Touchstones: Essays in Literature, Art and Politics

  The arrival of Dadaism in Berlin in 1918 – from Zurich and the work of Richard Huelsenbeck – gave Grosz an appropriate climate – a philosophy and certain techniques – to give full rein to his anarchism and iconoclasm, to his fury and virulence against the political regime and the institutions of the nascent Weimar Republic, and to his revolutionary dreams, that were more destructive than constructive, and would keep him in the Communist party until 1925. (He joined the party in 1918, along with other Berlin Dadaists like John Heartfield, Wieland Herzfelde and Erwin Piscator.) From that time he contributed to all the Dadaist magazines, manifestos and shows, he printed his first collections of lithographs, edited and illustrated innumerable avant-garde and revolutionary publications, was involved in scandals, married Eva Peter, his lifelong companion, organised individual exhibitions, was tried and fined three times for blasphemy and insulting the army, and lived to the full all the excesses, madness, fun and the political and cultural polemics of the twenties. These years prepared the ground for the second great European apocalypse, but they were also extraordinarily dynamic in artistic terms.

  These are Grosz’s great years. He was the leading artist in Berlin, in Germany, throughout the Weimar period. His two folders of lithographs, Erste George Grosz-Mappe and Kleine Grosz-Mappe date from 1917; the third, much more political than the previous two, Gott Mit Uns (God is with Us), is from 1920. As would happen later in his career, these engravings had already appeared before as drawings in different exhibitions and publications.

  In these years, Grosz would achieve a solid reputation, but he would also be subject to irate criticism from conservative sectors, which attacked him for his obscenity, anti-militarism and blasphemy, and, at times, even from his comrades in the Communist Party, who felt obliged to keep their distance from his iconoclastic excesses. The party publication Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag), for example, condemned as ‘perverse’ and ‘idiot forms of kitsch’ the paintings and objects of the First Dadaist Exhibition in Berlin (July and August 1920), in which Grosz exhibited nine engravings/lithographs from Gott Mit Uns, for which he was taken to court and fined three hundred marks (the court also ordered the destruction of the plates).

  Grosz’s world is, indeed, too individualist, arbitrary, obsessive and violent to serve the interests and objectives of a political party, even a party looking to reconstruct society root and branch. He very rarely offered a positive view of the proletariat and any future classless society. His 1919 drawing Wie der Staatsgerichtshof aussehen musste (How Courts Should Act), in which, beneath a portrait of the revolutionary leader Karl Liebkneth, a court of workers and peasants is trying a handful of generals in chains, is unusual in this respect. Instead, almost all his work of this period seems to be intent on satirising and expressing disgust at the military, the bourgeoisie, leaders and religious people, and describing, in extremely minute detail, degenerate and criminal elements.

  A pen-and-ink drawing from 1917, Als alles vorbei war, spielten sie Karten (When that finished, they started playing cards), which would appear in his book Ecce Homo (1923), with the title Apachen (Apaches), shows three horrifying individuals around a table, playing cards with icy tranquillity, after having murdered and dismembered a woman. A leg of the victim is sticking up out of one of the murderer’s chairs and the blurred mutilated body is in a corner. On the floor of the squalid room there is a woman’s boot, a basin and the axe and knife used for the crime. We can’t talk about ‘black humour’ here, because there is no humour, just macabre blackness, a life reduced to its essential cruel and grotesque components. And yet there is something about these three ferocious figures, their amorphous size, their rigid, slumped forms, their dead eyes, that is rather pathetic, a hint of humanity that seems to be accusing us. The design is simple and precisely realist.

