War, sex and decay: George Grosz in Berlin
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This summer in New York the Metropolitan Museum planned to exhibit the works that George Grosz created in Berlin between 1912 and 1932. The exhibition was cancelled because of the Covid epidemic, but the Museum has published George Grosz in Berlin: The Relentless Eye by Sabine Rewald, a handsome, intelligent and perceptive catalogue that has kept the project alive.
Grosz (1893-1959) had a weird war. He volunteered in November 1914, but never fought at the front. He spent most of his time in military hospitals and psychiatric wards, and was discharged on medical grounds in May 1915. Recalled in January 1917, he was again confined in a mental hospital. He told a friend: “ My nerves went to pieces this time, even before I saw the front, decomposed corpses and barbed wire. My nerves, every smallest fibre, felt disgust and revulsion.” Consumed by savage indignation, Grosz felt no comradeship with the other fighters and added in his Autobiography : “ I would vent my anger in drawings. I sketched what I disliked in my surroundings: the brutal faces of my fellow soldiers, angry war invalids, arrogant officers, lecherous nurses.” Finally, in May 1917, he suffered a complete mental breakdown and was discharged as permanently unfit for duty.
In Grosz ’ s caustic drawing Fit for Active Service (1918), a fat doctor examines a bespectacled skeleton, with shreds of clothing hanging from his bones, and passes him fit for duty at the front. A panel of compliant judges sits at a table, a soldier and a medical assistant stand at attention, burning buildings are seen through four windows in the background. In the foreground, two well-fed, moustached officers smoke cigars, laugh at the absurd spectacle and await their next victim. At the end of the war, when millions of soldiers had been killed, the army would take almost anyone they could get.
This drawing appeared in Grosz ’ s portfolio called Gott mit uns (“God with us”), a motto German soldiers wore on their belt buckles in both World Wars. Grosz ’ s drawing inspired Bertolt Brecht ’ s satirical poem “ Ballad of the Dead Soldier” (1918), in which a corpse is disinterred and continues to fight for the Kaiser. Grosz also designed the sets and costumes for a 1928 play, produced by his anti-war colleague Brecht. It was based on Jaroslav Hasek ’ s novel The Good Soldier Schweik (1923), about the near-fatal adventures of a mentally unstable Czech soldier at the front.
Instead of celebrating the brilliant Weimar culture of the 1920s — the philosophers and scientists, the painters Max Beckmann and Otto Dix, the writers Thomas Mann and Alfred Döblin — Grosz, like Brecht and Hasek, condemned the disastrous militarism of World War One. He loathed the Weimar leaders and accurately predicted that their politics would lead straight to Nazi rule. Ignoring the joyous hedonism of the era, he portrayed sex — with syphilitic prostitutes and their uninviting pubic hair — as disgusting and repulsive. In his preface to The Berlin Stories, Christopher Isherwood recalls entering “ a modernistic hotel where I was surrounded by thick-necked cigar-smoking businessmen who might have stepped right out of the cartoons of George Grosz.”
Grosz said, “ I am totally convinced that this epoch is sailing on down to its own destruction.” He hated the army, capitalism and the ruling Social Democratic Party. Briefly a communist, he was horrified in January 1919 when the Right-wing Freikorps captured and brutally murdered the Left-wing Sparticist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Disillusioned after a 1922 trip to Russia, he left the Party.
Rewald writes that Grosz ’ s self-taught art was characterised by “ fierce satire, black humour, distorted faces and bodies, and hatred of those in power.” His chamber of horrors was inspired by the mutilated war victims, blind beggars and crippled amputees in Francisco Goya ’ s Disasters of War. Grosz called his drawings “ Capriccios ” after Goya ’ s Caprichos , and Goya ’ s blind donkey reappears in Grosz ’ s The Eclipse of the Sun.
Grosz ’ s bold, provocative work got him into a lot of legal and financial trouble with the repressive Weimar authorities. In his first trial of 1920, he was fined 300 marks for defaming the German army. In his second trial of 1923, he was fined 500 marks for offending public morality with pornography. In his series of six connected trials from 1928 to 1931 for blasphemy, he was finally acquitted.
Grosz ’ s drawings are often as powerful as his paintings. He set the brutal Sex-Murder in Ackerstrasse (1917), inspired by a cheap novel, in a proletarian district of Berlin. (Fritz Lang ’ s expressionist film M , about a child-murderer in Berlin, has the same grim mood.) In Grosz ’ s drawing the fat killer, with his suspenders hanging down, looks back on the scene of his terrible crime and seems to be asking: “ What have I done?” After using an axe to cut off the head of a half-naked prostitute, he washes his bloody hands in the sink before disposing of the mutilated corpse.
