BRIGID DOHERTY. The Work of Art and the Problem
of Politics in Berlin Dada*

“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 statement that ran in more than forty German newspapers in March 1920, Kokoschka implored those involved in violent political convinct 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 constitutional
government in Berlin on March 12, fighting had erupted between
Reichswehr troops loyal to the “national dictatorship” of the putschists and workers
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 . ghting 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, forthcoming).
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 Heart. eld, “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
“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 tr ivial matter when bullet s damage
paintings.”2 Indeed “Der Kunstlump” takes its disagreement with Kokoschka a
step further, as Grosz and Heart. eld 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 Dresdenbased
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 buttonup
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 . lthy 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
OCTOBE74 R
and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 93–95; Roland
März, ed., John Heart.eld: 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 Heart. eld, “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.
4. G. G. L. [Gertrud Alexander], “Herrn John Heart. eld 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 Heart. eld, “Der Kunstlump,” p. 51.
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 worker s on Dresden’s Postplat z 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 . red 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 edi. cation for the “new human being” in advance
of the production of a postrevolutionary and properly proletarian culture.4
Grosz and Heart. eld do not value “past beauty.” Instead they write derisively of
how “sculptures preach the  ight 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  ight 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  edgling Social Democracy of the early Weimar
Republic suppresses left-wing political activity with military power and thereby, as if
The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada 75
bene. cently, delivers its victims to a better world beyond (ein reineres Jenseits). (The
Dadaists have in mind the various and prolonged states of emergency enacted by
the Social Democratic administration of President Friedrich Ebert in response to
perceived threats of uprisings on the left, along with the deployment against the left
of troops including not only the Reichswehr but also right-wing paramilitary out. ts
and the infamous Free Corps.) It is almost as though the Dadaists’ scenario of
political violence as salvation should itself be seen as an aesthetic experiment, a
travesty of the aestheticization of social problems elsewhere in modernism. Indeed
the next line of “Der Kunstlump” asserts the tendentiousness at work when “a
weakling like Rainer Maria Rilke, himself propped up by the perfumed leisure class,
writes: ‘Poverty is a great glow from within’ (The Book of Hours) (“Armut ist ein
großer Glanz von innen” [Stundenbuch]).”6
“What did the Dadaists do?” ask Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde in their 1925
pamphlet “Die Kunst ist in Gefahr!” (Art is in Danger!). “They said, it does not matter
whether one lets out some huffing and puffing—or a sonnet by Petrarch,
Shakespeare, or Rilke, whether one gilds boot heels or carves madonnas: there
will still be shooting, there will still be pro. teering, there will still be starvation,
there will still be lying; to what end the entire enterprise of art?” The Dadaists’
only mistake, they say, “was involving ourselves seriously with so-called art in the
. rst place. Dadaism, carried out with caterwauling and derisive laughter, was a
breakout from a narrow, arrogant, overrated milieu that , hovering in the air
between the classes, did not recognize any shared responsibility for the life of the
collective.”7 Five years earlier, in “Der Kunstlump,” Grosz and Heart. eld had repudiated
works of art that “preach the  ight of feelings and thoughts, away from the
unbearable circumstances of life on earth, to the moon and the stars, to the sky.”
In “Die Kunst ist in Gefahr!,” Grosz and Heart. eld’s younger brother Herzfelde,
poet, founder of the Malik-Verlag, and author of the “Introduction to the First
International Dada Fair” (1920), explain that what Berlin Dada accomplished
amounted to an assertion of the effective equivalence—in the face of violence,
exploitation, hunger, and hypocrisy—of lyric poetry and the mere breath that
const itutes the bodily medium of its speaking. Which is to say that , as far as
engagement in the contemporary world was concerned, giving voice to a sonnet
by Rilke was no different from letting one’s panting respiration be heard. (The
em-dash that separates the huf. ng and puf. ng from the sonnets dramatizes typographically
the Dadaist s’ claim of equivalence between those two effects of
breath.) “Die Kunst ist in Gefahr!” goes on to acknowledge that the Dadaists’
repudiations and assertions, and their breaking out of a milieu that Herzfelde in
his “Introduction to the First International Dada Fair” called “the clique of trendsetters,”
8 were part of an earnest involvement with art—or, rather, “so-called art.”
OCTOBE76 R
6. Ibid.
7. George Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde, Die Kunst ist in Gefahr! (Berlin: Malik-Verlag, 1925),
pp. 23–24.
8. See Wieland Herzfelde, “Introduction to the First International Dada Fair,” on pp. 100–04.
Made to the accompaniment of the Dadaist s’ own howling and sneering, the
“products”9 of Berlin Dada body forth that involvement by enacting allegorically,
in works that often include reproductions of masterpieces, the destruction of
objects of “so-called art,” things belonging to a category whose meaningfulness
and actuality the Dadaists believed had been vitiated under the particular conditions
of their histor ical moment . As Grosz and Herzfelde make clear, the
Dadaists’ dissatisfaction with works of “so-called art”—with sculptures, for example,
that “preach the  ight of feelings and thoughts, away from the unbearable circumstances
of life on earth, to the moon and the stars, to the sky”—is ethical in
origin: it represents their abhorrence, . rst, of the indifference of artists to the situat
ion of human beings in the surrounding social world and, second, of the
hypocrisy of those artists who depict aspects of that social world with a pathos that
for the Dadaists could not fail to be empty, indeed ethically fraudulent, despite, or
rather as a consequence of, its potential aesthetic effects, which for the Dadaists
are predicated on, and serve further to reproduce, an abdication of shared social
responsibility. In each case, artists are described as lacking a stable place among the
social classes: in “Der Kunstlump,” the Dadaists’ repudiation of Rilke’s mysti. cation
of poverty is made vivid in their description of the poet as himself “propped up by
the perfumed leisure classes,” while in “Die Kunst ist in Gefahr!,” contemporary
artists are described as “hovering in the air between the classes.”
Alexander’s critique of “Der Kunst lump” in Die Rote Fahne provoked a
defense of Grosz and Heart. eld from Julian Gumperz, coeditor (with Herzfelde)
of Der Gegner and future member of the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung.
