Manufacturing Discontent: John Heartfield's Mass Medium

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Title Manufacturing discontent: John Heartfield's mass medium
Author(s) Kriebel, Sabine
Publication date 2009-08
Original citation Kriebel, S., 2009. Manufacturing Discontent: John Heartfield's Mass
Medium. New German Critique 107, 36(2), pp.53-88.
Type of publication Article (peer-reviewed)
Link to publisher's http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-2009-002
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Rights © 2009 by New German Critique, Inc.
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Manufacturing Discontent:
John Heartfi eld’s Mass Medium
Sabine Kriebel
The readers of the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ) were formally intro-
duced to John Heartfi eld and his incisive art of photomontage in the second
week of September 1929—on page 17 of issue 37 (fi g. 1). Ceremonially clad
in coat and tie as if dressed for a formal portrait, brow furrowed, fi erce glare
commanding the beholder’s gaze, Heartfi eld presented himself in the act of
beheading the Berlin police chief, Karl Zörgiebel. Note that the blade sepa-
rating the police chief’s head from his body is not the solitary edge of a guil-
lotine, executing the condemned with a single merciful thwack, but the twin
edges of long-handled shears, slowly decapitating the victim with a repetitive
joining and separating, each gesture widening the gap between head and body,
helped along by Heartfi eld’s tugging fi ngers.
Zörgiebel was the fi gure held accountable for the unprecedented police
violence toward the communist demonstrators on May Day 1929, soon dubbed
Blutmai, or Bloody May, by the radical Left. Five months earlier, in December
This essay condenses arguments from my forthcoming book Revolutionary Beauty: John Heartfi eld
and the AIZ. My continuing thanks go to T. J. Clark, Martin Jay, Anton Kaes, and Anne Wagner for
their critical input on an earlier version of this material. I am also grateful to audiences at the Uni-
versity of York, the University of Glasgow, and Columbia University whose comments aided in
refi ning my argument. Finally, I thankfully acknowledge the Publication Fund of the College of
Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Science, University College Cork, for assisting with the reproduc-
tion costs of this article.
New German Critique 107, Vol. 36, No. 2, Summer 2009
DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2009-002 © 2009 by New German Critique, Inc.
53
54 John Heartfi eld’s Mass Medium
Figure 1. John Heartfi eld, Self-Portrait, 1929. Courtesy Akademie
der Künste, Berlin. Kunstsammlung, Inv. Heartfi eld 1491/
KS-FS-JH 318. © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
1928, Zörgiebel prohibited all outdoor meetings and demonstrations in response
to violent street clashes between and among communists, socialists, and National
Socialists. He then extended the prohibition to include the May Day marches,
a highly symbolic annual working-class tradition (socialist as well as com-
munist) that demonstrated working-class pride and solidarity. The commu-
nists, taking this gesture as provocation by the socialist regime, appeared en
masse to protest Zörgiebel’s prohibition peaceably, only to be met by specially
Sabine Kriebel 55
drafted riot police with rubber truncheons and pistols in hand, armed and
psychologically primed to disperse the crowds.1 Toward evening, as the legal
indoor meetings disbanded, the crowds in the streets grew, resulting in clashes
with police throughout the city. Dozens were beaten or arrested simply because
they were on the wrong side of the street or as they attempted to fl ee an onslaught
of bullets; others were beaten on sidewalks, in police vans, and at station houses;
still others were shot because they happened to be on their balconies or on an
evening stroll.2 Shocking exposés later revealed unwarranted police violence
against disabled war veterans and innocent children.3 In the following days,
the police placed entire districts of working-class Berlin under martial law,
mobilizing armored cars and occasionally directing their fi re at house fronts to
penetrate the barricades erected by the district’s inhabitants. Thirty civilians
were killed, more than half of them innocent bystanders; nearly two hundred
were wounded; and more than twelve hundred were arrested.
Blutmai 1929 proved a turning point for both German working-class
consciousness and the German Communist Party (KPD), further polarizing
the political landscape of the late Weimar Republic. The events only appeared
to confi rm the theory of “social fascism” promoted by Joseph Stalin and the
Communist International after the Sixth Congress in 1928, asserting that
socialism was the precursor to fascism, a treacherous postulate that divided the
Left in Germany, eroding unifi ed resistance against the Nazi Right in the years
to follow.
