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At Akron Art Museum: Fighting Nazism with art
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BY: CYNTHIA DETTELBACH Editor
How many ways are there to fight the enemy? In the Stone Age, cavemen probably confronted their adversaries with sticks and stones; today we have “graduated” to nuclear bombs and other weapons of mass destruction.
But from that earliest time to this, there has also been another way to confront the enemy: through art.
The painting on the cave wall, music, dance, the written word and, later, the camera were used to reveal the enemy and its dangers.
To fight, or at least rail against the rising threat of Nazism in the early 1930s, artist John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld, a non-Jew) enlisted the gluepot, scissors, retoucher’s paint and other artists’ photographs and drawings. Forty of his resulting photomontages are on view at the Akron Art Museum in a show titled “John Heartfield vs. Nazi Germany.”
Rather than being consigned to a museum or art gallery where few could see them, Heartfield’s bold, in-your-face images appeared in AIZ (Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung), an anti-Fascist, leftist weekly. Circulation: 500,000.
To attack the twin behemoths of fascism and Adolf Hitler, the little German (just over 5 feet tall) used satire; he exaggerated or riffed on the terrible truths of what he saw happening around him. Using parts of various photographs and drawings, he put together absurd combinations of objects, distortions of scale, and often added ironic words and sayings.
Consider, for example, the signature image used to promote the Akron exhibit, “Goebbels’s recipe against the food shortage in Germany” (1935).
Pressed against an outsized slice of dark bread is a panicked man in suit and tie slowly being buried in butter or schmaltz by a hand wielding a giant butter knife. Incised on the blade are two swastikas. The Nazis’ intent is made prophetically clear by the words Heartfield appends to the bottom: “What? Your meals are lacking lard and butter? You can eat your Jews.” Which, tragically, the Nazis did.
In the photomontage “Song of the Anti-semites,” an unlikely group of seven (industrialist, government worker, young boys, mother, opera diva?) are pictured with their mouths wide open. More in the mode of a menacing shout than a pleasant song. The translated lyrics read:
What do I care about property and money
When I am no Jew?
Only the Jew aims
To eat his fill in this world.
My Führer beats the Jews to death
And so reversed the misery of the people.
“Song” appeared in AIZ on Sept. 19, 1935, just four days after a summer filled with anti-Semitic assaults, vandalism and boycotts led to enactment of the national anti-Semitic laws. Pre-figuring the title of a book by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen that would appear over 60 years later, Heartfield is telling us that not only Nazi party members, but all Germans, were “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.”
A third photomontage (AIZ, Nov. 28, 1935) satirizes the infamous 1936 Olympics scheduled to be held in Berlin. Heartfield shows the sports at which Nazis could excel: “Ax swinging. Head Rolling. Riding the Promissory Note.” The segment on rope pulling depicts Nazis dragging a bound Jew.
In a 1933 image titled “With his empty phrases he wants to gas the world,” the peace dove, drawn as a flat, insubstantial form, is muzzled. Hitler is portrayed here as a “gasbag;” later those words will take on more ominous implications as Hitler becomes a gasser of Jews and other “undesirables.”
As a result of his brazen and brave depictions of the Nazi regime, Heartfield found himself in the Gestapo’s crosshairs. He escaped arrest in 1933 by fleeing to Prague, where AIZ magazine had already relocated. Just before Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, Heartfield fled to England. Very helpful timelines both of the artist’s life and of the history of that era are part of the Akron exhibit.
The exhibition was curated by the museum’s chief curator Barbara Tannenbaum and designed by Christopher Hoot of The University of Akron. Esther Hexter did background research, and Prof. Herbert Hochhauser helped with translation.
Unlike traditionally displayed exhibits, Hoot explains he wanted to “show agitation and immediacy by having the images clustered in a variety of combinations” and at various levels. “It is not a calming effect,” he affirms.
Tannenbaum, meanwhile, spent the summer researching what happened in Germany week by week during the period covered by the exhibit. “It was shocking to discover how early the things we think of as not known were evident,” she says. For example, an AIZ cover of 1933 had a picture of a concentration camp where opponents of Nazism, many of whom were Jews, were the first to be incarcerated.
Even though the figures, names and places in the exhibit are specific to the rise of Nazism, she adds, “some of the issues Heartfield addresses n militarism, war profits, the increasing division between rich and poor” and, of course, vicious attacks on vulnerable peoples n are still with us today.