Alexander responded in turn with an article published in two installments on
June 23 and 24, 1920, just days before the opening of the First International Dada
Fair in Berlin.10 In this second round of criticism, Alexander describes bourgeois
societ y as forever subject to an impulse toward “flight from realit y”
(Wirklichkeitsucht), a phenomenon exempli. ed by bourgeois responses to works
of art.11 In Alexander’s estimation, the proletariat, unlike the bourgeoisie, does
not readily give itself over to Wirklichkeitsucht, above all because proletarians
lack the leisure to devote themselves to fanciful contemplation. Nonetheless, she
writes that “it is our responsibility [that is, the responsibility of the vanguard
Communist intelligentsia] to ensure that the proletarian does not become captive
to  ights from reality,” and to do so not by destroying the works of art that
so often play a part in scenarios of Wirklichkeitsucht, but by “eradicating bourgeois
society,” that is, by radically transforming social relations and thereby (necessarily)
alter ing relat ions between human beings and works of art .12 “When
The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada 77
9. On the Dadaists’ use of the term “products,” see my introduction to Herzfelde, p. 93.
10. Ibid., pp. 93–99.
11. Alexander, “Kunst, Vandalismus und Proletariat,” Die Rote Fahne 112 (June 24, 1920). Reprinted
in Brauneck, ed., Die Rote Fahne, p. 73.
12. Ibid.
comrades Heartfield and Grosz get
agitated [about Kokoschka’s plea for
the protection of works of art], that is
itself merely the fear of the bourgeois
gone wild [die Angst des wild gewordenen
Bürgers], the fear of that impulse, that
Wirklichkeitsucht, to which the bourgeois
always falls victim.”13
Thus in her condemnat ion of
Grosz and Heart. eld the Communist
part y newspaper’s cultural editor
anticipated—indeed I think she perhaps
provided—the language of the
title of Grosz’s and Heart. eld’s 1920
sculptural montage, Der wildgewordene
Spießer Heartfield (The Middle-Class
Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild), a
title that would appear in Herzfelde’s
catalog to the Dada Fair when it was
published nineteen days later, on July
14, 1920. As my translation of the title
indicates, the Dadaists used the word
Spießer to name a middle-class philist
ine, a per son of pet it-bourgeois
sensibility. But the word Spießer has
other, older meanings that the Dadaists’ invocation also calls up. In Germany in
the seventeenth century, a Spießer or Spießbürger was an upstanding member of a
civilian militia, armed with a pike and ready to march.14 The Spießer, then, is a
paramilitary man, a . gure of habitually upright posture, something like a knight.
That is a connect ion subsequently stressed in the writings of Adolf Behne, a
prominent German critic and theorist of art and architecture who reviewed the
Dada Fair and knew the Berlin Dadaists and their work well. Pointing to a tendency
among Germans of all classes to arrange the décor of their domestic spaces
along diagonals, Behne argued that the “deeper cause” of that inclination lay in the
13. Ibid.
14. The following description of the seventeenth-century German Spießer’s French counterpart
appears in the opening paragraph of the chapter “Docile Bodies” in “Part Three: Discipline” of Michel
Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: “Let us take the ideal . gure of the soldier as it was still seen in the
early seventeenth century. To begin with, the soldier was someone who could be recognized from afar;
he bore certain signs: the natural signs of his strength and his courage, the marks, too, of his pride; his
body was the blazon of his strength and valour; and although it is true that he had to learn the profession
of arms little by little—generally in actual . ghting—movements like marching and attitudes like the
bearing of the head belonged for the most part to a bodily rhetoric of honour; ‘The signs for recognizing
those most suited to this profession are a lively, alert manner, an erect head, a taut stomach, broad
shoulders, long arms, strong . ngers, a small belly, thick thighs, slender legs and dry feet, because a
man of such a . gure could not fail to be agile and strong’; when he becomes a pike-bearer, the soldier
‘will have to march in step in order to have as much grace and gravity as possible, for the pike is an
honourable weapon, worthy to be borne with gravity and boldness’ (Montgommery, 6 and 7).”
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (1975; New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 135.
George Grosz and John Heart.eld. The Middle-Class Philistine Heart. eld Gone
Wild. 1920. © 2003 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, and
Estate of George Grosz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy Berlinische Galerie,
Landesmuseum für moderne Kunst, Photographie und Architektur, Berlin.
“unconscious retention of a
posture of st ruggle and
defense. . . . Just as the knight,
suspect ing an attack, posit
ions himself cros swise to
guard both left and right, so
the peace-loving burgher, several
centur ies later, order s
his art objects in such a way
that each one, if onl y by
standing apart from all the rest, has a wall and moat surrounding it. He is thus
truly a militant, middle-class philistine [Spießbürger].”15
If, as Behne claims, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germans
ordered their dwellings and displayed works of art according to unconsciously
held pseudo-feudal postures, prominent artists working in Germany in that period
consciously took up the pose and put on the costume of the knight. For Lovis
Corinth, the knight provided a . gure of positive identi. cation; here he calls
himself Der Sieger (The Victor), and stands, clad in armor and brandishing a pike,
behind his wife, the painter Charlotte Berend-Corinth, she in dishabille. For
Kokoschka, in whose work the knight also often appears and who painted himself
as an errant one in his eponymous self-portrait of 1914–15, the type of the Irrender
Ritter underwrote an allegory of the artist’s undoing, depicted here in the knight’s
collapse across a craggy outcropping with his back to a temperamental sea. “It is
not my trade to unmask society,” Kokoschka explained in his autobiography, “but
to seek in the portrait of an individual his inner life.”16 Hence this self-portrait has
15. Adolf Behne, Neues Wohnen, Neues Bauen (1927), cited in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project,
trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999),
p. 215. Translation slightly modi. ed.
16. Kokoschka, cited in Claude Cernuschi, Re/Casting Kokoschka: Ethics and Aesthetics, Epistemology
and Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (London: Associated University Presses, 2002), p. 55.
Top: Oskar Kokoschka. Self-Portrait (Knight
Errant). 1914–15. © 2003 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York/ProLitteris, Zurich.