Enter Heartfi eld, scissors in one hand, scalp of Zörgiebel in the other, on
the seventeenth page of a mass-circulation magazine. The AIZ was communist
in its orientation but not directly affi liated with the KPD, answerable instead to
Moscow’s Communist International. This subtle distinction was one that Willi
1. In the weeks before May 1 the German Communist Party (KPD) encouraged protest demon-
strations in the press and through wall posters, at times using incendiary language. Heartfi eld wrote
a celebratory agit poem, “Erster Mai,” for the communist journal Das rote Sprachrohr in April 1929,
rpt. in Roland März, Der Schnitt entlang der Zeit (East Berlin: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1981), 149–50.
The Berlin police, for its part, was on highest alert, and thirteen to fourteen thousand policemen were
specially drafted for the event. My retelling of these events draws on both contemporary press accounts
and historical reassessments, including Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists? (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1983); Thomas Kurz, “Arbeiter und Putschisten: Der Berliner ‘Blutmai’ von
1929 als Kristallisationspunkt des Verhältnisses von KPD und SPD vor der Katastrophe,” Internation-
ale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 22, no. 3
(1986): 297–317; and H. A. Winckler, Weimar, 1918–1933 (Munich: Beck, 1998).
2. See “Kampf-Mai der Berliner Arbeiterschaft,” AIZ, no. 20, 1929, 2–3; “Die Toten klagen an!”
AIZ, no. 21, 1929, 3; and Carl von Ossietsky’s chronicles “Zörgiebel ist schuld!” and “Abdankung,
Herr Polizeipräsident!” Die Weltbühne, May 7 and 14, 1929.
3. See Ossietsky, “Zörgiebel ist schuld!” and “Abdankung, Herr Polizeipräsident!”
56 John Heartfi eld’s Mass Medium
Münzenberg, the AIZ’s publisher, was careful to underscore, because it allowed
the AIZ relative independence in Germany.4 Heartfi eld’s photomontage not only
gives the social fascist a face but also thematizes the fi ght against him; Zör-
giebel the victimizer becomes the victim. In the form of popular politics, the
righteous photomonteur Heartfi eld dispenses justice on behalf of the radical
Left, avenging the dead, injured, imprisoned, and politically dispossessed as a
result of Socialist Party politics, in payoff for Bloody May 1929.
Though twice framed by the slogan “Use photography as a weapon”—
once above the self-portrait and once below, exclamatory headline and sober
undertitle—Heartfi eld’s commanding and violent act makes us wonder if it is
indeed the photograph, rather than the monteur’s savage scissors, that is the
actual weapon. Heartfi eld’s scissors declare their own deed, their long blades
pointing to the abrupt border of the self-portrait, where the background cedes
to the incursion of the adjacent exhibition photograph. “I did this,” the scis-
sors seem to say, calling our attention to the retracted frame, the mutilated
edges of Zörgiebel’s chin, the discomfi ting rift between his neck and shoul-
ders. Scissors in hand, Heartfi eld wields the instrument of his art, as well as
his weapon.
The prereproduction mock-up of the montage lets us revel in the savage-
ness of cutting—the act of making itself—that is muted, though not absent, in
the AIZ reproduction (fi g. 2). We can imagine the vengeful pleasure of decap-
itating a loathed enemy, the gratifi cation of slicing scissors through a photo-
graphic likeness, the satisfying grind of the blades as they sever the imaged
body on thick photographic paper, sundering head from shoulders. The raw
edges of Zörgiebel’s vulnerable pate evoke a visceral response, summoning
forth an open or scarring wound, the white of the paper revealing itself from
beneath the photographic image like slit fl esh. The eye registers the imperfec-
tions of cutting, the hesitations of the scissors, underneath his chin, for exam-
ple, as they excised Zörgiebel’s head from the cozy bourgeois interior with
which it was originally photographically fused.5
The wide readership of the AIZ would have delighted in this staged fan-
tasy of beheading Zörgiebel. The AIZ was a leftist alternative to the illustrated
4. I discuss this issue in greater detail in my article “Photomontage in the Year 1932: John
Heartfi eld and the National Socialists,” Oxford Art Journal 31 (2008): 97–127; and in “Revolution-
ary Beauty: John Heartfi eld, Political Photomontage, and the Crisis of the European Left, 1929–1938”
(PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2003).
