaphor: “pimping” was contemporary German slang for the promotion of dangerous, misleading ideas.

  It was clear that art had become a critical commentary on the state of Germany, its politics in particular. This set up a conflict that Hitler, artist and ideologue, would pursue relentlessly.

  Hitler the Savior and Pimp and Prostitute were circulating at a time when Hitler was gaining infamy for his failed Munich Putsch, which took place on the night of 8–9 November 1923. Leading up to the putsch, the thirty-four-year-old had continued voraciously reading newspapers, in which the coverage of Grosz’s trial for God with Us and continued prese
nce as a provocateur were omnipresent. Yet, despite Grosz’s efforts, the Nazis had become the most prominent nationalist party by the end of 1923.

  Hitler now held large rallies, and although his party was only one of roughly fifty other Far Right groups, he achieved political dominance by homing in on voters disenchanted with the government’s continued inability to craft policy and solve key issues. Hitler argued that Germany was suffering from a lack of national unity due to the “niggerizing of the Germans” by nonwhites, the rise of the communists, and a dangerously widening income gap.21 Even those who rejected the first two points could easily observe the third: economic disparity.

  Anti-Semitism was now a common rhetorical theme. Hitler argued that “Jewry” was a pernicious disease quite literally bred into Jews, an “inbred race” unwilling and unable to defend any nation and its culture; it was consequently dangerous for national security that they possessed full voting and civil rights. Hitler argued that a judicially enforced “opposition to and elimination of the privileges of the Jews” was warranted and would ultimately lead to the necessary extinction of Jews themselves.22

  The majority of Hitler’s opponents confidently believed that his movement would founder due to a lack of momentum and organization. Yet they underestimated how strategic Hitler was in marketing his new party, particularly as an antidote to communism. In early 1920, he adopted red as the official color of the party, now officially named the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), or National Socialist German Workers’ Party. It was a shrewd move that siphoned power away from the communists, Hitler’s main antiestablishment rival. Hitler railed that communism was a product of anti-German Jews, simultaneously arguing that democracy was also a Jewish plot to take over Germany.23 “The Jew destroys and must destroy because,” Hitler argued, within “himself he carries those characteristics, which Nature has given him, and he cannot ever rid himself of those characteristics.”24