Berlin Dada and the Modern Artists of the Weimar Republic

Dada and Degenerate Art in Germany

At the end of WW1, Germany found itself in a period of transition. Held responsible for the war and forced to pay reparations, the Weimar Republic was in a disastrous state. The Kaiser Willelm II had abdicated, hyperinflation decimated the value of the mark, and Berlin was fast becoming vice capital of the world with "New Frau" poster-girl Anita Berber taking pride in her position as the high priestess of immorality.[footnoteRef:1] It was a new Germany in every respect -- but not one that was destined to last: it was new in the sense that for the first time in its culture, the Germans were embracing the end -- the end of the old order, of the old code, of the old art and moral imperatives; life was short and falling apart at the seams as fast as the mark was becoming worthless. Jobs were being lost and hunger and prostitution soaring; the ideas of Freud and the Bauhaus were spreading, and if at least people could not find work they could drown their troubles in sex, drugs and cabaret. 1920s Germany under the Weimar Republic was a decade of decadence and "degenerate" art (as the Third Reich would come to call it): but it was also a celebration of both as the First International Dada Fair in Berlin from June 30th to August 25th, 1920 showed. Dada had been born four years earlier in Zurich, Switzerland at Cabaret Voltaire, opened by Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings. Lenin had been in Zurich at the same time, departing only one year later in order to oversee the revolution in Russia (German authorities allowed his carriage to pass without inspection). In short, revolution in art and in government was taking hold -- and Germany was the nexus of it all. [1: Katie Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (NY: Berghahn, 2013), 7.]

Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings had fled Germany in 1915 following their criticism of the war (Ball fled to avoid serving in the military -- just one of the ways in which he was the exact antithesis of Hitler,[footnoteRef:2] who not only served in WW1 but was decorated with two Iron Crosses, the Bavarian Military Medal and the Cross of Military Merit). Dada for them, and for Tristan Tzara and Jean Arp and the others who joined them at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, was the artistic epitome of their rejection of everything related to the established order of general society. Tzara for instance would dress like a clown when reciting poetry (mingled with screams) on the stage: it was cold, calculating, cynical, sarcastic, original and anti-establishment to the core. Ball's sound poetry, which consisted of a string of nonsense words -- babble -- which he tossed out while dressed like a caricature of a bishop of the church, was another example of the Dada Movement in Switzerland. (Raoul Hausmann was another sound poet, whose poems were "constructed abstractly from letters alone ... with lines such as "NVMWNAUR").[footnoteRef:3] Cabaret Voltaire thumbed its nose at the world of high art and everything connected to it -- and soon it would be extending its influence into Germany following the end of WW1, as the Germans surrendered, bowed their heads in submission to the Western powers, and gave up. Germany was being rolled over and left for dead -- and Dada and the Degenerate Art Movement, rather than mourn the loss, celebrated it with glee and reckless abandon. Dada was nihilism dressed up in artistic pose. [2: Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-garde in Exhibition (NY: Abrams, 1994), 98. ] [3: Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-garde in Exhibition (NY: Abrams, 1994), 107.]

If Otto Dix captured the visual essence of the new transition in German culture, Tzara captured the philosophical skullduggery of the times in his Dada Manifesto. Dix reflected in his paintings the vampirism underlying the new code; Tzara the hollow, smirking rage. Tzara, gleefully sounding like Dostoevsky's Underground Man, asserted, "I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am also against principles," relishing in his Wilde-like wittiness, a common enough diversion among the "smart set" -- but the German Dadaists took the Absurd to a whole new level. Tzara would go on to expound that "I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air; I am against action; for continuous contradiction, for affirmation too, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense,"[footnoteRef:4] and essentially thus laid out the doctrine of German Dada: Shakespeare's Iago could not have spun out a better philosophical treatise; nor Nietzsche; nor the Underground Man -- though Tzara certainly must have found inspiration among them all. It was this antithetical approach to all things ordered that crept into Germany post-WW1 and that transformed the culture, already receiving a beat down both politically and economically. [4: Tristan Tzara, "Dada Manifesto" (1918), 391.org, accessed May 8, 2016 from http://www.391.org/manifestos/1918-dada-manifesto-tristan-tzara.html#.Vy9504SDGko]

