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Textbook Ebook Revolutionary Beauty The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield Sabine T Kriebel All Chapter PDF
Textbook Ebook Revolutionary Beauty The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield Sabine T Kriebel All Chapter PDF
S U P P O R T OF T H E ART E N D O W M E N T F U N D OF T H E U N I V E R S I T Y OF
Sabine T. Kriebel
rp
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ISBN 9 7 8 - 0 - 5 2 0 - 2 7 6 1 8 - 5 (cloth : a l k . p a p e r )
1. P h o t o m o n t a g e . 2 . Politics in art. 3. H e a r t f i e l d , J o h n , 1 8 9 1 - 1 9 6 8 .
I. Title.
TR685.K75 2014
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M a n u f a c t u r e d in t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s o f A m e r i c a
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T h e p a p e r u s e d in t h i s p u b l i c a t i o n m e e t s t h e m i n i m u m r e q u i r e m e n t s o f
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For my family, passed and present
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments • ix
List o f Abbreviations • xi
1 T h e Subject in Circulation • 19
Notes • 269
Selected Bibliography • 303
List of Illustrations • 319
Index • 323
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When this project began in 1997, the Cold War was still thawing and a study of a Com-
munist photomonteur did not invariably meet with enthusiasm. I remain indebted to
my earliest critical supporters: Anne M. Wagner, T. J. Clark, Martin Jay, and Anton
Kaes. Crucial research funding was supplied by the Berlin Program for Advanced Ger-
man and European Studies, jointly administered by the Freie Universität Berlin and the
Social Science Research Council. I owe Karin Goihl particular thanks. At the Akademie
der Künste, Berlin, I am grateful to Michael Krejsa, Director of the John Heartfield
Archive, for his patient support; to Peter Zimmerman for his continuing scholarly gen-
erosity; and to Anita Metelka for her unfailing kindness and efficiency. Kari Dahlgren
at the University of California Press has been elemental in helping this book become
a reality; that the manuscript should find a home back in the location where it began
is deeply satisfying. I could not have asked for a better editorial team: Jack Young and
Steven Baker have helped make the book stronger and the painstaking process most
enjoyable. Though embedded in its German-Californian roots, the international dimen-
sions of support for this book have multiplied in splendidly unexpected ways. In the
Republic of Ireland, I am grateful to my home institution, University College Cork, for
a crucial sabbatical leave during challenging economic times. My colleagues in the His-
tory of Art Unit have been stalwart—Flavio Boggi, Simon Knowles, Ed Krcma, Jenifer
Ni Ghrädaigh—as has Geoff Roberts in the School of History. The art seminar "Pho-
tography Theory," organized by James Elkins and held at the University College Cork
in 2005, proved to be vital to my understanding of photography, as were conversations
i X
with Margaret Iverson, Margaret Olin, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and Joel Snyder; I am
indebted to James Elkins for inviting me to write the introduction to the resultant book
and for nearly a decade of critical support. T h e College of Arts, Celtic Studies, and Social
Sciences, the School of History, and the History of Art department at the University
College Cork and the National University of Ireland have generously provided publica-
tion grants, which I gratefully acknowledge. Laura Rascaroli, Anne O'Callaghan, and
Kathleen James-Chakraborty are cherished sources of strength and encouragement. In
the United Kingdom, Jo Applin, Seth Graham, John Krcma, Debbie Lewer, Jonathan
Long, Frederic Schwartz, and Christian Weikop have bolstered and enriched my work
in several ways. In Germany, I warmly thank Ralf Burmeister, Wolfgang Hesse, Antje
Krause-Wahl, Roland März, Freya Mühlhaupt, Anne Söll, and Eckhard Siepmann. I
received generous assistance at Amsterdam's International Institute of Social History
from Mieke Ijzermans and Ursula Langkau-Alex. In North America, Judith Brodie,
Leah Dickerman, Thomas Haakenson, Andreas Huyssen, Karen Kenkel, Katherine
Kuenzli, Rudolf Kuenzli, Amy Lyford, Margaret MacNamidhe, Eve Meitzer, Bibiana
Obler, Sergei Oushakine, Andreas Puskeiler, Anson Rabinbach, and Michael T h o m a s
Taylor offered pivotal interventions. Anna Wexler Katsnelson provided characteristically
incisive feedback on several chapters. Sally Stein's sharp observations and discerning
comments shifted important aspects of my argument. Andrés Zervigón became a fellow
Heartfield traveler on the journey, ensuring a stimulating trip and providing buoyant
company. Stephan Koch, my most steadfast ally, has tolerated the other Berliner in our
lives with good humor, curiosity, and patience for nearly a decade and deserves my deep-
est thanks. This book is dedicated to my family, which nourished my investment in this
particular moment in history long before I went to university, and whose lives have been
indelibly marked by its aftermath. To the memory of my grandparents Elfriede Kriebel
and Käthe and Helmut Becker, and of my father, Dr. Horst Kriebel, whose loving pres-
ences and sad stories haunt this book. To my mother, Christa, and brother, Norbert, in
Southern California, who can hold and read it. This is for you.
