Although Grosz loved Berlin for its racy glitter, he also appreciated its grime. His prewar drawings, based largely on the toilet graffiti he assiduously studied, exuded a blossoming misanthropy and misogyny, a partiality for Lustmord, the sex-murders in which men dispatched whores and wives in creatively grisly fashion. He was just reaching his stride as a chronicler of domestic mayhem when the war broke out. Unlike many of his fellow artists, he did not cheer this development, viewing the whole business as an expression of mass stupidity. He registered his revulsion in a drawing entitled “Pandemonium, August 1914,” which depicted prowar revelers as a howling pack of cretinous thugs. Nonetheless, he enlisted in November 1914, apparently convinced that the front could be no more brutal than the rear. He saw no action, though, for a sinus infection soon put him in a military hospital, and he was discharged as unfit for service in late 1915. Returning to Berlin, he found the city
cold and grey. The frenzied activity of the cabarets and bars contrasted un-nervingly with the dark, murky, and unheated places where people lived. The same soldiers who sang, danced and hung drunkenly on the arms of prostitutes could later be seen, ill-tempered, laden with parcels and still muddy from grave-digging duty, marching through the streets from one railway station to the next. How right Swedenborg was, I thought, when he said that Heaven and Hell exist here on earth side by side.
Grosz had always had an eye for the underside of life in Berlin, but now he seemed to see nothing but its stinking nether regions, as if it were the proverbial Asshole of the World. His representations of Germany’s capital in wartime seem like an amalgam of Hogarth, Bosch, and Brueghel. In 1917 he described one of his paintings, explicitly Hogarthian, as
a large picture of Hell—a Gin Lane of grotesque corpses and lunatics; there’s a lot going on—Old Nick himself is riding on the slanting coffin through the picture out towards the left; on the right a young man is throwing up, vomiting on the canvas all the illusions of youth. . . . A teeming multitude of possessed human beasts—I am totally convinced that this epoch is sailing on down to its own destruction—our sullied paradise. . . . Just think: wherever you step smells of shit.
Six months later Grosz (he had recently changed his name from Georg Gross to document his contempt for Germany) completed a canvas entitled Widmung an Oskar Panizza (Dedication to Oskar Panizza). Here the city was a riotous bedlam of flag-waving patriots, strutting generals, and grim priests, along with three grotesque figures representing alcoholism, syphilis, and plague.
One cannot escape the impression that Grosz took a certain perverse pleasure in the depravity he described, that he was proud to live in a place that smelled so thoroughly of shit. But his penchant for wallowing in the dreck did not diminish his work’s effectiveness as a searing commentary on life in the beleaguered German capital. In the end, no one was better than Grosz at representing Berlin as a hideous inversion of Germany’s vaunted “Peace of the Castle”: a place where instead of working harmoniously together people brayed patriotic slogans while fattening themselves at their neighbors’ expense, where everyone was fighting over everything from food rations and coal supplies to the anticipated privilege of pouring down boiling oil when the enemy began climbing the walls.
In the last two years of the war, Grosz and another Berlin artist, John Heartfield (he had changed his name from Helmut Herzfelde), began experimenting with a new technique, photomontage, which involved composing parts of photographs into synthetic images seemingly produced by a camera—a very bizarre camera. Their obvious susceptibility for the absurd made Grosz and Heartfield natural converts to a new art movement sweeping up from Zurich: Dada. Invented by an international coterie of war refugees, dada expressed the artists’ contempt not just for the “civilized” world at war, but for all the traditional art forms that either failed to point up the absurdity of the war or that opportunistically abetted it. Dada declared war on Art by producing anti-art; it attacked sense with non-sense. “Bevor Dada da war, war Dada da. (Before dada was there was dada there.)” “Aimless of the world unite,” declared writer Richard Huelsenbeck, who brought the movement to Berlin. Grosz put this doctrine to practice by performing a tap dance while pretending to pee on a painting by Lovis Corinth. “Art is shit,” he cried, and pee made excellent varnish.
Although Dada caught on in many European cities, Berlin became its most important outpost after Zurich. There was method in the madness here: in no other city, after all, was there a greater gap between seemingly rational rhetoric and patently irrational reality; nowhere had the old verities proven so bankrupt. According to Huelsenbeck, the war, like a purging fire, would eventually burn out the rotten underpinnings of Western Civilization, though this would require even more bloodletting. “We were for the war, and Dada is still for the war,” he declared. “Everything has to crash together; things are not horrible enough yet by a long shot.”
Defeat and Revolution
Things were perhaps not yet bad enough for the Dadaists, but they were fast becoming so for most ordinary Berliners. In the second half of the war the food and coal crisis worsened appreciably, while prices continued to mount. Police reports on morale in the city registered an escalating malaise and “a tense political situation” due to the endless shortages, high prices, and an inequitable distribution of resources. If wealthy people were still able to purchase scarce items through back channels, this was beyond the reach of the poor and even of the middle classes, who complained with justice about the authorities’ inability or unwillingness to make life’s daily necessities affordable to the general population. As the crisis deepened, Berliners increasingly forgot that quietude was their first duty as citizens. In March 1917 about 500 women stormed a municipal vegetable warehouse in Charlotten-burg, demanding an immediate distribution of its contents. Then they marched to the town hall, crying “Hunger, hunger, we want turnips!” It was a bad sign when people started protesting for turnips.
Because the Social Democratic Party, the traditional champion of Berlin’s working classes, continued to do little to relieve the suffering, the party leadership lost credibility in the capital. “In no other city does the established Socialist leadership command so little influence as here,” reported the Berlin police in March 1917. The capital thus became the natural breeding ground for an internal leftist opposition. Such a movement had surfaced as early as January 1916 with the foundation of the Spar-takusbund by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who had never reconciled themselves to their party’s support of the war. On May Day 1916 the Spartacists organized a demonstration in the center of Berlin against the government and the war; as a result, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were packed off to jail. By early 1917, dissension within the party had reached the point where advocates of an early peace decided to split off from the SPD to form a new entity, the Independent Social Democratic Party (Unabhangige Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands, USPD). The group was strongest in Germany’s industrial areas, especially in the Ruhr and Berlin.
Although Berlin was becoming a hotbed of leftist agitation against the war, it also housed an influential contingent of patriotic bitter-enders, which was only natural given its status as the national capital and headquarters of the military-industrial complex. Concerned about growing antiwar sentiment in Berlin and elsewhere, a coalition of military figures, right-wing lobbyists, and nationalist academics published a manifesto in 1916 demanding that Germany fight on until it had achieved an ambitious list of war aims, including domination of the European continent and parity in world affairs with Britain. The following year saw the formation of the Fatherland Party, which lobbied for an expansionist victory abroad and continued authoritarianism at home. As the organizational center of both the militant right and the radical left, Berlin confirmed and expanded its status as cynosure of political polarization in the German Reich.