  The word ‘realist’ is inevitable when it comes to describing Grosz’s world, as well as saying that it is urban, cataclysmic, full of sensuality, sex, blood, egotism, exploitation and cruelty. Also that it is elemental and primary, without nuance, ambiguity, generous gestures, compassion or lofty feelings. The people that inhabit this world are stupid puppets, vulgar bipeds thirsting for material pleasures, like eating, drinking, fornicating, exploiting their neighbours, going to war, as well as baroque excesses like slaughtering and decapitating other human beings. Is this life? Was this Berlin in the twenties? Of course not. Why use the word realist, then, to describe such an extravagant caricature? Because even though it is completely deformed and stripped of all positive aspects and complexity, the life reflected in Grosz’s ‘fiction’ is rooted in this common fund of shared experience, and we can recognise in it something that we are as well. The animate and inanimate beings of this world are joined by a very thin umbilical chord to the beings in our world – their carnal desires and the space they move in – and the artist’s skill has given them a persuasive power that overcomes any reservations we might have about their evil, their mechanised being or their ugliness (that is their unreality).

  In an autobiographical text from 1925, entitled Abwicklung (Liquidation),33 Grosz tells us that in order to make his objects as rough and virulent as possible, he studied the crudest impulses of artistic creation, the graffiti in public urinals and street doodles, which expressed very directly ‘the most powerful instincts’. He also felt that children’s drawings stimulated him ‘through their lack of ambiguity’. In his early exercise books and notebooks there are copies of slogans and images that he has seen in city streets. Indeed, in many of Grosz’s drawings in the twenties, especially in the first years of the decade, there are many echoes of these spontaneous, inexperienced attempts at producing images. Grosz looked for inspiration and models that chimed with his own view of life. The elemental and dogmatic views that he upheld required, for the sake of coherence, an equally simple and primary form: little men that seem like the stick figures that children doodle, or obscene graffiti where, in the loneliness of public toilets or in the darkness of the night, certain people give expression to filthy and disgusting feelings. The outlook and the form complement each other so successfully that they create an entire reality, different to that other reality – the real world – but linked to it by a powerful mixture of contrasting feelings: repulsion and fascination, hatred and desire, attraction and a desire to escape.

  Grosz’s world is very personal, but not solipsistic, as would be the case, in those years, with many other artists, above all those that abandoned figurative art. In his work there are many aspects that would appeal not just to his progressive contemporaries, but also to very large numbers of apolitical people. Take, for example, his criticism and condemnation of militarism, the old military caste that, despite the fall of the empire, continued to dominate the army and was a very troublesome legacy for the republican regime. They were responsible for losing the war and for the limitless sufferings of the German people. The merciless satires and caricatures that Grosz launched against the rituals, personalities, mythology and emblems of the military world were interpreted as being ideological. But it was not historical materialism and the class struggle that were the real sources of inspiration, but rather an irresistible desire to provoke and offend the people who best symbolise, in any regime, those aspects of the world most odious to an individualist, seditious and anarchic spirit such as his: force, discipline, hierarchies and order.

  The collection Gott Mit Uns contains his best anti-militarist prints. Perhaps the most famous of these is K.V. (Die Gesundbeter) (The Quack Doctors), which is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. (K.V. stands for kriegsverwendungsfahig: fit for active service). An army doctor declares as ‘fit for service’ a skeleton that he is examining with a stethoscope. The picture is framed by high-ranking officers standing around smoking and chatting, indifferent to the farce that they are party to, and by upright, automaton soldiers. The two generals in the foreground, seen in profile, have that look that is common to many of Grosz’s characters, somewhere between a clown and a wild beast:
bald heads, walrus moustaches, bull necks enclosed in stiff uniform collars, epaulettes, monocles, open jaws, butcher’s teeth, doll-like stiffness. There is something profoundly stupid, as well as carnivalesque, about these stunted human beings that seem to be enslaved by rituals that are absurd and yet can cause immense grief and violence. The tone is sarcastic, and the scene is also very claustrophobic, with the bare walls and barred windows through which one can glimpse skyscrapers, chimneys and clouds of smoke.

  It is not just the ferocity and insolence of the artist’s vision that is so impressive in this and in other drawings. It is true that they can be seen as a bilious attack on a certain state of affairs, an important moment in history. But if the vigorous energy of this work depended just on its historical content, then it would have become more anodyne or have disappeared altogether with the passing of time. The fact that it makes such an impact today, when ‘German militarism’ is now a thing of the past, is because this drawing also offers its own coherent and tightly structured world, full of colourful and terrifying buffoons and horrifying victims that have a life of their own. It is a creative response to real life: the deceitful world of fiction. A life without which the other life, the one that we live and not the one we dream, would be much more difficult to endure. That is why certain exceptionally talented people, like Grosz, have invented, with all the force of their imagination and technique, this parallel and autonomous life found in great artistic fictions.

