Hannah Höch: life and work, 1889–1978

Introduction
Hannah Hoch was an artist most known for her work in between the wars—the Weimar period, in which the Dada Movement came to the fore to challenge the sensibilities and pretensions of the early 20th century. Dada was as much a protest against the bourgeois as it was a slap in the face of the rising Fascist Movement. Hitler despised the Dadaists and the Dadaists despised him. Hoch counted herself as one among the Dadaists during the Weimar period—a period in which art and life came into intense conflict, while the universal stage was being set for the final showdown between the new and the old in WWII. For that reason—and for the reason that Hoch’s art gets to the heart of the changes that society was undergoing during that time of upheaval—I have selected Hannah Hoch as the focus of this paper. She is important to our textbook because she represents the woman’s perspective in a time that was fiercely dominated by men—and her perspective is one in which the superficiality of the times comes under the fire of her intense scorn. This paper will look at Hoch’s background, training, influences, achievements and contributions to art history, including five works that help demonstrate her talent and importance.
Background
Hannah Hoch was born in Germany in 1889. She studied in Berlin briefly before joining the Red Cross during the beginning of WWI. However, her stint there was short-lived and she returned to Berlin to enter into the National Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts. There she met some members of the Dada Movement and by 1917, she herself was a Dadaist (Makela; Gaze). Dada was like the artistic equivalent of a middle finger to all things—the ruling class, the new ideas, the self-importance of art. Dada was like a wrecking ball that sought to smash over the pomposity of all the people and organizations and belief systems that were cropping up. The war did nothing to slow down Dada—in fact, it enhanced it, pushing the Dadaists to ever more aggressive tactics.
During the war, many Dadaists had fled to Zurich to start up Cabaret Voltaire. Hugo Ball with his sound poetry and Tristan Tzara with his Dada Manifesto and clown poetry; Raoul Hausmann—another sound poet—and the one who introduced Hoch to the Dadaist at the National Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts—they were all there, enjoying and relishing their cynical takes on the modern world, pompously anti-pompous in their own way (Altshuler).
Training
Hoch thus received her basic training at the National Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts—but her training in Dada came directly from the movement’s founders—Hausmann, Tzara, Jean Arp, Otto Dix and the others. Tzara helped develop the artistic credo that Hoch and the Dadaists would embrace—and it was full of self-contradictions of the sort that the Dadaists deliberately made in order to mock: “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” (Tzara). It was acerbic and cynical and both serious and not serious at the same time. Dada was a giant sneer at polite society; it was also somewhat reckless in its lack of reverence for all the foundations of modern society and the institutions of art. Hoch absorbed it all; in lieu of much formal training beyond what she received at the National Institute, it served as her induction.
Influences
Influences were all around her—they were not just the artistic influences of the Dadaists in her immediate circle. They consisted of the Weimar environment that took over following the end of World War I. Berlin became vice capital of the world with its cabaret nightlife introducing Anita Berber to the world. Goebbels defined it as—“sin, vice and corruption.” Berber was the original poster girl of the sex, drugs and rock-n-roll lifestyle (pre-rock-n-roll). For example, while the idea of the “new woman” aka the Neu Frau was popping up in the Weimar Republic—a concept which made the new woman into something androgynous and equal to men, socially speaking—Hoch set out to mock the idea and deconstruct it while also asserting her own feminism. She embraced the type of “punk rock” spirit of Berber—unleashing on the modern century with everything inside of her. Instead of doing it through dance and performance in the cabarets of Berlin, Hoch did it through art—that, of course, would end up catching the eye of the Third Reich.
Hoch also spent time working for the publishing company Ullstein Verlag, where she developed her trademark photomontage style. It was for Ullstein Verlag that she spent roughly a decade of her time both during the war and after it when the Weimar Republic was getting under way. There she was given the opportunity to do collages and perfect her craft and her art. This time working for the publisher allowed her to build on the skills she developed at the National Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts and led to the style that she would become famous for.
Achievements
Hoch participated in the First International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920, organized by Hausmann and the other Dadaists (Altshuler). It was there that she displayed Cut with the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919). Hoch’s relationship with Hausmann did not go smoothly and by the mid-1920s she broke up with him and to some extent with the other Dadaists. She moved to the Netherlands before eventually coming back to Berlin during WWII. By that time, her art had been classified as degenerate by the Third Reich. Hitler being an admirer of art in the Old World style abhorred the modern artists and Dada in particular. While Hitler was preparing the Great German Exhibition in 1937, Hoch was living quietly in a small cottage in Berlin, trying to mind her own business so as not to be exiled or identified as a political saboteur (Barron). Hoch continued to create collages until her death in 1978 but her fame, once so assured in 1920, faded with the arrival of the Third Reich and the war—and after the war she never really recovered it.