Left: Lovis Corinth. The Victor. 1910.
Present location unknown.
been seen to display the painter’s own “inner life” in a grouping of allegorical
. gurations of his relationships and experiences around the time of its production.
17 Both the reclining knight and the winged . gure hovering in the dark sky
above him resemble the painter as he portrayed himself in other works of the
period. The winged . gure has been identi. ed as the angel of death, and the
knight has been likened to a wounded Christ: “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? [My
God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?],” the knight may be asking in the
shorthand “ES” inscribed above his left arm, which he lifts across the blustery
hor izon in a dramat ic demonstrat ion of frailty. Or, the winged figure may
represent the child never to be born to Kokoschka and his lover Alma Mahler,
who had broken off their relationship and ended a pregnancy short ly before
Kokoschka set to work on this picture in the second half of 1914 (the kneeling
naked woman hunched head-in-hand among the green, black, and white swirls of
the middleground’s blasted landscape has been seen as a portrait of Mahler). It
seems Kokoschka finished Self-Portrait (Knight Errant) either just prior to his
departure for military service in March 1915, or just after his return to Vienna
some seven months later. This uncertainty concerning the date of the work’s
completion leaves open the question of whether the painting might further relate
to Kokoschka’s experiences in World War I, during which he was wounded in
combat. When Kokoschka mentioned the painting in a letter of December 27, 1915,
to Herwarth Walden, impresario of the Berlin art gallery Der Sturm, he called it Knight
in a Magical Landscape.18
No matter which, if any, the picture’s particular points of reference may be,
the place where Kokoschka’s self-representat ion appears is meant to seem
enchanted. For Kokoschka, plying the painter’s “trade” is like taking up the quest
of a knight errant whose charge is “to seek in the portrait of an individual his
inner life.” It is as if in this instance the painter’s pursuit of the inner life of his
portrait subject involved making the artist’s trade itself magical, conjur ing
emblems and allegories (miniature winged . gures with plaintive faces, tiny naked
melancholy women, scrawny leafless trees, portentous tides and skies, tender
seashells) to render visible the sitter’s intimate, internal preoccupations. The
painter as maker of magical landscapes appears here as himself captive to that
magic, such that the self-portrait as a presentation of Kokoschka’s inner life in
allegorical . gures becomes an allegory of the painter’s fate as subject to art’s
effects of enchantment. Shown nearly life-sized, Kokoschka as knight errant has
the vacant face and lumbering gestures of a somnambulist, here tipped to recline
open-eyed and stiff on the ground plane of the picture’s narrow horizontal.
Made in the wake of Grosz and Heart. eld’s critique of Kokoschka in the socalled
“Kunstlump-Debatte” (Art-Scoundrel Debate), Der wildgewordene Spießer
OCTOBE80 R
17. See, for example, Jaroslaw Leshko, “Kokoschka’s Knight Errant,” Arts Magazine (January 1982),
pp. 126–33; Thomas M. Messer, “Der irrende Ritter,” in Oskar Kokoschka (Vienna: Residenz-Verlag,
1986), pp. 183–86; and Werner Hofmann, “Der irrende Ritter,” in Oskar Kokoschka, pp. 265–78.
18. See Tobias G. Natter, ed., Oskar Kokoschka: Early Portraits from Vienna and Berlin, 1909–1914 (New
York: Neue Galerie, 2002), p. 180.
Heart.eld embodies something like the conditions of possibility for getting the
contemporary artist back up on his feet.19 In place of the work of art as a means of
seeking the inner lives of individuals, the Dadaists’ collaborative product insists on
the exteriority of the object and its subject: the artwork is a thing mounted with
devices and artifacts of everyday life, not a magical landscape into which we gaze,
not a sacred sculpture that promises to transport us to a better world; and the
Spießer himself is oriented outward, knight-like in the disposition of his defensiveness,
but bereft of a quest . Postured and outfitted for present-day life, Der
wildgewordene Spießer Heart.eld stands for the disenchantment of the work of art.20
I want now to return to the place of der wildgewordene Spießer in the political
discourse of the Berlin Dada period, and speci. cally in a vitriolic attack on
anarchist radicalism and petit-bourgeois revolutionism launched in a speech
delivered by Lenin in Moscow on April 27, 1920. Appendices were added to the
text of that speech on May 12, and it was published in Russian in pamphlet
form on June 20. Soon after, the brochure was issued simultaneously in English,
German, and French translations. Published in
German under the title Der “Radikalismus,” die
Kinderkrankheit des Kommunismus, Lenin’s text
was translated by the Executive Committee of
the Communist International in 1920 as The
Infantile Sickness of “Leftism” in Communism, but
it is now more commonly known by the title
under which it appeared in New York in 1934,
“Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Der
“Radikalismus” was widely available to the
German public by mid-July 1920, at which time
advertisements for its publication in pamphlet
form were appearing in the left-wing press.21
Moreover, the effects of Lenin’s condemnation
of left extremism and petit-bourgeois revolutionism
were quickly felt in Germany. Members of
the Communist Party (KPD)—especially those
based in Berlin and including Franz Jung, a
The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada 81
19. See Herzfelde’s “Introduction to the First International Dada Fair” on pp. 100–04 for a gloss on
another 1920 work by Grosz that purports to represent his friend and collaborator Heart. eld: ‘Der
Sträing’: Monteur John Heart.eld nach Franz Jungs Versuch, ihn auf die Beine zu stellen (‘The Convict’:
Monteur John Heart. eld after Franz Jung’s attempt to get him up on his feet). On ‘Der Sträing’ as a
Groszian self-portrait, see Brigid Doherty, “‘See: We are all Neurasthenics!’ or, The Trauma of Dada
Montage,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (Fall 1997), pp. 104–18.
20. On modernism and disenchantment, see T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of
Modernism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 7, passim.; on modernist disenchantment
and reenchantment in the art of Adolf Menzel, see Michael Fried, Menzel’s Realism: Art and
Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 231–46.