For Dix, the new German soul was that which he saw beneath the surface of the skin, in his Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber (1925) and The Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926). Dix painted Berber as though she were a calculating old harlot -- which was, of course, the image she liked to cultivate. Her portrait shows her with vivid red hair, powdered white face, heavily painted with make-up and clad in a tight, form-fitting red dress, which she hikes up her thigh, a sneer in her eyes daring the viewer to make his move. Dix's portrait casts a lurid red glow over Berber, with the backdrop doused in globs of red and black: her eyes stare out beneath hoods of black mascara and her bored mouth portrays the requisite cynicism and ennui -- one could only take so much pleasure in the thrill of being "bad" before the thrill finally and inevitably wore off -- such was what Dix appears to have discovered in Berber's young (but quite old if one counts years by experience) face. There is a skeletal characteristic to her portrayal and a kind of predatory snarl lurking in her expression. Berber was the liberated woman of the 1920s -- the Cabaret girl -- the famous dancer whose life of opiates, sex, and alcohol would lead her to an early grave. Famous German filmmaker Fritz Lang would model his anti-heroine of Metropolis after her -- the wicked seductress of the German menfolk, captivated by her blatant eroticism and played like the rats led by the pied piper. Dix's portrait of Berber reflected this to some degree.

His portrait of Sylvia von Harden did the same for her as his portrait of Berber did for the dancing girl. Harden was another "New Frau" -- but of the more intellectual kind rather than of the "entertainment" variety. Harden was the journalist whose outlook was colored by the ideals of the emancipated woman -- woman liberated from the old order, which had kept her subjugated to a patriarchy that was now running for the hills, tail between its legs (all, that is, except for young men like Hitler, who recoiled with intense disgust at what was happening in Germany at this time). Harden's New Frau was much more symbolic of the elitism that the identity was meant to cultivate: Harden herself changed her name from Lehr to von Harden so as to give herself the same kind of character of upper-crust nobility that Lars Trier would later adopt by inserting the "von" into the middle of his name.[footnoteRef:5] (She was not the only one to change her name: George Grosz would also change his first name from Georg so as to reflect his rejection of European bourgeois values, and John Heartfield anglicized his from Helmut Herzfelde).[footnoteRef:6] Harden would also give herself a physical makeover, cutting her hair short, sporting the androgynous bob (gender-bending linked up with the sexually amorphous, homosexual, sexually liberated underworld that Berber was so much a part of). Harden's own life was riddled with sexual dalliances, but such was the nature of the times that having a child out of wedlock, as Harden did, was almost part and parcel of being progressive.[footnoteRef:7] The idea of matrimony being something sacred (and something connected to childbearing and the fostering of a family) would be a theme of some of the portraits by Hannah Hoch -- for instance, in Immortal Life (1924) and The Bride (1924-7), both representative of the deep social strain overwhelming the Weimar artistic consciousness. Dix's portrait of Harden also hinted at this strain: the portrait exaggerates the woman's features and essentially caricatures his subject. Her hands and fingers are elongated like the vampire in Murnau's Nosferatu, another Weimer cinematic masterpiece, like Lang's Metropolis, which captured the tone, mood, and decline of German society, with the vampire at the center of the film lurking as an undead predator in the shadows, stalking his victims unawares. Harden's portrait by Dix could be called a study in vampirism in Weimar society through the persona of one of its more celebrated journalists. [5: Shearer West, The Visual Arts in Germany, 1890-1940: Utopia and Despair (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 138.] [6: Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-garde in Exhibition (NY: Abrams, 1994), 102.] [7: Jill Jiminez, Joanna Banham, Dictionary of Artists' Models (UK: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2012), 262..]