Contributions to Art History: Five Works
Cut with the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919)
Described as “a forceful commentary, particularly on the gender issues erupting in postwar Weimar Germany” (Blumberg), her entry into the First International Dada Fair in Berlin proved to be one of the finest. Harris and Zucker state that it represented the political and social chaos of Germany after WWI. The collage captures the fragmentation that was occurring in Germany while simultaneously deriding all the different factions involved in the political and social movements of the time. Everything included in the collage is there to be ridiculed. Hoch was taking a swipe at Germany’s leaders, its followers, its factions, its past, its present and its future. The knife that clipped the pictures was the knife of Dada, here represented loud and clear by Hoch. While other artists would make other splashes—like Duchamp with his Fountain—Hoch was keeping it simple, yet loud—like the true “punk rock” artist that she was.
The collage is housed at the Collection Staatliche Museen Zu Berlin— Preu6ischer Kulturbesitz, Nation Algalerie. Its value and importance is in its character. As Makela notes, it humorously “unites representatives of the former Empire, the military, and the new, moderate government of the Republic in the ‘anti-Dada’ corner at the upper right, while grouping Communists and other radicals together with the Dadaists at the lower right” (25). Around them all are the dancing girls, celebrating the fact that soon they will be voting, too.
The Bride (1924-27)
The Bride represents matrimonial union of the new woman and the same old man, wearing a coat and tails. The new woman is distracted by all the ideas circling her head, indicating that she is just as vapid and an airhead as anything else in Germany at the time. The painting symbolizes that which was superficial and inhuman about Weimar society. The bride has the body of a woman; she is wearing the traditional white dress—but her head is large—ridiculously so—like she is a bobble head of today. The expression of the head is comical: the face of the woman is frozen in surprise, as she looks at the strange orbs that float around her head. Inside of each of the orbs is a message from society. In one there is a pair of wings, in another a wheel, in a third an eye that has a tear falling from it. There is a baby and a snake wrapped round the forbidden fruit. Each orb symbolizes about the mores and values of society—the expectations that the new woman still must face as she is, after all, getting married to a man and will be expected to go forth and multiply. The painting seems to suggest that the ridiculousness of the new woman is here—still surrounded by all the expectations that surrounded the concept of traditional womanhood. In other words, Hoch suggests that the new woman was not liberated or equal in any sense of the word.
The Bride is housed in the Collection Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum fur Moderne Kunst. The piece is important as a reminder of the realities of life in the Weimar Republic. As Makela and Boswell point out, it “features the white-clad figure of a bride surmounted by the incongruously large head of a frightened girl, who looks in horror at emblems of marital life that swirl menacingly around her” (15). For that reason alone it can be appreciated even today.
Immortal Life (1924)
Immortal Life (1924) depicts, in a way, the offspring of this union by representing a small child with a devious, almost demonic, air about it, with arms outstretched over its held and a devilish grin on its face. Beside the child is a flower and in the background is a small, blood-red earth, indicating that the world’s offspring is awash in blood and that childrearing is an unholy exercise. The snarling tone of the picture, with its hauntingly red backdrop, like the portrait by Dix of Anita the Dancer, suggests that the Weimar Republic in the 1920s has a horrific secret at its heart—one which has something to do with innocence, children, and sexuality. It could signify, for instance, the disconnect between natural eroticism and the procreation aspect of sexual intercourse. By commercializing the erotic in cities like Weimar Berlin, through its cabarets and night clubs, expressionist dances and sexualized photography, the sex act had become something produced solely for pleasure, without any hint of its natural end—the reproduction of children. Here, in Hoch’s painting is the missing element—the forgotten child, unwanted, unraised, unholy—the future of society.
Housed in a private collection, the work is important because it shows the acerbic quality of Hoch’s style more so than any other work. Its appeal is devastatingly bleak. The reward the viewer receives in viewing it is to wince.
The Beautiful Girl (1920)
Hoch would return to the theme of the new woman in this collage, which shows the merger of womanhood with industrialization. Juxtaposed in the image are the ideas of the feminine with the masculine and the notion that emerges is one in which there seems to be no clear idea about what either is meant to represent. The beautiful girl has a light bulb for a head and is surrounded by BMW emblems, a wheel and a pocket watch. A face peaks out from behind it all and a woman’s wig sits atop it all—and the overall impression that Hoch creates is of a modern Germany in which femininity is displaced by fake charm and materialism. The clock of time keeps ticking and society, which is supposedly progressing forward, is haunted by the specter of reality, which looks over the mass of images right into the eyes of the viewer as if to challenge him. This is one of Hoch’s works that indicates that the bottom was bound to fall out of German society sooner or later.
This work is housed in a private collection. Its importance is in what the image conveys—the de-womanizing of woman: “Hoch not only removed or obliterated the faces of the women in this photomontage but surrounded them with such signs of mechanization as a crank shaft, an I-beam, and an automobile tire” (Makela and Boswell 34).
Marlene (1930)
The title of this piece refers to the German actress Marlene Dietrich and the image is of a pair of woman’s legs in high heels standing up in the air from a pedestal. The image conveys the idea that women’s sexuality is conquering the world, knocking over the statues and structures that have been put in place by the old world. A pair of lips smiles in the upper right hand corner indicating that perhaps Hoch herself is quite pleased with what is happening, either here in the picture or overall in society. The sexuality of the image conveys the idea that men are doomed to suffer like the men in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, spell bound by the sexual beauty of the false Maria. Hoch finds the idea humorous and here plays with it happily.