21. See, for example, Die Rote Fahne 134 (July 20, 1920).
Hans Baluschek, cover of Proletarier, October 1920. © 2003 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Hannah Höch Archive, Berlinische
Galerie, Landesmuseum für moderne Kunst, Photographie und Architektur, Berlin.
writer closely associated with Grosz and Heartfield, who were also founding
members of the KPD—left the Party in large numbers starting in April 1920,
when many joined in launching the German Communist Worker s’ Party
(KAPD). As Barbara McCloskey has noted, the KAPD paper, Proletarier (The
Proletarian), criticized Lenin for having the “bureaucratic mentality of an arrogant
leader who thinks the revolution is his monopoly,” and the KAPD actively
sought the engagement of avant-garde artists and writers who were likely to feel
less welcome in the KPD as it began to articulate a cultural politics along the
lines of Alexander’s critique of the Dadaists.22 Grosz, for example, mentions his
regular attendance at KAPD meetings in a 1921 letter to fellow Dadaist Raoul
Hausmann. The letter’s sardonic tone suggests, however, that Grosz was no
more at home in the KAPD than in the KPD to which he continued to belong.23
When we compare to the militant middle-class philistine bearing Heartfield’s
name the proletarian drawn by Hans Baluschek for the cover of the October
1920 edition of the KAPD’s eponymous journal, it is not hard to see why a
Dadaist might have felt out of place at that party’s gatherings. Not that the
Dadaist s’ self-identification as wildgewordener Spießer should be understood as
other than ironical. What remains to be explained is the connection of that ironical
identi. cation to a particular work of art, and to the problem of politics in
Berlin Dada.
As published that summer of 1920, Lenin’s “Der Radikalismus” contains the
following passage:
The exper ience of all European revolut ions and revolut ionar y
movements fully con. rms . . . that the small proprietor . . . who under
capitalism is constantly oppressed and suffering, and whose conditions
of life often take a sharp and rapid turn for the worse, when faced with
ruin moves easily to extreme revolutionism, but is incapable of displaying
any stability, organization, discipline and .rmness. The petit-bourgeois
who is beside himself with rage as a consequence of the horrors of
capitalism [der infolge der Schrecken des Kapitalismus “außer sich geratene”
Kleinbürger] is a social phenomenon which, like anarchism, is peculiar
to all capitalist countries. The weakness of such revolutionism, its futility,
its very nature enables it to transform itself into obedience, apathy,
phant asy and even into a “mad” infatuat ion with some bourgeois
“fashionable” tendency—all this is common knowledge.24
Subsequent German translat ions of Lenin’s text would rephrase the line “der
infolge der Schrecken des Kapitalismus ‘außer sich geratene’ Kleinbürger” as “der durch die
OCTOBE82 R
22. See McCloskey, George Grosz and the Communist Party, p. 68.
23. See Grosz, letter of December 13, 1921, in Hannah Höch: Eine Lebenscollage 1921–1945, ed. Ralf
Burmeister and Eckhard Fürlus (Ost. ldern-Ruit: Hatje, 1995), vol. 2, pp. 34–35.
24. N. Lenin, Der “Radikalismus,” die Kinderkrankheit des Kommunismus (Leipzig: Westeuropäisches
Sekretariat der Kommunistischen Internationale, 1920), pp. 13–14.
Schrecken des Kapitalismus ‘wild gewordene’ Kleinbürger,”25 a formulation that is clearly
very close to the title Der wildgewordene Spießer Heart.eld. I am not claiming that the
Dadaists themselves necessarily had read and were responding directly to Lenin’s
polemic. It is my sense, however, that through her association with Die Rote Fahne,
Alexander could have read or otherwise come to know something of the vocabulary
and tone of Lenin’s pamphlet in advance of its of. cial publication in Germany,
and could thus have been taking over Lenin’s terms when on June 24 she referred
to Grosz and Heart. eld as seized by the “fear of the bourgeois gone wild.” And I
do not think it is impossible that by the time the title of Der wildgewordene Spießer
Heartfield was set for printing short ly before July 14, Grosz, Heartfield, and
Herzfelde—all members of the Communist party, well-connected in left-wing
publishing circles, and af. liated with Der Gegner, which was paying a great deal of
attention to Lenin in the spring and summer of 1920—could have come to recognize
the phrase as part of Lenin’s larger argument.26 (The Berlin Dadaist Hannah
Höch was in possession of a copy of what she describes in a notebook as “Lenin,
Der Radikalismus,” as well as his State and Revolution, when she catalogued her
books some years later.)27 I stress these connections—which I acknowledge to be
speculative—because I believe the Bolshevik leader’s rhetoric is particularly
apposite to the works that were on view at the Dada Fair, and to the politics those
works were meant to manifest. “Dada is a German Bolshevist affair,” proclaimed
Richard Huelsenbeck in his history of the Dada movement published in July
1920.28 Der wildgewordene Spießer Heart.eld makes clear just how idiosyncratic Berlin
Dada’s “German Bolshevism” was.
Tendentious from head to toe, Der wildgewordene Spießer Heart.eld is a sculpture
that offers no escape from the conditions of life in the modern world. No religious
stupefaction. No moon and stars. And the glow comes from its glaring lightbulb
head, not from a grand and luminous poverty deep inside. The photograph of Grosz
and Heart. eld holding their “Art Is Dead” placard29 as they stand in front of Der
The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada 83
25. V. I. Lenin, Werke (Berlin [GDR]: Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der
SED, 1970), vol. 31, p. 161.
26. For example, an installment of Gregorij Sinowjew’s Lenin: Sein Leben und Seine Tätigkeit (Lenin:
His Life and Work) was published in the same issue of Der Gegner as “Der Kunstlump.”
27. See BG HHC H346/79, Hannah Höch Archive, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin.
28. Richard Huelsenbeck, En Avant Dada: Die Geschichte des Dadaismus (1920; reprint, Hamburg:
Edition Nautilus, 1984), p. 39.