Something has gone terribly wrong — perhaps impotence and humiliation — in their sexual encounter and provoked his fatal revenge. Yet the scene is strangely homely: his watch, liquor and cigarettes lie on the table, his jacket and cane hang on the partition; her shoes and nightgown are next to the bed. Comfortable props — curtained windows, a large oil lamp, even a victrola — make the murder seem even more horrific. By contrast, his drawings of an unidentified Young Girl (1924) and of his elderly mother-in-law Anna Peter (1927) are respectful and sympathetic, gentle and tender.
The chaotic, apocalyptic street scene in Metropolis (1917), with tilted buildings about to topple into the crowded street, takes place at an intersection in front of a luxurious Berlin hotel. Grosz said his first large work was painted with “ the blood reds of my suicidal palette… The tramway plunges into the picture, telephones ring and in the port-wine-red, kidney-devouring nights, the moon hangs close above infectious and cursing carriage drivers, and in dusty coal cellars murder by strangulation occurs.”
The recipient of Dedicated to Oskar Panizza (1918) was a writer and psychiatrist who was declared insane and confined to a mental asylum. In a useful chapter of this book, Ian Buruma observes that “ the picture of hell shows the wartime metropolis like an open wound, in lurid blood-red colours, filled with delirious crowds of syphilitic men, drunks, a mad priest, a sabre-rattling officer, and the skeletal figure of Death dancing on a coffin.” Always illuminating about his work, Grosz described this inferno filled with bestial creatures: “ in a sinister street at night a hellish procession of dehumanised figures rolls on, with faces representing Alcohol, Syphilis, Pestilence. Against Mankind gone mad, I painted this protest.”
The Pillars of Society (1926) alludes to the ironic title of Henrik Ibsen ’ s 1877 play about a corrupt society. In Grosz ’ s painting a helmeted soldier holds a raised bloody sword and points his gun, a politician clutches a poster and a patriotic flag of the old imperial Germany, a journalist who spews out lies has an upside-down chamber pot on his head, a Nazi with beer mug and sword wears a swastika tiepin beneath his high choking collar, a fat priest hopelessly extends his hands toward a burning building that foreshadows the rise of Hitler and the coming war. All five men are hideously ugly, with fiery red faces, huge bulbous noses, fierce teeth and menacing expressions. The politician and Nazi have severed skulls, one with tangled wires on top, the other with a pile of excrement extruding from his head instead of brains. These men represent the defeated Germany, now whipped into a destructive frenzy and seeking revenge for their supposed betrayal by the victors in the Great War.
Max Herrmann-Neisse (1886-1941), a well known German poet in 1920s, was later nearly forgotten during his English exile. Grosz painted his portrait in 1925 when Max was 39 but looked much older. The Toulouse Lautrec of Berlin was a hunchback, with a bald, bulging, veined and outsized head, as if his brains were about to erupt in a cerebral haemorrhage. He has a wrinkled forehead, tiny deep-set eyes behind huge spectacles, thick pursed lips, chin resting on his chest, hidden neck, spindly wrists jutting out of stiff white shirt cuffs, bony tentacle-like fingers with a topaz ring, pale lower leg showing beneath his trousers and spats on high-heeled shiny shoes.
He ’ s sunk into an incongruously loud flowery chair, next to a dull grey wall and muddy brown floor. His deformity accentuates his wounded sensitivity and, terribly frail, he seems close to extinction. As John Dryden wrote in “ Absalom and Achitophel”, he “ fretted his Pygmy Body to decay.” The good-natured Max enjoyed sitting for his close friend and didn ’ t mind being portrayed as a dwarf.
Rewald writes that in Grosz ’ s powerful Christ with the Gas Mask (1929), which provoked his third trials, “ the emaciated body of Christ, his face covered by a gas mask [with goggles] and his boots secured [on a platform] by nails, hangs [with bent knees] from a splintery wooden cross. His left hand is free and holds a small black cross.” An outsize, shimmering halo floats above his head. His thin arms are tied to the cross with ropes, and his claw-like right hand is pierced by a nail. He has long, hippy-like hair and beard, protruding rib cage and spear wound on his hip, not chest. In Grosz ’ s savage drawing, Christ has been drafted and gassed as well as crucified.
Grosz ’ s anti-clerical and anti-war pictures are particularly meaningful today when the Russian Orthodox Church actively supports the current conflict and when hundreds of rebellious Russian soldiers refuse to fight in Ukraine.
Jeffrey Meyers ’ books on art include “Painting and the Novel, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis”, “Impressionist Quartet” and “Modigliani: A Life”
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