The work is housed in the Collection Dakis Joannou in Athens. Its historical importance is in the fact that “it belongs to a group of works dating to the late 1920s and early 1930s that reference films or film stars” (Makela and Boswell 111). Its artistic importance may lie in the fact that it foreshadows one of the greatest scenes in one of the greatest films in American cinema—The Christmas Story—and in particular the moment when Ralphie’s father unwraps his major award to find a lamp that consists of a high-heeled, stockinged woman’s leg, which his wife eventually ends up breaking out of jealousy.
Why Should Deserves to be in the Textbook
Hoch deserves her place in the textbook because she represents the arrival of Dada—the punkiest of punk rock art—punk rock before punk rock even existed. Many punk rock bands and artists would go on to imitate her style. The Sex Pistols loved the collage concept and so too have many others in the genre. Hoch represented the punk motif—and while she herself was not walking around in leather with a Mohawk and a rhinestone belt, her attitude was certainly like that of the punk rock artists that would make the scene before Hoch would bid farewell to the world.
Hoch also deserves a place in the textbook because she represents the artistic expressions of the Weimar Republic so well. The cultural and artistic expressions of the Weimar Republic were represented by the decadence embodied by Berlin at the time. The night clubs and cabarets explored the sexually expressionistic dances and skits of men and women like Berber and her lover Droste, and the films—like Murnau’s Nosferatu and Lang’s Metropolis, which explored the sordid underbelly and consequences of a lascivious generation out of control. The liberal inter-War years were preceded by the abdication of the Kaiser and followed by that ascendency of Hitler, whose regime put a stop to the liberal decadence, promoting nationalism in its place. Hoch stood in the midst of it all and let out her own voice, reflecting the chaos of the times and giving her commentary—in Dadaist form—on all of it.
The Dadaists had no real solution to the world’s problems or its descent into chaos in the inter-War period, nor did they intend to offer one. Their artistic expressions were designed to mock rather than enlighten and for a brief period of time such expression was a welcome voice. Hoch took pleasure in giving that voice and her works display a genuine mocking spirit that is robust and soulful. Yet as society under the Weimer Republic continued to deteriorate, due to wartime reparations, hyper-inflation, joblessness, and moral decay, a need for stability and restoration was felt throughout the land. Hoch and her art was not the answer. She simply represented a time, a movement, a preference, a feeling—angst, if you will. She would not be the one to lead the country out of its hell. Her view of the new woman and the ideals that the new woman was meant to embrace could only take the Dad movement so far.
Thus it was that a man with as much vision, national pride, and drive as Adolf Hitler and the members of the Third Reich could sweep to power in the early 1930s by promising to attack the evils of the time and to rid the country of the vice and financial oppression that had kept it downtrodden during the Weimar Period. Hoch thus had to go. She would have no place in the Great German Art Exhibit. She would be classified as a degenerate artist—and to keep her head down and mouth shut was all she would be able to do during the years of the Third Reich.
Conclusion
Hannah Hoch helped introduce the world to Dada. She paved the way for the punk rock sentiment in artistic expression with her wonderful collages and artworks which challenged the status quo and made mincemeat of the factions and fragmentation occurring in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. She was friends with Dix, Hausmann, Ball and the rest of the Dadaists—and yet she was not really one of them. They had more cynicism in them than anything else. Hoch could mock with the best of them, but in the end she was still a woman who cared and that shows in the fact that she never stopped creating art even after her period of fame and celebrity came to an end during the rise of the Third Reich. Even after the war, she was still celebrated in the art world—but by then the times had changed; the women’s movement actually began to develop in earnest; the Third Reich was defeated—and Hannah Hoch survived them all. That in itself should say something about her longevity: we are still talking about her today, after all.
References
Altshuler, Bruce. The Avant-garde in Exhibition. NY: Abrams, 1994.
Barron, Stephanie. Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany.
NY: Abrams, 1992.
Blumberg, Naomi. “Hannah Hoch.”
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hannah-Hoch#ref1204320
Gaze, Delia. Dictionary of Women Artists, Volume One. London: Taylor & Francis,
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Goebbels, J. “Around the Gedachtniskirche.” Germany History Docs, 1928.
http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=3860
Harris, Beth and Steven Zucker. “Hannah Hoch: Cut with the Kitchen Knife.” Khan
Academy. https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/wwi-dada/dada1/v/hannah-h-ch-cut-with-the-kitchen-knife-1919-20
Makela, Maria. "Hannah Höch". In: Louise R. Noun (ed.), Three Berlin Artists of the
Weimar Era: Hannah Höch, Käthe Kollwitz, Jeanne Mammen. Des Moines, Iowa: Des Moines Art Center, 1994.
Makela, Maria and Peter Boswell. The Photomontages of Hannah Hoch. Walker Art
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Tzara, Tristan. “Dada Manifesto,” 1918.
http://www.391.org/manifestos/1918-dada-manifesto-tristan-tzara.html#.Vy9504SDGko