29. The placard’s complete text reads: “Art is dead / Long live the new / machine art / of Tatlin.”
Those lines paraphrase a sentence from a 1920 art icle on the Russian artist Vladimir Tat lin by
Konstantin Umanski. In that article, the . rst in a four-part report on contemporary art in Russia,
Umanski writes: “Die Kunst ist tot—es lebe die Kunst, die Kunst der Maschine mit ihrer Konstruktion
und Logik, ihrem Rhythmus, ihrem Bestandteile, ihrem Material, ihrem metaphysischen Geist—die
Kunst des ‘Kontrereliefs’ [Art is dead—long live art, the art of the machine with its construction and
logic, its rhythm, its components, its material, its metaphysical spirit—the art of the counter-relief].”
See Umanski, “Neue Kunstrichtungen in Rußland. I. Der Tatlinismus oder die Maschinenkunst,” Der
Ararat 1, no. 4 (January 1920), p. 12. On the Dadaists’ knowledge and reception of Tatlin’s art, see
Helen Adkins, “Er ste Internat ionale Dada-Messe,” in Stat ionen der Moderne: Die bedeutenden
Kunstaustellungen des 20. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1988), p. 159; and Eva
Züchner, “Die Erste Internationale Dada-Messe in Berlin: Eine meta-mechanische Liebeserklärung an
wildgewordene Spießer at the Dada Fair gives a sense of the apparently improvised
nature of the work’s original display, with a glimpse of anchoring twine and of the
makeshift slate-topped table that was the sculpture’s pedestal. Pulled tight, the
narrow cords attached to the joint at the knee of the peg leg and looped around the
boot-like mannequin ankle seem indeed to be keeping the . gure down, holding Der
wildgewordene Spießer in place as if in accordance with the chalk lines mapped on the
slate. I have suggested elsewhere that the chalk markings might be associated with
military drills performed on the Tempelhof . eld in Berlin—a site invoked in related
works on display at the Dada Fair, and the place where Grosz, Heart. eld, and
Herzfelde took part in training exercises during World War I—but there is something
about the way the . gure is tied that also suggests primitive imprisonment, ad
hoc court martial, or facing the . ring squad.30 It is as if the Spießer had gone wild and
then, forcibly, violently, had been brought back under control. He stands erect
and still, subdued and frozen in a digni. ed pose. But it is as though the going wild
had transformed his body, replacing his head with a lightbulb, his leg with a metal
rod, his arms with a doorbell and a revolver, his penis with a plaster impression of a
human mouth. The Spießer, we might say, attempted escape, but got caught, or stayed
caught. Now the . gure embodies both the attempt (the going wild) and the failure
(the getting or remaining captured) in the form of the mechanisms that make up his
body, mechanisms that announce his enforced rootedness in the world, and his endless
experience of the rage the world inspires. That rage, once manic, is now
suppressed, but the body bears replacement parts as memorials to its fruitless revolt.
We know from “Der Kunstlump” that Grosz and Heart. eld had Rilke in mind
during the spring of 1920. The fact that they misquote him there—the line from the
Stundenbuch is more dramatic, more Rilkean, than the Dadaists indicate, and actually
reads, “Denn Armut ist ein großer Glanz von Innen . . . ”—only underscores how
readily his poetry could be summoned. Massively popular, Rilke’s works did not
require looking up in print; they could be recited—or at least fairly well paraphrased—
straight from memory. Der wildgewordene Spießer stands like a fragment of an
ancient statue arranged for display, and in other ways suggests a travesty of Rilke’s
1908 sonnet “Archaïscher Torso Apollos” (Archaic Torso of Apollo). This is not the
place for an interpretat ion of Rilke’s poem. Given, however, that Grosz and
Herzfelde put lyric poetry and its recitation at the crux of what the Dadaists did
(“They said, it does not matter whether one lets out some huf.ng and puf.ng—or a
OCTOBE84 R
Tatlins Maschinenkunst,” Berlin-Moskau. Moskau-Berlin (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1995), pp. 118–24.
On the relationship of the Dadaists’ (mis)understanding of Tatlin’s art to their conception of politics,
see Samantha Kate Winskell, “Between Mass Culture and Proletkult, the Death of Art and Utopia:
Berlin Dada and the Soviet Cultural Model,” chap. 4 of her “Dada, Russia and Modernity, 1915–1922”
(London: Courtauld Institute of Art, 1995).
30. Preußischer Erzengel (Prussian Archangel), a collaborative sculptural construction attributed to
Heart. eld and Rudolf Schlichter that hung from the gallery’s ceiling at the Dada Fair, consisted of a
plaster pig’s head attached to a stuffed German military of. cer’s uniform to which was clipped a sign
that read: “To grasp entirely the meaning of this work of art, one must, while completely out. tted for
battle and carrying a fully-loaded knapsack, perform daily twelve-hour drills on the Tempelhof . eld.”
See Doherty, “The Trauma of Dada Montage,” pp. 118–21.
sonnet by Petrarch, Shakespeare or Rilke”) it will be worth exploring how Der
wildgewordene Spießer might be seen to operate in relation to Rilke’s rendering of an
encounter with the “meaningful fragment” of an ancient work of art.31
We did not know his stupendous head
in which the eyeball-apples ripened. But
his torso still glows like a gas lamp
in which his gaze, just turned to low,
abides and gleams. Otherwise the curve
of his breast could not blind you, nor the gentle turn
of his loins send forth a smile
to the center that once procreation bore.
Otherwise this stone would stand dis. gured, short
beneath the shoulders’ transparent drop
and would not shimmer like a wild beast’s fur:
and not burst out of all its contours
like a star: for here there is no place,
that does not see you. You must change your life.32
31. I borrow this phrase from Judith Ryan, Rilke, Modernism, and Poetic Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 80.
32. Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
Left: Grosz and
Heart.eld at the
First International
Dada Fair, 1920.
Far left: Male torso,
called the “Miletus
Torso.” ca. 480–470
B.C. Musée du
Louvre, Paris.
Der wildgewordene Spießer has a head we do not know; we can hardly bear to
look at it—it is blinding. And like Rilke’s Apollo, Dada’s Spießer is lamp-like at the
site of his gaze—in the most literal and up-to-date way. Where the gaze of Rilke’s
OCTOBE86 R
sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,
sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.
Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz
unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz
und  immerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;
und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.
(Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaïscher Torso Apollos” [1908], in Werke. Gedichte 1895 bis 1910, ed.
Manfred Engel and Ulrich Fülleborn [Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1996], vol. 1, p. 513.)
In the course of attempting a translation of “Archaïscher Torso Apollos” that would be apposite to
the claims of this essay, I have consulted and in some cases borrowed from the following bilingual
editions and translations of Rilke’s sonnet: Rilke, New Poems, revised bilingual edition, ed. and trans.
Edward Snow (New York: North Point Press, 2001), pp. 182–83; The Essential Rilke, bilingual edition, ed.
and trans. Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1999), pp. 32–33; Rilke, Neue
Gedichte/New Poems, ed. and trans. Stephen Cohn (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998),
pp. 142–43; The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, bilingual edition, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell,
intro. Robert Hass (New York: Vintage, 1982), pp. 60–61; Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. and
commentary Robert Bly (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), pp. 146–47; Possibility of Being: A Selection of
Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. J. B. Leishman (New York: New Directions, 1977), p. 53; Requiem and
Other Poems, trans., intro., and notes J. B. Leishman (London: Hogarth Press, 1949), p. 115; Selected Poems,
ed. and trans. C. F. MacIntyre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1940), pp. 92–93; Selections from the
Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. M. D. Herder Norton (New York: Norton, 1938), pp. 180–81. I
am also indebted to Ryan’s translation and analysis of “Archaïscher Torso Apollos” in Rilke, Modernism,
and Poetic Tradition, pp. 80–89. Wolfram Groddeck’s essay “Blendung: Betrachtung an Rilkes zweitem
Apollo-Sonett,” in Groddeck, ed., Interpretationen: Gedichte von Rainer Maria Rilke (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999),
pp. 87–103, has been helpful to my reading of “Archaïscher Torso Apollos” and its interpretations. I
share Groddeck’s skepticism regarding efforts to locate and name the sculptural “sources”of Rilke’s
Apollo sonnets. Let me therefore mention that the question of whether or not the Miletus Torso (ca.
480–470 B.C.; Musée du Louvre, Paris), illustrated here as reproduced in Ulrich Hausmann, Die
Apollosonette Rilkes und ihre plastischen Urbilder (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1947), or indeed any other individual
work of art, can properly be described as an immediate source for Rilke’s “Archaïscher Torso Apollos” is
irrelevant to my juxtaposition of that statue and its apparatus of museum display with Der wildgewordene
Spießer John Heart.eld. Here the Miletus Torso stands for antique sculpture in general, and for the speci. c
conditions of its visibility in modernity. In Montage und Metamechanik (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2000), Hanne
Bergius proposes that the works produced by the Berlin Dadaists beginning in late 1919 and designated
as “metamechanical”—of which Der wildgewordene Spießer would be a key example, though it is not the
object of a sustained analysis by Bergius (she discusses it brie y on p. 281)—represent the introduction
into Dada montage of an “Apollonian” principle opposed to the “Dionysian” one that had governed the
production of earlier works (p. 9). While I agree with Bergius that the terms of Nietzsche’s The Birth of
Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872) are pertinent to Berlin Dada, I see the connections differently, as my
claims in this essay should suggest. My remarks on Der wildgewordene Spießer in relation to Rilke’s
“Archaïscher Torso Apollos” are indebted to a conversation with Michael Fried that began at Johns
Hopkins in December 1995, and that since then has meant more to me than a footnote can convey.
Apollo was zurückgeschraubt, turned down low as though by means of a mechanism
like those on modern, gas-powered candelabra,33 the illuminated gaze of Dada’s
Spießer has a brand name: bulb by Osram™. The breast of the Spießer curves outward
with the mannequin’s built-in upright stance, and that stance, mounted on a
metal leg that resembles a support to stabilize an ancient statue on display, now
gestures toward an antique allusion. In the poem, we have reached the midpoint
of the Apollonian body and of the Rilkean sonnet, where the smile resides, the
point at which Dada’s travesty hits its mark, with stunning, ridiculous force, confronting
metaphor with the literalness of matter, and rendering the Spießer’s body
grotesque, even obscene: “nor the gentle turn / of his loins send forth a smile / to
the center that once procreation bore.” The place of procreation on the Spießer
might leer, chew, laugh, nip, chomp, chatter—it might do the common jobs of the
mouth, but that plaster cast of lips and teeth, itself a miniature sculpture, cannot
smile like the face of an ancient statue. Inverted to vertical, the displaced mouth cannot
smile at all, unless the Spießer . nds a way to recline like Kokoschka’s knight, to
lie down and let himself be seen horizontally, propped up on a doorbell– or
revolver-arm, like a vanquished mechanical Mars, or a very modern Venus, on
whose pudenda the plaster mouth would then appear as if the seashell resting
before the hips of Kokoschka’s knight had moved up the picture plane and
attached itself to his crotch. (Among the works Grosz exhibited at the Dada Fair
was one called Mißachtung eines Meisterwerkes von Botticelli (Primavera) [Contempt
for a Masterpiece by Botticelli (Primavera)], in which the Dadaist registers his
contempt in an “X” taped across the glass of a framed reproduction of the painting;
here I compare to Der wildgewordene Spießer Heart.eld another masterpiece by
Botticelli, namely Mars, Venus, and Satyrs.) The Spießer’s mouth is barren. It opens
onto shallow blackness backed up against a mannequin’s crotch of cloth and
wood. Central to Rilke’s sonnet is the statue’s “visible-invisible phallus,” marked as
missing by the displaced smile that travels through the loins to that center which
The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada 87
33. See Ryan, Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition, p. 88.
Sandro Botticelli. Mars, Venus, and Satyrs. 1483. National Gallery,
London. Photo courtesy Alinari/Art Resource, N.Y.