X A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
ABBREVIATIONS
IB Illustrierter Beobachter
SA Sturmabteilung
SS SchutzstafFel
xi
S.M. A D O L F
John Heartfield, His Majesty Adolf, f r o m AIZ n , no. 34 (August 2 1 , 1932). T h e Getty R e s e a r c h
Institute, Los A n g e l e s (87-S194). © I V A R O / V G Bild-Kunst, B o n n .
INTRODUCTION
Photomontage, Paradigm of the Modem
Dear Sir,
Seeing your wonderful photomontage pictures in the Lilliput Magazine makes me
think that it is now possible to gratify an old lady's wish, which she has wanted to come
true for many years, and in this I would be very grateful of your kind assistance.
My mother-in-law's only son was a student in England and passed his B.Sc. (Engi-
neering) examination but shortly afterwards got into trouble and joined the army as a
ranker and unfortunately died.
We managed to get a copy of a photograph of him in his uniform and had an enlarge-
ment made, but his mother cannot "picture" him in that garb.
I wonder if you could, using the negative which I enclose, construct a head and shoul-
ders portrait of him in a cap, gown, and hood, and civilian clothes, of course.
Portrait to be in black and white, and size 9V2" x 12" (it would then be the same size
as the enlargement we have and they would make a pair).
Would you kindly let me know if you can do this for me, and if possible, give me an
estimate of your charge.
I am, Sir,
Yours faithfully,
S. B. Flint1
FIGURE 2.
John Heartfield, Blood and iron, f r o m AlZ 13, no. 1 0 (March 8, 1934). T h e
Getty Research Institute, Los A n g e l e s (87-8194). © I V A R O / V G Bild-
Kunst, B o n n .
private request w a s surely vexing for a m a n w h o had risked life and limb to produce criti-
cal art for a m a s s audience. Recently exiled to England, John Heartfield w a s the fugitive
i m a g e - m a k e r of the G e r m a n C o m m u n i s t Left w h o had produced a copious supply of
posters, book jackets, and satirical montages, most significantly the 237 photomontages
that he m a n u f a c t u r e d for the p o p u l a r left-wing Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (AlZ), or
Workers' Illustrated Magazine, over the course of eight years. B e c a u s e of his provoca-
tive pictures, Heartfield w a s persecuted by the National Socialist r e g i m e , spied on by
Gestapo agents, and twice forced into exile, once in 1933 and again in 1 9 3 8 . T h e eight
photomontages that Flint saw reproduced in Lilliput m a g a z i n e in May 1 9 3 9 included
2 I N T R O D U C T I O N
FIGURE 3.
John Heartfield, The meaning of Geneva, f r o m A / 2 11, no. 48 (November 27,
1932). T h e Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-S194). © IVARO/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
some of Heartfield's most trenchant critiques of Nazism: S. JVf. Adolf (fig. 1); Blood and
iron (fig. 2); The meaning of Geneva (fig. 3); German acorns 1933 (fig. 89); Hurrah! The
butter is finished! (fig. 4); The thousand year Reich; Have no fear, he is a vegetarian; and As
in the Middle Ages, so it is in the Third Reich.2
But if we delve deeper, looking beyond surface appearances as Heartfield's images
ask us to do, Flint's entreaty not only highlights salient elements of photomontage,
but also tells us something about the popular reception of the medium. Flint's request
recalls a widespread wartime practice whereby infantrymen at the front affixed photo-
graphs of their faces to picture postcards of soldiers in u n i f o r m and sent them to family
John Heartfield, "Hurrah, the butter is finished!" from AIZ 14, no. 51
(December 19,1935). The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-S194). ©
IVARO/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
members back home. Here, that practice has been enlisted for civilian desires, for the
purpose of fabricating academic rather than military authority. The operations are the
same, though the uniforms are different. Flint asks that Heartfield conjure a new body,
a fantasy image, cleaving a man from his military uniform with incisions that penetrate
his photographic flesh—a solicitation that turns the artist into a surgeon or a magician,
depending, as the philosopher Walter Benjamin observed, on the degree of awareness
we accord the violence of mechanical intervention. 3 As will become evident in the course
of this book, Heartfield's montages move from surgery to sorcery to induce political
4 INTRODUCTION
disenchantment in the beholder, while the wounds of his intervention evanesce with
their mechanical replication.