5. Heartfi eld excised Zörgiebel’s head from a public relations photograph of the police chief
and his wife seated at home. Heartfi eld preyed on one of those awkward and unfortunate moments
of the snapshot: Zörgiebel blinked as the shutter opened. Heartfi eld capitalized on the police chief’s
unfortunate expression, recontextualizing his closed eyes to make him look dead.
Sabine Kriebel 57
Figure 2. John Heartfi eld, Self-Portrait with Police Presi dent
Zörgiebel, mock-up, 1929. Courtesy Akademie der Künste,
Berlin. Kunstsammlung, Heartfi eld 430 © 2008 Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
magazines, or Illustrierten, fl ooding the German market during the 1920s.
With a print run of nearly fi ve hundred thousand, it was the second most popu-
lar Illustrierte in circulation, outsold only by the left-of-center Berliner Illus-
trirte Zeitung (sic), whose readership extended into the millions.6 Geared
toward a broad-based, left-wing readership, the purpose of the AIZ was to
propagate a communist viewpoint to nonparty members and the so-called
homeless Left. Its brilliance lay in its ability to speak to the broad spectrum of
6. This is according to the AIZ itself, which published in 1931 the journal’s growth rates (rpt. in
Heinz Willmann, Geschichte der Arbeiter Illustrierten Zeitung, 1921–1938 [Berlin: Dietz, 1974],
122–23). BIZ circulation in 1930 was 1,844,130 (quoted in Sperlings Zeitschriften Adressbuch
[Leipzig: Börsenverein der deutschen Buchhandler, 1930]).
58 John Heartfi eld’s Mass Medium
Lefts during the Weimar Republic, many of whose members felt disenfran-
chised by both the radical KPD and the more moderate Socialist Party. For
instance, the artist Käthe Kollwitz and the satirist Kurt Tucholsky contrib-
uted regularly to the AIZ, disagreeing with the intransigence of the KPD but
nevertheless supporting radical left-wing politics on philosophical grounds.
The AIZ reached its readership by way of newsstands, local bookstores, and a
posse of street sellers. Readers were encouraged to pass the journal along—to
leave it on park benches, on buses, in cafés, for the neighbor, for the milkman—
thereby expanding the leftist community during a period when the Nazi Right
was on the rise.7
Heartfi eld’s beheading is of course a fantasy—of the disenfranchised, of
power, of the agency of the artist. Between the bloodshed of Blutmai and the
time that Heartfi eld’s murderous self-portrait appeared in the AIZ, the KPD
paper Die rote Fahne was banned not once but twice, per Zörgiebel’s order, for
“the protection of the Republic.”8 The Rote Frontkämpferbund (RFB), the com-
munist paramilitary organization, was similarly prohibited, while the Nazi
equivalent, the Sturmabteilung (SA), and the socialist equivalent, the Reichs-
banner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, remained legal. These are examples of an asym-
metrical justice system in the Weimar Republic that tended to punish the radical
Left while often turning a blind eye to infractions of the radical Right. In 1929
the KPD was a party under siege. Its response was to adopt and mobilize the
indignant, militant tone peculiar to those under threat, its imagery and language
refl ecting and reinforcing a sense of embattlement among its constituents.9
Heartfi eld’s fantasy was nevertheless a publicized fantasy, available for
twenty pfennig at all newspaper stands, intervening, albeit four months later,
in an event well covered in the press. In this turbulent political climate, Heart-
fi eld’s 1929 self-portrait would have resonated. Using scissors as his weapon,
Heartfi eld resolutely combats the so-called Gummiknüppelherrschaft, the
billy club reign, of the late Weimar Republic.10 The spectator summoned by
this image is incensed by the street violence, witness to its inequities, and gal-
vanized by the picture’s vengeance, delighting in Heartfi eld’s aggression. For a
moment, Heartfi eld’s self-portrait provides the beholder with resolution, satis-
faction, retribution, pleasure.
7. See, e.g., AIZ, no. 41, 1931; or AIZ, no. 36, 1932.
8. The paper was banned May 3–23, 1929, and May 26–June 22, 1929.
9. Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists? 61.
10. For another account of communist cultural practice that straddles the line between KPD
policy and the real, everyday politics of the streets, see Richard Bodek, Proletarian Performance
in Weimar Berlin (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1997).
