Expressionism and Posters of the Revolutionary Period

chapter 4 From War to Revolution, from Propaganda to Art: Expressionism and Posters of the Revolutionary Period

World War I is known as the first “modern” war. Waged by industrialized nations, this war drew the various mechanical and bureaucratic advances intro- duced by industrialization into the service of warfare, and it fully exploited the communicative—and manipulative—possibilities offered by the growth of the mass media. This modern war was also conceptualized as “total,” a war that mobilized not only men of fighting age and ability, but all sectors of society, all members of the populace, including women and children. Total war required doing battle on two different fronts—the traditional, externally directed fight to defeat enemy nations and the modern, internally oriented struggle to galva- nize and sustain support for the war on what came to be known as the home front.1 Warring nations deployed a range of horrifyingly efficient machinery for waging the fight, including long-range artillery, machine guns, tanks, airplanes, and submarines, and they also wielded words and pictures in carefully orches- trated propaganda campaigns. While enemies felt the force of this weaponry, civilian populations at home were the targets of internal propaganda that was meant to keep them committed to the war effort, willing to submit to hard- ships, and prepared to bear stoically the death and injury to loved ones. This modern war would prove to be devastating, yet when it began, many Expressionists, like most of their fellow Germans, welcomed it. For these Ex pressionists, the war was a modernizing opportunity, a chance to destroy the old, stultifying order and create a new, more spiritually guided world in its place. However, as the destructive realities of the conflict quashed any fan- tasies of a swift, cleansing victory, initial euphoria about the war quickly dis- sipated. All the military machinery at the Supreme Command’s disposal could not defeat the nations allied against Germany, and all the carefully calculated internal propaganda campaigns could not deflect the harsh realities of the hunger, shortages, and death that the German population had endured.

1 Pearl James, “Reading World War I Posters,” in Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture (Lincoln, NE and London, U.K.: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 1. See also Corey Ross, “Mass Politics and the Techniques of Leadership: The Promise and Perils of Propaganda in Weimar Germany,” in German History 24, no. 2 (2006), 186.

Ultimately, the war did destroy the old order of the “Kaiserreich”—Emperor Wilhelm II left Germany on November 9, 1918 and he abdicated less than a month after that; the once-formidable German armed forces were broken and defeated. The Kaiser’s departure was preceded by the start of the short-lived “November Revolution,” which was ignited in late October, 1918. War-weary sailors had rebelled against orders to launch a fruitless battle against the British navy, unleashing waves of revolutionary unrest that swept Germany. Laborers and soldiers, encountering no organized resistance, took over Berlin and spontaneously established workers councils modeled on Russian soviets. On November 9, competing socialist parties each proclaimed a republic. The Kaiser then fled, and after weeks of strikes and demonstrations, and the violent suppression of the protests and revolutionary activities, what became known as the Weimar Republic began. The world that had given rise to Expressionism had definitively shattered. Some of the most important Expressionist artists had been killed, including Blue Rider members Franz Marc and August Macke; many were wounded, including the Austrian Expressionist artist and dramatist Oskar Kokoschka; and many others suffered mental breakdowns as a result of their experiences, including Brücke member Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.2 The Expressionism that emerged after the war was dramatically different from its pre-war incarnations.3 While pre-war Expressionism had been “political” in the sense that it resisted bourgeois morality, scientific rational- ism, and materialism, its artists had not been directly involved in organized political activities; their “rebellion” had been artistic rather than political. Post- war Expressionists, caught up in the euphoria and promise of revolution, felt impelled to merge art directly with politics. Many responded to collapse of the old regime by embracing the socialist impulses that fueled the November Revolution. However, because most of these artists had little if any prior ex- perience with socialist movements or the concerns of laborers, their interpre- tation of socialism remained idealistic, grounded more in the cultural realm than in political and economic realities. They hoped to assist post-war revolutionary efforts to remake German society by creating a new role for art. They

2 Kirchner voluntarily joined the field artillery division as early as August of 1914, but he was only ordered to basic training in May of 1915. He never saw actual combat, but he experienced his brief time in the military as devastatingly humiliating, Peter Springer, Head and Hand: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “Self-Portrait as Soldier,” trans. Susan Ray (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Lon- don: University of California Press, 2002), 22–42. 3 This difference between pre- and post-war Expressionism has led some scholars to designate post-war Expressionists as a Second Generation, German Expressionism 1915–1925: The Second Generation, ed. Stephanie Barron (Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Mu- nich, Federal Republic of Germany: Prestel, 1988). I will use “pre-war” and “post-war” throughout my discussion to designate Expressionism before and after World War I respectively.