once gave rise to procreation, which once was the site of Apollonian genitals.34 In
Berlin Dada’s Spießer, a boy-sized tailor’s dummy presents a center that cannot yet
have given rise to procreation; with a reproduction of a mouth in place of genitals,
his middle now never will. A statue but not of stone, the Spießer stands dis. gured,
short , peg-legged, and plaster-crotched, beneath the glow of his incandescent
electri. ed head. His shoulders support a doorbell and a gun, but from them nothing
plunges. If, in addition to a see-through drop, a translucent fall from noble shoulders
to the gentle torsion of smiling loins, Rilke’s choice of the word Sturz summons at
once both the ruin of an antique torso itself and the protective glass covers that
separate works of art from their modern audiences, the Spießer incorporates its
own status as a ruin on display in the metal support that stands in for a missing
leg.35 Around that support the Spießer has been tied down, as if to emphasize that
he can no longer (or could not ever have) burst forth from his own contours, that
he cannot (or never could) explode like a star to accost his beholder with an ethical
exhortation: “You must change your life.” The Spießer wears his light on the
outside, in the form of a bright transparent bulb; nothing glows within him any
longer. He has gone wild, and the energy of what might have been (or might have
become) his own attempt at life-changing has been spent . All that remains
incandescent is that electric lamp, which keeps him close to the wall, near the outlet
into which he must be plugged. Rilke figures as a ruin, in fragment s
reconstituted as a sonnet, what the Dadaists, in montage, aimed to actualize, in
order thereby to dis. gure it even further: the work of art as an object of contemplation
that does not so much tell us, let alone show us, how to live, but that how we
are living must change. Dada’s Spießer does not admonish us; it cannot bring itself,
cannot hold itself together, to tell us: “You must change your life.” But the Dadaist
work of art registers, in its travesty, the relinquishing of the wish, or the loss of the
hope, to do so.36
A 1919 pen and ink drawing that was published with the title Nachkriegsidyll
(Postwar Idyll) in Grosz’s 1921 book Das Gesicht der herrschenden Klasse: 57 politische
Zeichnungen (The Face of the Ruling Class: 57 Political Drawings), pre. gures the
appearance of the Spießer at the Dada Fair. Calling the picture an idyll and thus
situating it in relation to lyric poetry, Grosz shows a blind veteran propped against
a wall, wearing a uniform with patches at the elbow, steadying himself with a cane,
and proffering a box of matches from a carton that hangs around his neck.
Tucked in behind the carton is a sign on the matchseller’s chest that bears the
word “blind,” and dangling over the top of that sign is a military medal, an Iron
Cross. The face of a raging Prussian of. cer occupies the extreme foreground in
OCTOBE88 R
34. On “der sichtbar-unsichtbare Phallus” in “Archaïscher Tor so Apollos,” see Groddeck,
“Blendung,” pp. 98–99.
35. On the de. nition of Glassturz as “a protective glass cover for an art object,” see Ryan, Rilke,
Modernism and Poetic Tradition, p. 236, n. 70; see also Groddeck, “Blendung,” p. 98, n. 8.
36. I have more to say about this aspect of Berlin Dada, speci. cally in relation to the aesthetic theories
of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, in Montage.
the center of the drawing, while just behind the of. cer at left a one-legged veteran,
also st ill in uniform, labors to walk on crutches and cast s a bitter sidewise
glance in the direction of his superior. A fat man in fancy clothes strolls toward
the middle of the picture, enjoying a cigar and taking notice neither of the . gures
he is approaching (the three men in uniform) nor of the ones behind him
(an aristocratic couple on horseback, a hapless bourgeois carrying an umbrella
and a cigar in a holder, and, at the back, a unit of steel-helmeted soldiers
marching in formation and bearing the German national  ag). The fat man’s
indifference to the matchseller, the . gure nearest to him and one who might
be expected to arouse his passing interest, if not his sympathy, represents an
extreme case of the failure or refusal to “recognize any shared responsibility for
the life of the collective” that Grosz and Herzfelde criticize in “Die Kunst ist in
Gefahr!” and that characterizes the behavior of all the . gures in Grosz’s 1919
drawing. (The one-legged veteran and the blind matchseller differ from the
others in that they display a kind of agonizing incapacity for recognition that
registers around their eyes, which in the matchseller appear as dense ink hatchings
that may stand for the shadow cast by the man’s visor or for the cavernous
absence of an eyeball, while in the one-legged veteran the eye exposed in pro-
. le rolls back into his head at the outside corner where its lids meet, as if the
man’s desperate effort to apprehend the world and the others in it could only
end in extreme dissatisfaction and discomfort, with the man now turning his
frustrated gaze back in upon himself, or rather upon the corner of his own
Grosz. Postwar Idyll. 1919.
© Estate of George Grosz/Licensed by
VAGA, New York, NY.
eye.)37 Like the blind matchseller, the fat man has a wooden cane; smoothly . nished
and . tted with metal details, it gets put to fashionable instead of practical
use, hanging from the crook of the stroller’s elbow rather than helping him to
stay up on his feet. Along with the others on the page a familiar type in Grosz’s
drawings of the period, the fat man is a pro. teer, a man grown rich in the war
economy and now taking pleasure in his postwar station; as if in recognition of
the source of that on which he has grown fat, an Iron Cross hangs like a charm
from the substantial watch chain at his middle. An oversized diamond tie pin
gives off rays of light that spread across the pro. teer’s chest, and we are bound
to notice how both the diamond and the  imsy, store-bought Iron Cross have
been aligned along diagonals with the blind matchseller’s medal, which is
meant to look as though its bearer earned it (the drawing gives no indication
that the matchseller might be a fraud—that is, not blind, not a decorated veteran,
or neither). Nachkriegsidyll is typical of Grosz’s caricatures of the period,
which perform a kind of comparative anatomy of the cast of characters they
represent (in that sense the matchseller’s authenticity hardly matters: the fraud
would be an equally salient type). Der wildgewordene Spießer Heartfield, which
bears an Iron Cross of its own on its ass, does something different. It is as if
that montage-sculpture subsumed the types depicted in the drawing in a new
composite body, a . gure of absolute actuality and in.nite contradiction, with
the posture of a soldier trained to march, the slender stiff-backed haughtiness
of a monocled count , the fraught bemusement of the middle-class intellectual,
the vulgarity of the pro. teer, the missing limbs and blinded eyes of wounded
veterans, and the rage of the ranting of. cer.38 (It is worth the risk of taking this
too far to make the point visually: the Spießer’s breast gleams as though the profiteer’s
diamond had been fused with the blind veteran’s medal to form the gilded
imperial eagle medallion that is displayed, as if proudly, upon the mannequin’s
velvet chest.)