  Until he left Germany in 1933, and above all in the immediate post-war years, military men constantly appear in Grosz’s world, in all their ridiculousness, ordering massacres, playing the macabre game of war, repressing workers, killing communists or simply exhibiting their ugly loud-mouthed faces, pitted with duelling scars, along with their dress swords, pistols, helmets and medals, often including swastikas. And in squalid, plebeian contrast to this military aristocracy stifled in their operatic parade uniforms, we find the former soldiers, turned by the war into mere shadows of human beings, armless, eyeless, leaning on their prosthetic limbs, starving, dragging their wretched figures through the streets, begging or selling knick-knacks in café or brothel doors.

  But these former soldiers, like the proletariat – whom we glimpse only rarely, always in the background, tied to an execution post, run through by a bayonet, setting out at dawn for the factory, or sweating in the factories to make the bosses rich – are, compared to the military, secondary figures in the farcical world of Grosz. This is a world of oppressors rather than victims.

  By contrast, the capitalist is also a prominent figure and is always centre stage, as in the marvellous sketch in the sixth issue of Die Pleite magazine (January 1920), where we find a general and a bourgeois gentleman dangling from scaffolds, shaking hands and wishing each other a happy New Year. The capitalist is described – invented – with the same tremendous excess as the military man. He is also a repulsive puppet. Whether he is a millionaire or a small-scale landlord, he is always seen as unsatisfied in his desires, always desperate for more money, more drink, more food and more women. He preens himself like a coquette, but he oozes vulgarity. He surveys his companies with shameless delight, stating, implacably, ‘I will destroy everything that prevents me from being the absolute master of this’ (an illustration for Schiller’s Die Rauber (The Robber)), or, brandishing a cigar, smoking, his hands in his waistcoat, his head in the clouds, showing the wretched of the world his immense stomach in which even his entrails are shaped like his factories (the illustration for Die Drie Soldaten (The Three Soldiers) by Bertolt Brecht in 1930).

  Capitalists make an appearance in cafés, count their money wads with their little eyes gleaming with greed, they dress in furs, watch-chains gleam in their waistcoats, they disport walking sticks and umbrellas, dress coats, cravats, top hats, round metal glasses, stiff collars, carnations in their buttonholes, walking their dogs in the street, kneeling in front of military men, kissing their swords and boots, eating and drinking until they are sick, spending their nights in nightclubs, frolicking with whores or with their wives whom they treat like whores. Among their fantasies are sadism and masochism and they are inveterate voyeurs. They play cards, speculate on war, preach sacrifice to their workers, they are patriots, nationalists and Nazis. In the intimacy of their bedrooms, they like to loosen their braces, unbutton their flies, stretch their legs and look covetously at the ample flesh of their lovers or wives or prostitutes.

  Grosz’s best collection – Ecce Homo, eighty-four lithographs and sixteen watercolours (Berlin, 1923) – mainly concentrates on these men. Here the bourgeois reigns, repellent, abusive, egotistical, hypocritical, a mediocre monster drunk with power and sensuality. In the most caustic of these images, the watercolour Kraft und Anmut (Force and Grace, 1922), you can see him with his hands in his pockets, in an elegant brown suit and a green tie, his jutting chin defying the world. Is he looking through the window at the properties that he has already acquired, or at those that will soon fall into his grasp? His posture, his expression, his square face, the muscles in his enormous neck, his open legs all signal an absolute confidence in himself, the security of someone who has possessions and who is in charge. Behind him, on the yellow quilt and the maroon cushions, in quiet desperation, or stretched out in a suggestive pose, is the third central figure in this crude and strident social trinity envisaged by Grosz: the prostitute. She wears pink slippers and black stockings, she has coloured ornaments on her white slip, which reveals some thigh and the mounds of her breasts. Her eyes reflect the tiredness of pleasure, her mouth is half open and, by the way that she is showing them off, she seems to be proud of her hairy armpits. This blatant vulgarity represents ‘Grace’ in Grosz’s twisted world.

