In the 1930s the Nazi’s were gaining ground in Europe.
Many chose to ignore or had a laissez faire attitude to the National Socialist policy
of expansionism known as Lebensraum or the threat of war what Germany
now posed to the world. A German citizen born Helmut Herzfeld was one who chose
to criticize the regime through art. He produced a remarkable series of
photomontages (decades before Photoshop it should be noted) the audacity of
which can still astonish today. Bismarck
had stated that the German people would be reformed through a combination of blood
and iron Hartfield’s 1939 photomontage shows exactly how this was to be interpreted
in reality. Heartfield had always been a reactionary when it came to German
nationalism. Born in 1891as Helmut Herzfield he saw the horrors of the First World
War first hand. Although propaganda was rife and rabid on both sides he made
the extraordinary move of anglicizing his name in 1916 in the middle of the war
to protest against such nationalism. The real motive for Hitler’s strange hold
on political power in the thirties was something that was utterly transparent to
Heartfield was diametrically opposed to the extreme right wing National Socialism
(Nazism) that swept Germany (although it borrowed policies from both left and
right wing) It was after founding a satirical magazine Die Pleite that he met Brecht.
Later he would work for the weekly AIZ (published in exile of course this sort
of thing would never have been allowed inside The Fatherland) It was for AIZ that
he produced most of his photomontage work. Although some of his work may seem a
little primitive in our days of Photoshop the meaning of Heartfield’s 1939 work.
Heartfield had to remove himself from Germany
(in fact at the beginning of the Nazi Regime) as this sort of political satire would
no doubt have earned him a visit in the night and a trip to a concentration
camp. He left Germany
in1933 the year Hitler came to power and relocated to nearby Czechoslovakia.
Perhaps a little too close for comfort. After the defeat of Hitler and Nazism Heartfield
returned to Germany
and lived out the rest of his days in East Berlin. His life
and works were commemorated on a postage stamp. During the later years he
worked closely with a variety of theater directors and in 1967he visited London
to prepare for a retrospective of his work. Unfortunately he died before this happened
but his widow completed the work for the exhibition and it was shown at the ICA
in 1969.
No comments:
Post a Comment