Dix, Hoch and others had all been part of the First International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920.[footnoteRef:8] But it was Grosz, Hausmann and Heartfield who organized it -- and who ultimately failed to turn a profit.[footnoteRef:9] Nonetheless, they reflected in their art the rising violent conflict within German society around them: Heartfield, Grosz, Dix and the German Dadaists all "drew vicious caricatures of officers and their bourgeois supporters," and hung them on the walls at the Fair.[footnoteRef:10] Dada was about rejecting the order that the Dada artists hated and mocked: they had no love for the fighting outfits or the politics of nationalism: they were revolutionary in their aspect, nihilistic in their philosophy, and anarchistic in their politics. Their contempt for the German soldier, whom they scorned without exception was evident in the Fair's art pieces: Grosz and Heartfield collaborated on a piece entitled The Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild (Electro-Mechanical Tatlin Plastic) -- "a mannequin decorated with a war medal and rusty cutlery, with a light bulb for head and pistol and electric bell for arms, 'dedicated to the Socialist Reichstag delegates who voted for the war'."[footnoteRef:11] The scornful contempt of the artists was unmistakable. Hoch's photomontage Cut with the Cake Knife took its title from the idea that the Fair's artists had "cut with the cake knife of Dada through the last beer-swilling cultural epoch of the Weimar Republic."[footnoteRef:12] It was in this manner that the Dadaists represented their displeasure with German culture. Hausmann would go on to produce collages too such as Tatlin at Home, using machine imagery to describe the left-wing revolution.[footnoteRef:13] They despised both right and left, striking out at one and all. [8: Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-garde in Exhibition (NY: Abrams, 1994), 100.] [9: Wieland Herzfelde, Brigid Doherty, "Introduction to the First International Dada Fair," October, Vol. 105, Dada (Summer, 2003), 93.] [10: Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-garde in Exhibition (NY: Abrams, 1994), 102.] [11: Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-garde in Exhibition (NY: Abrams, 1994), 103.] [12: Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-garde in Exhibition (NY: Abrams, 1994), 104.] [13: Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-garde in Exhibition (NY: Abrams, 1994), 112.]

The Dadaists did not make themselves welcome company for the British occupying the Rhineland, either: "the British authorities already had prohibited two of their earlier publications" and their show in Cologne, preceding the Berlin arrival, was closed for "obscenity."[footnoteRef:14] Berlin Dada was essentially the beginning and the high point for Dada in Germany. From there it went to France and then to the U.S. where Duchamp's Fountain become an iconic Dada piece. In Germany, however, Dada and all modern art would hit a brick wall in the 1930s. What Franco would do in Spain by tightening the reigns of control, Hitler attempted did in Germany. Franco succeeded largely because he did not take on the whole world (at least not the international order that swept from Russia to the U.S.); but, then again, Spain was not the nexus of Europe -- Germany was. The Rhineland was the heart of the Continent -- and Hitler and the Third Reich meant to expunge that heart of any and all modernism, of the cultural apathy and degeneracy that had run wild in the 1920s; and they would not stop at the borders of Germany but would, in fact, challenge the international order on a grand scale. The Third Reich essentially represented the Old World and WW2 was a violent clash between the Old and the New. [14: Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-garde in Exhibition (NY: Abrams, 1994), 108.]

It was in this spirit that the Great German Exhibition was planned in 1937. It was Hitler the artist attempting to restore what he believed was a cultural imperative -- traditional art that reinforced traditional German concepts, motifs and ideals. The Exhibition ran through 1943 -- nearly right up to the end of the Third Reich. It displayed works by Werner Peiner, such as Das schwarze Paradies and Landschaft in Osttransvaal, and Karl Lenz, such as Erdausen in Sommer, or Otto Scheinhammer's Kallmunz, or Edward Harrison Compton's Wolken uber dem Inntal.[footnoteRef:15] Many of the paintings were pastoral scenes, landscapes, nature paintings of the pre-modern era that were still being painted but were not in vogue; others were genre pieces, architecture, allegory/mythology, portraits, military, still life, animals; in short, images that were not abstract, surreal, disjointed, cynical, satirical, caricature, or anything else that modernism projected. This was the art that Hitler admired and wanted Germans to admire and respect. This was the kind of art that he himself had wanted to produce as a young man before the First World War. [15: Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (1938-1943), accessed May 8, 2016 from http://www.gdk-research.de/]

