The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada*
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The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada* BRIGID DOHERTY “Der Kunstlump” (The Art Scoundrel) is a diatribe by Berlin Dadaists George Grosz and John Heartfield that appeared in the journal Der Gegner (The Opponent) in April 1920. Notorious for its “anti-art” stance, “Der Kunstlump” was written in response to an appeal by Oskar Kokoschka in which the Expressionist painter and playwright had beseeched the German public to take measures to ensure the preservation of the cultural heritage under conditions of civic unrest. In a state- ment that ran in more than forty German newspapers in March 1920, Kokoschka implored those involved in violent political conflict to avoid damaging works of art. He was responding to the events of March 15, 1920, in Dresden, where, in the wake of the counterrevolutionary Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch that had overthrown the consti- tutional government in Berlin on March 12, fighting had erupted between Reichswehr troops loyal to the “national dictatorship” of the putschists and work- ers demonstrating in connection with the general strike that would bring about the demise of the Kapp government on March 17. 59 persons were killed and 150 wounded during that day’s clash on Dresden’s Postplatz; the battle also sent a stray bullet into Peter Paul Rubens’s Bathsheba in the nearby Zwinger picture gallery. In his statement, Kokoschka, who had been appointed professor at the Dresden academy of art in 1919, pleads with people of all political persuasions to do their street fighting at a safe distance from any place in which “human culture might come into danger.”1 * What follows is a revised version of material prepared for a colloquium on Dada that took place at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., on November 2, 2001. The argument sketched here will appear in its complete form in my book, Montage: The Body and the Work of Art in Dada, Brecht, and Benjamin (Berkeley: University of California Press, forth- coming). I am grateful to Elizabeth Cropper and Leah Dickerman for the invitation to participate in the recent series of Dada colloquia at CASVA, and for their insights offered on those occasions and others; thanks also to my fellow colloquia participants. This essay is for Tim Clark. 1. Oskar Kokoschka, cited in George Grosz and John Heartfield, “Der Kunstlump,” Der Gegner 10–12 (n.d. [April 1920]; reprint, Berlin: Das Arsenal, 1979), p. 52. On the subject of what came to be called the “Kunstlump-Debatte,” see Walter Fähnders and Martin Rector, eds., Literatur im Klassenkampf. Zur proletarisch-revolutionären Literaturtheorie 1919–1923: Eine Dokumentation (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1971), pp. 43–50; Barbara McCloskey, George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 65–69; Beth Irwin Lewis, George Grosz: Art OCTOBER 105, Summer 2003, pp. 73–92. © 2003 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703769684164 by guest on 27 September 2021 74 OCTOBER “Der Kunstlump” dismisses Kokoschka’s plea and urges “vigorous resistance” to the Expressionist’s position on the part of all those “who, knowing that bullets tear human beings to pieces, feel it a trivial matter when bullets damage paintings.”2 Indeed “Der Kunstlump” takes its disagreement with Kokoschka a step further, as Grosz and Heartfield announce: “We greet with pleasure the fact that bullets whiz into the galleries and palaces, into the masterpieces of Rubens, instead of into the homes of the poor in the workers’ districts.”3 A 1920 montage-painting by the Dresden- based artist and close associate of the Berlin Dadaists, Otto Dix, shows an actual copy of Kokoschka’s published plea lying in a gutter not far from a blind and limbless World War I veteran attempting to sell matches on a Dresden sidewalk as the legs of indifferent middle-class citizens wearing seamed stockings and spotless button- up spats hurry past. With its paper torn and its text truncated, Kokoschka’s appeal as pasted into the painting echoes the damaged condition of the match-selling veteran’s body, and vice versa: a dachshund raises his leg before the mutilated matchseller, sprinkling him with piss as the gutter’s filthy puddles soak the paper of Kokoschka’s statement. Dix’s display of contempt for Kokoschka’s appeal responds to the Expressionist’s plea for the protection of works of art as if that plea implied a corollary disregard for the situation of human beings. Understood in the terms of Dix’s crude and vivid critique, it is as though Kokoschka was asking to see works of art treated as if they were persons, and was doing so, moreover, in a context in which human beings—for example, the workers who had demonstrated on Dresden’s Postplatz—felt compelled to risk their lives