Less clear is whether a new kind of Heartfield is on the horizon today, using his or her skills as weapons against these ongoing injustices.
cdettelbach@cjn.org
What: “John Heartfield vs. Nazi Germany”
Where: Akron Art Museum, One S. High St., Akron
When: Through Nov. 30
Admission: Fee
www.akronartmuseum.org
But from that earliest time to this, there has also been another way to confront the enemy: through art.
The painting on the cave wall, music, dance, the written word and, later, the camera were used to reveal the enemy and its dangers.
To fight, or at least rail against the rising threat of Nazism in the early 1930s, artist John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld, a non-Jew) enlisted the gluepot, scissors, retoucher’s paint and other artists’ photographs and drawings. Forty of his resulting photomontages are on view at the Akron Art Museum in a show titled “John Heartfield vs. Nazi Germany.”
Rather than being consigned to a museum or art gallery where few could see them, Heartfield’s bold, in-your-face images appeared in AIZ (Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung), an anti-Fascist, leftist weekly. Circulation: 500,000.
To attack the twin behemoths of fascism and Adolf Hitler, the little German (just over 5 feet tall) used satire; he exaggerated or riffed on the terrible truths of what he saw happening around him. Using parts of various photographs and drawings, he put together absurd combinations of objects, distortions of scale, and often added ironic words and sayings.
Consider, for example, the signature image used to promote the Akron exhibit, “Goebbels’s recipe against the food shortage in Germany” (1935).
Pressed against an outsized slice of dark bread is a panicked man in suit and tie slowly being buried in butter or schmaltz by a hand wielding a giant butter knife. Incised on the blade are two swastikas. The Nazis’ intent is made prophetically clear by the words Heartfield appends to the bottom: “What? Your meals are lacking lard and butter? You can eat your Jews.” Which, tragically, the Nazis did.
In the photomontage “Song of the Anti-semites,” an unlikely group of seven (industrialist, government worker, young boys, mother, opera diva?) are pictured with their mouths wide open. More in the mode of a menacing shout than a pleasant song. The translated lyrics read:
What do I care about property and money
When I am no Jew?
Only the Jew aims
To eat his fill in this world.
My Führer beats the Jews to death
And so reversed the misery of the people.
“Song” appeared in AIZ on Sept. 19, 1935, just four days after a summer filled with anti-Semitic assaults, vandalism and boycotts led to enactment of the national anti-Semitic laws. Pre-figuring the title of a book by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen that would appear over 60 years later, Heartfield is telling us that not only Nazi party members, but all Germans, were “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.”
A third photomontage (AIZ, Nov. 28, 1935) satirizes the infamous 1936 Olympics scheduled to be held in Berlin. Heartfield shows the sports at which Nazis could excel: “Ax swinging. Head Rolling. Riding the Promissory Note.” The segment on rope pulling depicts Nazis dragging a bound Jew.
In a 1933 image titled “With his empty phrases he wants to gas the world,” the peace dove, drawn as a flat, insubstantial form, is muzzled. Hitler is portrayed here as a “gasbag;” later those words will take on more ominous implications as Hitler becomes a gasser of Jews and other “undesirables.”
As a result of his brazen and brave depictions of the Nazi regime, Heartfield found himself in the Gestapo’s crosshairs. He escaped arrest in 1933 by fleeing to Prague, where AIZ magazine had already relocated. Just before Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, Heartfield fled to England. Very helpful timelines both of the artist’s life and of the history of that era are part of the Akron exhibit.
The exhibition was curated by the museum’s chief curator Barbara Tannenbaum and designed by Christopher Hoot of The University of Akron. Esther Hexter did background research, and Prof. Herbert Hochhauser helped with translation.
Unlike traditionally displayed exhibits, Hoot explains he wanted to “show agitation and immediacy by having the images clustered in a variety of combinations” and at various levels. “It is not a calming effect,” he affirms.
Tannenbaum, meanwhile, spent the summer researching what happened in Germany week by week during the period covered by the exhibit. “It was shocking to discover how early the things we think of as not known were evident,” she says. For example, an AIZ cover of 1933 had a picture of a concentration camp where opponents of Nazism, many of whom were Jews, were the first to be incarcerated.
Even though the figures, names and places in the exhibit are specific to the rise of Nazism, she adds, “some of the issues Heartfield addresses n militarism, war profits, the increasing division between rich and poor” and, of course, vicious attacks on vulnerable peoples n are still with us today.
Less clear is whether a new kind of Heartfield is on the horizon today, using his or her skills as weapons against these ongoing injustices.
cdettelbach@cjn.org
What: “John Heartfield vs. Nazi Germany”
Where: Akron Art Museum, One S. High St., Akron
When: Through Nov. 30
Admission: Fee
www.akronartmuseum.org
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