Indeed, Hitler had by all accounts served nobly in WW1 and was recovering in the hospital from his wounds when he heard of Germany's surrender. It was, he felt, a fatal blow and one that the German people could scarce suffer. He felt Germany's leaders had betrayed the German spirit, culture and people who had supported the war effort for so long. He turned from art to politics, vented his outrage at the worthlessness of the mark, crusading for the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), and winning support from compatriots who had not yet given up on the idea of German restoration. For his efforts, he was again wounded, arrested, imprisoned -- but his time in jail afforded him the opportunity to pronounce his own vision -- Mein Kampf -- which became a bestseller in Germany, igniting a spirit of nationalism that had seemed dead just a decade earlier. Upon his release, Hitler would sweep to power at the head of the NSDAP, challenging the Communists (who had taken hold in the Republic) and attacking the international bankers (such as the House of Rothschild) who he and many others identified as being behind the ruthless exploitation of the German people. Hitler's ascent was backed by a vigorous resolution to sweep out the degeneracy of the 1920s: the book burning that commenced under the Third Reich was of literature identified as pornographic -- such as Berber and Droste's Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy -- or it was deemed socio-politically evil, such as the literature of the Freemasonic lodges which were shut and condemned. Hitler too had been an artist as a young man -- but his art was not subversive or sarcastic: it had been simple, realistic, traditional. Hitler represented the resurrection of the old order, militant and ready to return to fighting.

Thus, Hitler and the Third Reich exercised tight control over German culture and art once they took power in Germany. "Artists were forced to join official groups, and any 'undesirables' were dismissed from teaching posts in the academies and artistic organizations," as Barron notes.[footnoteRef:16] In order to cleanse the country of the modern art that had crept in through Bauhaus and the Dadaists and the cabarets, Hitler extolled the idea of restoring traditional artistry. He tasked Goebbels with the mission of filling a gallery with such works -- but when Goebbels' committee failed to satisfy, things changed. [16: Stephanie Barron, Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (NY: Abrams, 1992), 9.]

The Degenerate Art Exhibit had been Goebbels idea, after his committee had been ravaged by Hitler for selecting works of art for the Reich's exhibit that failed to receive Hitler's approval (it appeared that neither Goebbels or his committee knew "good" art from "bad"). In order to make up for the offense, Goebbels suggested that the Fuhrer hold a Degenerate Art Exhibit in tandem with the Great German Exhibition so as to educate the public about what was good art and what was bad art (the Great Exhibition would serve as an example of good art, and the Degenerate Art Exhibit would serve as an example of bad art -- with explanations for why it was bad to boot). Yet, if the original committee had had difficulty telling the difference, some of the artists had it even worse: one of the artists selected for the Degenerate Art Exhibit was Emile Nolde, who had begun his career as an Expressionist -- and he found his inclusion in the Degenerate Art Exhibit to be offensive -- so he wrote to the Reich, pleading his case, which was essentially ignored. In fact, Nolde would be forbidden to paint after 1941.[footnoteRef:17] All it showed was that art remained a subjective experience for one and all and the line between good art and bad art that Goebbels and Hitler attempted to draw was impossibly arbitrary. [17: Emil Nolde, Nolde: Forbidden pictures, watercolours 1939-1945 (UK: Marlsborough Fine Art, 1970).]

Kandinsky was included in the Degenerate Art Exhibit along with Kirchner. Kandinsky had also started out with Impressionism and Expressionism before moving towards Abstractionism and producing works like Yellow-Red-Blue or Composition No. 8 -- abstract works of geometric figures that "spiritualized" the modern era in artistic representation. Kandinsky was something new -- something in the mold of the Bauhaus; but Nolde was a descendent of Van Gogh and to put the two side by side was to fail to see any difference between the two. Kirchner, moreover, would be included in the Degenerate Art Exhibit -- his work A Group of Artists (The Painters of the Brucke) (1925-6) being displayed by the Third Reich and later by Neue Galerie in New York in 2014 as part of a restoration exhibit, celebrating the German artists whom the Third Reich had attempted to downplay.