in demanding recognition of their own personhood and the rights it was said to entail in the representational democracy of a federal republic. Confronted with a situation in which the collective and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 93–95; Roland März, ed., John Heartfield: Der Schnitt entlang der Zeit: Selbstzeugnisse, Erinnerungen, Interpretationen. Eine Dokumentation (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1981), pp. 102–28; Joan Weinstein, The End of Expressionism: Art and the November Revolution in Germany, 1918–19 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 240–41; and Hubert van den Berg, Avantgarde und Anarchismus: Dada in Zurich und Berlin (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1999), pp. 390–98. 2. Grosz and Heartfield, “Der Kunstlump,” p. 53. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 3. Ibid., p. 55. Italics in original. Otto Dix. The Matchseller I. 1920. © 2003 Artists Rights Society/ARS, New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photo courtesy Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703769684164 by guest on 27 September 2021 The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada 75 demands of human beings for self-determination faced military suppression and in turn themselves sometimes took the form of violent resistance, Kokoschka calls for the protection of works of art as objects of a shared heritage at risk of destruction in a dangerous public sphere. The Dadaists, by contrast, demand the transformation of the social and political conditions against which the workers were originally demonstrating and of which they take Kokoschka’s text itself to be symptomatic, not because Kokoschka lends his support to the radical, antidemocratic right (he does nothing of the kind), but because instead of standing on the side of demonstrating workers, he speaks up on behalf of masterpieces. That the realization of demands such as those voiced by the workers on Dresden’s Postplatz might happen occasionally to involve the destruction of works of art does not concern the Dadaists, except insofar as they are pleased to see bullets fired in the midst of monuments and museums rather than in neighborhoods where workers make their homes. Many contemporary readers of “Der Kunstlump” understood the text as a call to cultural vandalism, and it was widely condemned on those grounds, including in the communist press. In a reply to Grosz and Heartfield published in the German Communist party organ, Die rote Fahne, in early June 1920, the newspaper’s cultural editor, Gertrud Alexander, characterized Kokoschka’s original plea as typical of the cynicism of modern artists, agreeing with the Dadaists that it was in principle preferable that a precious painting rather than a human life should be damaged or destroyed by a bullet, stray or otherwise. But to greet the destruction of art with pleasure was another matter, and the bulk of Alexander’s response was taken up with refuting the Dadaists’ declaration to that effect. Culture, for Alexander, was made up of things of eternal value, things that in a revolutionary society would represent nothing less than the cultural patrimony of the proletariat as it came to power, a “past beauty” that would have to be (and deserved to be) maintained to serve as a source of pleasure and edification for the “new human being” in advance of the production of a postrevolutionary and properly proletarian culture.4 Grosz and Heartfield do not value “past beauty.” Instead they write derisively of how “sculptures preach the flight of feelings and thoughts, away from the unbearable circumstances of life on earth, to the moon and the stars, to the sky.” The work of art that provides an occasion for such flight is, to the Dadaists, a tendentious work, grounded in a theory of art that they link to their present historical moment, which they believe to be ruled by a cynical and violent politics: “The machine guns of social democracy have their way as they aim to transport the disenfranchised to a better afterlife.”5 In other words, the way the work of art transports its viewer to a place apart from the everyday world (to the moon and the stars, to the sky) provides an aesthetic counterpart to the way the fledgling Social Democracy of the early Weimar Republic suppresses left-wing political activity with military power and thereby, as if 4. G. G. L. [Gertrud Alexander], “Herrn John Heartfield und George Grosz,” Die Rote Fahne 99 (June 9, 1920). Reprinted in Manfred Brauneck, ed., Die Rote Fahne: Kritik, Theorie, Feuilleton, 1918–1933 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1973), p. 65. 5. Grosz and Heartfield, “Der Kunstlump,” p. 51. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703769684164 by guest on 27 September 2021 76 OCTOBER beneficently, delivers its victims to a better world beyond (ein reineres Jenseits).