Although we do not know if Heartfield ever indulged this request, in several respects,
Flint gets Heartfield's project right. Flint's letter is a request to adjust matters on the
home front. Flint wishes for a reassembly of the world, predicated on fantasy and adroit
recombination; he wants Heartfield to "gratify a wish" by conjuring an impossible real-
ity with a photograph, that is, with a photochemical imprint of the transient material
world. Flint commissions Heartfield to weld together a visual fiction, one that in this
instance reinforces an ideal world, of a scholar in cap, gown, hood, and civilian clothes,
"of course." The letter requests an image that his mother-in-law can "picture," rather
than preserve a photograph that reinforces the reality of a victim, one among millions,
of the First World War. Although Flint's is a wish to return the dead to a kind of eternal
life (albeit frozen on photographic paper), it is also a desire to actively suppress the past.
It is, we might say, an allusion to an illusion, pointing to the presence of disavowal
while engaging in the rituals of memory and mourning. Vital to the juxtaposition of
fantasy image (son in scholarly regalia) to real (son in military uniform) is a dialectic of
truth and illusion, of Utopia and dystopia—forces that play off of each other endlessly
in the space of a photographic frame. Or on a magazine page, as is the case with Heart-
field's AIZ work.
How ironic that an English citizen should be asking that a dead relative be brought
back to photographic life by a German photomonteur, when the English soldier pos-
sibly died at the hands of a German. John Heartfield, formerly Helmut Herzfeld, may
have found wry amusement in this fact as well, given that his choice of pseudonym
more than twenty years earlier had been a wartime protest against German chauvin-
ism and a symbolic alliance with the English enemy. Although this name change was
not explained to Lilliput readers, Heartfield's German origins, his "intense hatred of
war and fascism," and his skill and fame were. "Now, at 48, he is in England, a refugee
for the second time, still devoting his gift to peace and freedom." That his devotions
stemmed from radical Left politics was bypassed.
Flint's letter is a vivid example of one use of photomontage as perceived in the 1920s
and 1930s, namely as a pictorial antidote to modern disenchantment. Its purpose was
persuasion and momentary deception (of course we know it's "only" a photograph),
representing the world as we would like it to be. As such, photomontage found its place
both in private amusement and in commercial advertising, in economies of play and
desire. Yet this same capacity also meant that the persuasive allure of photomontage was
recruited for explicitly political ends, becoming, as this book elaborates, a weapon in the
struggle for power and mass consensus. Although these ideological stakes—capitalist
advertising and radical revolution—are rather different from each other, their visual
spectacle was very much intertwined in the 1920s and 1930s. Heartfield was among the
most prominent manufacturers of political photomontage and, at the same time, was
greatly admired by the commercial sector. Straddling high art and low culture, art and
PHOTOMONTAGE, PARADIGM OF T H E M O D E R N 5
propaganda, imagination and realism, Heartfield's photomontages actively contributed
to debates about modern representation. While Heartfield's work has been dismissed
as Communist propaganda, partially accounting for its long absence from art historical
accounts, this book shows how integral Heartfield's photomontages were to the visual
and political culture of the early twentieth century. Often treated as an amusing descen-
dant of photography or a technological iteration of collage, photomontage offers critical
purchase on photographic history and theory; photo historians overlook photomontage
to their detriment. As a "message without a code," photography's meaning is at once
related to its referent and radically contingent on its context, an empty sign reliant on
supplemental discourse. 4 Bound to the phenomenal world and rooted in cultural sys-
tems of meaning, photography is a powerful ideological vehicle, as Heartfield and his
contemporaries well understood. Photomontage, which extracts and recontextualizes
photographic fragments, also distills the photographic act itself—an "instantaneous
abduction of the object out of the world into another world, into another kind of time,"
as Christian Metz memorably phrased it—thus condensing and transforming many of
photography's symbolic functions, from apotropaic ritual to hegemonic reinforcement. 5
As a synthetic, polysemic form, photomontage's conjunction of historical referents and
context-driven meaning in 1930s Europe sheds new light on this decisive moment of
capitalist modernity.