Nachkriegsidyll is a “polit ical drawing,” and Der wildgewordene Spießer
Heart.eld might be called the embodiment of politics in Berlin Dada, an ironical
identi. cation with a .gure of militant middle-class philistinism and petit-bourgeois
revolutionism, and a corollary to the Dadaist s’ positive self-de.nition as “the
OCTOBE90 R
37. The pro. le and eye of the one-legged veteran strongly resemble those in a number of Grosz’s
self-portraits of the period, for example ‘Der Sträing’: Monteur John Heart.eld nach Franz Jungs Versuch,
ihn auf die beine zu stellen (‘The Convict’: Monteur John Heart. eld after Franz Jung’s attempt to get him
up on his feet), which is reproduced with the translation of Herzfelde’s “Introduction to the First
International Dada Fair,” pp. 100–04, and discussed in Doherty, “The Trauma of Dada Montage,” pp.
104–18. See also note 19.
38. In the form of the mounted plaster mouth, the Spießer also has the vagina dentata of a body that is
not, or is not only, male. I have more to say about that aspect of Der wildgewordene Spießer Heart.eld in
Montage. In “The Trauma of Dada Montage,” I argue that Der wildgewordene Spießer Heart.eld materializes
aspects of the experience and the treatment of the traumatic neuroses of World War I. The present
interpretation neither supersedes nor contradicts that one; my claim here is precisely that this object,
and Dada montage in general, are intended to sustain such multiple, so to speak superimposed, understandings.
(The fact that the Dadaists often gave their works more than one title, or individual titles
that incorporated multiple subjects, supports this claim.)
vanguard of dilettantism,” the latter a position envisioning a democratization of
the making and viewing of works of art that would follow upon the destruction of
the cult of art.39 In this regard, the placard that announces “Die Kunst ist tot” does
not so much articulate an “anti-art” stance as present the Dadaists’ appraisal of the
situation of the work of art in the contemporary world. “Art is not alive,” the placard
might be saying, with the implied ethical position that human beings ought not
to treat works of art as if they were persons when they do not treat other human
beings that way. The Dadaists’ position is ethical, and, .nally, political: “All indifference
is counterrevolutionary!,” declared Grosz and Heart. eld in “Der Kunstlump.”40
39. See Herzfelde, “Introduction to the First International Dada Fair,” pp. 100–04.
40. Grosz and Heartfield, “Der Kunstlump,” p. 56. It alics in original. In Montage, I locate the
Dadaists’ position within a larger problematic of modernism to which the following passage from a
1967 essay by Stanley Cavell points; Cavell’s speci. c subject is “contemporary music,” but his claims
speak to modernism in general. What responses to contemporary music suggest, he writes, “is that the
possibility of fraudulence, and the experience of fraudulence, is endemic in the experience of contemporary
music; that its full impact, even its immediate relevance, depends upon a willingness to trust
the object, knowing that the time spent with its dif. culties may be betrayed. I do not see how anyone
who has experienced modern art can have avoided such experiences, and not just in the case of music. . . .
[T]he dangers of fraudulence, and of trust, are essential to the experience of art . . . Contemporary
music is only the clearest case of something common to modernism as a whole, and modernism only
makes explicit and bare what has always been true of art. (That is almost a de. nition of modernism,
not to say its purpose.) Aesthetics has so far been the aesthetics of the classics, which is as if we investigated
the problem of other minds by using as our examples our experience of great men or dead men.
In emphasizing the experiences of fraudulence and trust as essential to the experience of art, I am in
effect claiming that the answer to the question ‘What is art?’ will in part be an answer which explains
“What the Middle-Class Philistine Forgot…,”
Illustrierter Beobachter, 1926.
Berlin Dada produced an art of failed revolution, in which the destructive
energy as well as the actual collapse of revolutionary politics in Germany circa
1919–20 are . gured in the destruction of the traditional work of art as a component
of the work of Dada montage. The medium of that destruction, montage
embodies the energy as well as the collapse, and the Dadaists’ technique keeps
both in play.
When, with the publication of “Die Kunst ist in Gefahr!” in 1925, Grosz and
Herzfelde repudiated the Dadaist s’ earnest involvement with art, they pointed
to what they saw as the unresolved problem of politics in Berlin Dada, the hazard
of embodying politics in works built up around . gures of absolute actuality
and in.nite contradiction. That hazard has another aspect, to which an article published
in 1926 in the far-right weekly the Illustrierter Beobachter points. Called
“Was der Spießer vergeßen hat . . . ” (What the middle-class philistine forgot . . . ),
the article, which is illustrated with photographs of the November Revolution
and the Spartacist Revolt, describes how in the years since 1918 the German
Spießertum has made its peace with the republic that right-wing radicals, like
their counterparts on the left, with the Dadaists among the latter, despised:
“may the Spießertum . nd its own demise in the republic whose legitimacy it has
recognized. For Germany’s future there would be no loss in that .”41 The
Illustrierter Beobachter inverts the extremism of Lenin’s Der “Radikalismus” in conflating
Social Democracy, seen as the politics of the German Bürgertum, with
Bolshevism. But the article has in common with Berlin Dada’s self-ironizing
identi. cation with the wildgewordener Spießer condemned by Lenin an attempt to
glimpse a future politics in a critique of the German Spießertum. The problem
is, the future belonged to the Illustrierter Beobachter.
OCTOBE92 R
why it is we treat certain objects, or how we can treat certain objects, in ways normally reserved for
treating persons.” See Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 188–89. Italics in original.
41. Anonymous, “Was der Spiesser vergessen hat…,” Illustrierter Beobachter (1926), vol. 5, p. 14.



OCTOBER 105, Summer 2003, pp. 73–92. © 2003 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.