  This paradise of militarism, exploitation and other bourgeois vices is also a relentlessly macho world, cruel to women. Women exist to be observed naked, to be fondled, hit, humiliated, murdered or cut up like a piece of meat. Because here women, as in the sermons of Puritan fanatics excoriating ‘sins of the flesh’, seem to possess the sinister gift of bringing out the worst in men, of turning them into beasts, as literally occurs in a 1928 drawing, Ruf der Wildnis (The Call of the Wild), in which five people looking at a dancer shaking her thighs grow the mouths and snouts of pigs. It comes as no surprise to learn, therefore, that the young Grosz was fascinated by the mythical figure of Circe, who turned men into pigs. There are at least two drawings dedicated to her, from 1912 and 1913: in one she is a modern woman with a hat, and in the other she has high heels and is smoking a cigarette, enthroned, in Olympian fashion, above groups of animalistic men, who are cowering at her feet. Women appear in Grosz’s world stretched out in voluptuous poses, showing their sex or their buttocks to bourgeois males with their flies undone who observe them as potential victims or as mere instruments of pleasure. They also appear in transparent dressing gowns and petticoats, in black stockings, half naked but wearing hats, jewels, chains and crosses. All these are the marks of the courtesan or professional woman of pleasure, or of bourgeois ladies who have become corrupted: these are the only parts they are allowed to play by the shadowy lustful males who dominate the world. Even when they get dressed and go out, to sit in a café or go for a walk, they cannot escape their nature and condition: their clothes are transparent and reveal their fat thighs, their heavy breasts and their enormous buttocks. Their appearance is the same, like the soldiers and the bourgeois men, whether they are gyrating at the top of a rope, doing acrobatics, gossiping in cafés, flirting in parties or opening their legs in the bedroom: plump, bags under their eyes, painted, pure flesh without brains or spirit, shameless, vulgar and artificial.

  Grosz grew up in a rural area of a region that was the bastion of very strict Protestantism, where families respected the pious customs of Wilhelm’s Germany. In his autobiography he remembers that in his youth convention dictated that the female form should be hidden by demure bodices, girdles and layers of clothing, without even an ankle showing, and that ‘decent women’ w
ere not even allowed to cross their legs. He also recounts in great detail the miraculous, unreal experience of seeing as a child a friend’s aunt undressing, thus discovering the intimacy of the female form. Whether it is true or false, the anecdote reveals the tremendous repressive atmosphere surrounding sex and the twisted, overheated effect that this had on male erotic fantasies. Without this background, one cannot understand how the depiction of women, sex and desire in Grosz’s drawings from the Berlin years could be so grotesque and violent, and so much like a sermon on chastity delivered by a preacher.

  That is why some critics call him a ‘moralist’. He does not seem to have been so in the post-war years, when the republic ushered in a spectacular liberation in behaviour, especially in the artistic, bohemian world of Berlin. Although he was a very dedicated worker, he enjoyed on at least several occasions those alcoholic and cocaine-fuelled binges where everything was possible, and he wrote about an orgy in his studio that lasted twenty-four hours. But it is certainly the case that when he came to paint, and doubtless contrary to his rational beliefs, there welled up from some inner place someone who was frightened by and furious at the mysteries of sex, someone who never felt himself on equal terms with women, or who had never rid himself totally from the inhibitions that are always at the root of the apocalyptic desires, the violence and the humiliation associated with physical love. Although he knew of Freud’s efforts, which were very fashionable in Germany at the time, to have the different aspects of sex treated naturally, as an essential part of life, he could not have taken them very seriously. (He dedicated a sardonic watercolour to him in 1922, Professor Freud gewidmet, in which we see this elegant gentleman with his tongue hanging out, surrounded by ample naked and half-naked ladies).