6 INTRODUCTION
ing, prompting a critical awareness of this new medium of mass information. That
photomontage took hold in Germany and Soviet Russia more extensively than elsewhere
has to do, I suspect, with the concentrated modernization in these countries in the wake
of World War I, coupled with the establishment of new political systems—parliamen-
tary democracy in Germany and Communism in Russia. The exceptional energy and
innovation invested in the medium of photomontage in these two countries cannot be
divorced from the intense interwar climate of futuristic utopianism—or, in the case of
Heartfield and other radical critics of the Weimar Republic, of fervent disillusionment
combined with deep-seated idealism. Although the German commercial sector had to
contend with the fragile postwar economy, there, too, hopeful expectation prevailed over
current circumstance. 7 Thus, it appears that photomontage was at its most vital in the
intersections of despair and desire, pessimism and longing.
As a form of representation, photomontage offered a way of disassembling and reas-
sembling the world order, deconstructing conventional representations in order to con-
struct a new world or an ideological critique. As such, photomontage was considered
the ideal form of Marxist critique, because a juxtaposition of material imprints of "the
real" enabled the viewer to understand the relations between things—social relations,
political relations, commodity relations—and the practice thus evolved into "dialecti-
cal montage." However, as chapter 3 demonstrates, the radical Right in Germany also
mobilized photomontage during a crucial moment in its history, extending the use of
political photomontage beyond leftist circles. For a short time at least, serious oppo-
nents of capitalist liberal democracy considered photomontage to be a potent agitational
medium, remarkably effective in representing political relationships. It was more than
just a good joke, as Georg Lukâcs famously contended in 1938. 8 More economical than
film, more pervasive in daily life than the cinema, photomontage became a political
weapon, a form through which to shape mass consciousness before radio and television
became competitive forms of everyday information.
Based on the structural principle of pictorial disruption and reassembly, photomon-
tage is regularly described as a "symbolic form" or "paradigm" of the modern. 9 Montage,
as Christopher Phillips writes, "provid[ed] a shared visual idiom that more than any
other expressed the tumultuous arrival of a fully urbanized, industrialized culture." 10 In
its fragmentation, discontinuity, and simultaneous competition among parts within the
whole, photomontage offered a new syntax, a cipher for the accelerated social, economic,
and technological transformations of the twentieth century. Paul Citroën's Metropolis of
1923, for instance, conveys the heady tempo of modern urban life in its multiperspec-
tival reconstruction of a city and its modes of transportation (fig. 5).
Elemental to the modern symbolism of photomontage is its process of manufacture,
for photomontage mimics industrial production in its assembly of prefabricated, mass-
replicable parts. In German, the connection between montage and industrial assembly-
line production is linguistically explicit, for montieren means "to assemble" or "to fit,"
and a Monteur is a mechanic or engineer. The Berlin Dadaists, of which Heartfield was
a prominent member, seized on this semantic contiguity with manual industrial labor,
aligning both their artistic labor and their politics with the proletariat and mass repro-
duction, rather than with the institution of high art, emblematized by the unrepeatable
and private act of painting. 11 Heartfield's nickname "Monteur Dada" and his legendary
predilection for wearing worker's overalls functioned as social codes for anti-bourgeois
politics and artmaking. Dada-merika, a 1919 collaboration between Heartfield and his
fellow Dadaist George Grosz, is an assembly of readymade parts resembling a dysfunc-
tional machine about to overheat (fig. 6). The result is the construction of a pictorial
machine system, one that leads the viewer to cognitive awareness of fragmentation and
totality, part and whole.
For critical theorist Peter Burger, it is precisely this consciousness of pictorial frag-
8 INTRODUCTION
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