Sabine Kriebel 59
Amplifying that viewer-image relationship is Heartfi eld’s gaze, directed
at the viewer, away from his activity of bloodless violence. In the instant his
fi erce look was captured on fi lm, Heartfi eld acknowledged the camera that
froze his face for posterity, his eyes directly confronting the lens. However, that
impassioned glare was intended for the viewers beyond the camera, addressing
an imaginary audience to witness an execution. Heartfi eld’s declarative look
insists on a moment of caesura, a pause separating the acts of summoning and
making. Heartfi eld not only is aware of his audience but deliberately enjoins it,
sparking a preternatural continuity between this static photographic likeness
and its beholder. I consider this visual summoning a metaphor for Heartfi eld’s
AIZ project, which essentially began with this self-portrait and lasted until 1938,
surviving forced exile to Prague in 1933, fueling international diplomatic scan-
dal, and generating at least 237 photomontages. Like the self-portrait, Heart-
fi eld’s photomontages labored to stimulate political consciousness through com-
pelling visual means during a period of extreme political and social upheaval.
The ultimate goal was to create a community of revolutionary-minded citizens
who would actively contribute to radical social change. The beholder of the
photomontage completes the work, which, I aim to show, is a cognitive opera-
tion woven into the conception of Heartfi eld’s project. The viewer is as integral
as photography and scissors to his political weaponry.
This montage is a show of Heartfi eld’s technique, and a performance of
his social identity as artist, as he conceived of it, in 1929. Like his self-portrait,
Heartfi eld’s very name relies on an audacious politics of protest. “John Heart-
fi eld” came into being in 1916, as the story has it, the pseudonym of the man
baptized Helmut Herzfeld in 1891.11 Anglicizing his German name in the midst
of World War I, according to Heartfi eld legend, was to signal a brazen refusal—
a cheeky rejection of the “spontaneous and irrational” anglophobia that took
hold of Germany shortly after the English entered the war on August 4, 1914.12
At the close of the war Heartfi eld signed up with the fl edgling KPD, allegedly
at its fi rst congress on December 30, 1918, receiving the Parteibuch from
Rosa Luxemburg herself. Heartfi eld’s subsequent involvement with Berlin
11. The often-repeated anecdote that Heartfi eld adopted his pseudonym as early as 1916 to protest
German anglophobia has come under increasing scrutiny, as has the date of his actual membership in
the Communist Party. Heartfi eld’s entry into the German Democratic Republic in 1950 was clouded
by offi cial suspicion for several reasons, including his “formalism” and his affi liation with Willi
Münzenberg; certain facts may have been embellished to shore up Heartfi eld’s radical political com-
mitment. I leave it to Andrés Mario Zervigón’s forthcoming study to present this material in detail.
12. Matthew Stibbe, German Anglophobia and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2001), 11.
60 John Heartfi eld’s Mass Medium
Dada, whose art and actions were provoked by the traumatic war and the failed
revolution of 1918–19, was an antibourgeois, prorevolutionary protest that mobi-
lized photomontage as a political weapon, representing the Weimar Republic
as a disorderly verbal-visual cacophony. Although the radical proclivities of
the Dadaists waned in the mid-1920s, Heartfi eld remained, for better or worse,
a dedicated agitator for the communist cause, designing election posters, book
jackets, and, beginning in 1929, satirical photomontages for the AIZ.
It is worth remarking here that the idea of communism was often at odds
with the policies and politics of communism, as dictated by the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union and enacted by the KPD. Münzenberg’s journal, as
noted earlier, bridged the gap between party members and far-Left sympathiz-
ers. Heartfi eld’s pictorial agitation and his politics, I maintain, were a poli-
tics “on the ground,” to borrow Eric Weitz’s phrase,13 and sought to balance
(sometimes more, sometimes less, successfully) the ideological terrain of
bureaucratic communism with what has been called Gefühlskommunismus—a
humanistic communism—in dialogue with, and deeply contingent on, the cul-
tural politics of daily life. I mean neither to depoliticize nor to minimize Heart-
fi eld’s commitment to communism and all that this entailed in the 1930s, but
to point to the balancing act that such a resolute commitment required and to
challenge one dominant view that Heartfi eld was no more than a propaganda-
generating Stalinist ideologue. Given this essay’s focus on the politics of pic-
torial manufacture, I shall signal here only that the story of his political com-
mitment is more nuanced than many assessments have acknowledged.14 At the
same time, however, we cannot ignore that the period 1929–39—essentially
the years covered by Heartfi eld’s work with the AIZ—also framed Stalin’s
most heinous acts, from forcible collectivization to incarcerating and execut-
ing tens of millions. Why Heartfi eld chose not to leave the Communist Party,
as did his friend and fellow artist George Grosz, is a complicated question.15
13. Eric Weitz, Creating German Communism, 1890–1990 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1997), 235.
14. A prominent exception is Michael Krejsa, “Wo ist John Heartfi eld?” in Kunstdokumenta-
tion, 1945–1990, SBZ/DDR, ed. Günther Feist (Cologne: DuMont, 1996), 110–26, which offers the
most thorough account of Heartfi eld’s complicated relationship to the Communist Party to date. I dis-
cuss Heartfi eld’s response to Communist Party policies in specifi c contexts in my dissertation “Revo-
lutionary Beauty.” I also address some aspects in “Photomontage in the Year 1932.”
15. For an account of George Grosz’s complicated relationship to the KPD, see Barbara McClos-
key, George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918–1936 (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). According to McCloskey, Grosz was increasingly estranged
from the party’s radical and infl exible policies of the late 1920s, while the party was less and less sup-
portive of Grosz’s polemical, nonheroic, and complex satires, particularly when Grosz mocked the
Sabine Kriebel 61
It has to do, I think, with Heartfi eld’s seemingly unshakable commitment to
the idea of communism, beyond (or in spite of) its particular bureaucratic
manifestations, bringing him to endure the various expectations, inconsisten-
cies, purges, and accusations that would pursue him from the 1928 Witt orf
affair to his vexed reception in the German Democratic Republic after 1950.16
While Heartfi eld’s artistic identity derived from a deeply rooted and sub-
versive politics of protest, his 1929 self-portrait is assertively violent, produced
in the aftermath of Blutmai, when the Communist Party increasingly embraced
violence as a viable form of political struggle.17 The politics and the production
of Heartfi eld’s work are legible and accessible in this image, understandable to
the broad readership that comprised his mass audience; the montage vehe-
mently asserts its rupture, the scissors declare their ability to maim. This visi-
ble process of making foregrounds violence, not simply because Heartfi eld’s
act of beheading literally does so but also because the semantics of rips, fi s-
sures, gaps, hastily cut-and-pasted passages convey a rhetoric of savagery,
issuing a disturbing psychic charge. This self-portrait exults in the materiality
of its production, asserting its handmadeness, intervening in the impersonality
of photographic reproduction and mass circulation on which it relies.
As other writers have noted, both the manufacture and the consumption
of photomontage involve a degree of violence. Walter Benjamin wrote in 1935
that Dada montage “hit the spectator like a missile,” forcefully intervening in
the beholder’s consciousness.18 Brigid Doherty has demonstrated how the dis-
junctive form and aggressive content of Dada montage embodied the alien-
ating experience of modern industrial life and war trauma, using the phrase
“montage as violent vivisection” to describe works of Berlin Dada.19 Maud
Lavin, to mention a third case, remarks on the disruptive and violent effects of
Hannah Höch’s photomontage, noting the allusive readings and aggressive
party and the communist Left now and again. Grosz refused to accede to party expectations: “I
don’t consider it necessary to satisfy the demands of a ‘hurrah Bolshevism’” (129).
16. See Krejsa, “Wo ist John Heartfi eld?” and Kriebel, “Revolutionary Beauty,” chap. 1.
17. Both Rosenhaft (Beating the Fascists?) and Weitz (Creating German Communism) detail
post-1929 KPD violence.
18. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” sec-
ond version, rpt. in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al., trans.
Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2001), 119.
19. Brigid Doherty, “Figures of Pseudorevolution,” October, no. 84 (1998): 75. Doherty’s argu-
ment about shock and montage was fi rst articulated in “Berlin Dada: Montage and the Embodiment
of Modernity, 1916–1920” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996); and was further
developed in “See? We Are All Neurasthenics! or, The Trauma of Dada Montage,” Critical Inquiry
24 (1997): 82–132.