A scene from Lang’s Metropolis, 1925–26
America, however, was not the model for Berlin’s Dada artists. George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Wieland Herzfelde all joined the German Communist Party (KPD) shortly after its founding and trumpeted the Soviet Union as the nation of the future. In their own country they saw that social iniquities—symbolized by crippled war veterans scrambling in the gutter for cigar butts discarded by fat plutocrats—were more crassly evident than ever. To carry on revolutionary propaganda against the Weimar “pseudo-democracy” they founded the Malik-Verlag, which published politically inspired fiction and art books. Their initial production was a journal entitled Jedermann sein eigener Fussball (Everyone His Own Football). The first issue featured on its cover a satiric photomontage, “Who Is the Most Beautiful?” with the faces of Noske, Ludendorff, Erzberger, Ebert, and Scheidemann. The publishers distributed some 7,600 copies of their journal during a mock funeral procession through the streets of Berlin, a gesture that turned out to be quite apt, for the police immediately prohibited future numbers. Malik followed with a tract called “Die Pleite” (Bankruptcy), which contained a cartoon by Grosz showing President Ebert as a fat king being served a drink by a capitalist lackey. In the summer of 1920 the Malik circle organized Berlin’s First International Dada Fair in a local art gallery. Here the main target was traditional art and bourgeois cultural values. Grosz and Heartfield advertised the show with a placard reading “Art is Dead, Long Live the New Machine Art of Tatlin”—a pitch for Soviet constructivism as the artwork of the future. Visitors to the exhibition saw a calculatedly messy assemblage of paintings, prints, and posters parodying Great Art and the bourgeois social order that dutifully worshipped it. One of the posters read: “Dilettantes, Rise Up against Art!” The pièce de résistance was a dummy dressed in a military officer’s uniform with a pig’s head and a sign hanging from its crotch explaining: “In order to understand this work of art go on a daily twelve-hour exercise on the Tempelhof Field with full backpack and equipped for maneuvers.”
The First International Dada Fair, Berlin, 1920
For this and other insults to the military the Dada Fair organizers were taken to court. Grosz and Heartfield were fined 300 and 600 marks respectively. But it was not only the conservatives who were outraged. The Communists, whose ideals Grosz and company claimed to represent, were appalled by the Dadaists’ wholesale attack on traditional culture. Unlike these anti-artists, the Communists took the great art of the past seriously, believing it could be inspirational for the workers. Echoing Kaiser Wilhelm IIs condemnation of modern art, Gertrud Alexander, cultural editor of the KPD’s newspaper Die Rote Fahne, denounced Dada’s “tasteless new barbaric ‘paintings’,” adding: “The conscious fighter has no need, like Dada, to destroy artworks in order to free himself from ‘bourgeois attitudes,’ because he is not bourgeois. Those who can do no more than glue together silly kitsch like Dada, should keep their hands off art.”
Bertolt Brecht, who would himself later fall afoul of Communist Party guidelines on art, believed he understood why the Dadaists made imperfect Communists: they were animated less by reverence for the proletariat than by contempt for the bloated bourgeoisie. In a letter to Grosz regarding the latter’s satirical attack on the plutocracy, Das Gesicht der herrschenden Klasse (The Face of the Ruling Class), Brecht proposed that what made the painter “an enemy of the bourgeois was their physiognomy.” “You hate the bourgeoisie not because you are a proletarian but because you are an artist,” he told Grosz. The same, of course, could have been said of Brecht himself.
In mid-November 1923 the government of Chancellor Gustav Stresemann, which had taken office in August 1923, introduced a new currency, the Rentenmark, to replace the essentially worthless paper marks then in circulation. To buttress the new money, Germany took out a mortgage on itself, putting up all its rolling stock, gold reserves, and public real estate as backing. Hjalmar Schacht, a financial wizard who would later become Hitler’s chief banker, was appointed National Currency Commissioner to oversee the transition to the new system. At the same time, Stresemann ended the “passive resistance” policy in the Ruhr, which was draining away 40 million gold marks a day. These measures anchored the Rentenmark at the prewar mark’s dollar ratio of 4.2 to 1, a tremendous accomplishment.
The social price, however, was extremely high. The new currency completely swept away whatever paper marks people still possessed, capping, for many Germans, a process of progressive impoverishment. To keep the new currency stable, moreover, the national, state, and municipal governments adopted strict austerity programs, including unprecedented reductions in public spending. In Berlin alone some 39,000 city employees, among them high-level civil servants, lost their jobs. Many never found employment again, ensuring that the jobless rate in the capital would remain dangerously high even during the period of relative prosperity between 1924 and 1929.
The Haller Review at Berlin s Admiralspalast
5
THE WORLD CITY OF ORDER AND BEAUTY
In those days the entire world was watching Berlin. Some with dread, some with hope; in that city the fate of Europe was being decided.
—Ilya Ehrenburg,
Memoirs, 1921–1941
THE HORRORS OF THE EARLY Weimar era that Berlin’s artists so faithfully—and perhaps all too eagerly—recorded did not entirely fade away when the political and economic conditions stabilized in the mid-1920s. The capital’s streets were still crowded with underage prostitutes, crippled beggars, and vulgar plutocrats. Yet the city, relying extensively on American loans, now undertook significant modernization and building projects that had been deferred during the Great Inflation. In the process it added between 80,000 and 100,000 new residents a year, pushing the population over the 4 million mark in 1925. Berlin now harbored one-fifteenth of Germany’s total population, one-twelfth of its large factories, and one-tenth of its employees. Politically it evolved into a bastion of pro-Republican sentiment: “Weimar,” originally posed as a safe alternative to Berlin, became almost synonymous with the capital. The city’s cultural life became even more open to outside influences—again from America but also from the young Soviet Union, which offered visions of harmonious social progress to compete with America’s survival-of-the-fittest technocracy.
Unfortunately, many progressive-minded Berliners mistakenly assumed that the rest of the nation thought as they did. In reality, however, the industrial concentration, economic rationalization, cultural cosmopolitanism, and pro-Republican politics that shaped Weimar Berlin were not nearly so warmly embraced outside the capital as inside it. The German capital had long been attacked as too big and too foreign, and the attacks escalated over the Weimar period as the city became yet more “alien” in its values. A brochure published in Karlsruhe, for example, denounced the Spree metropolis as a frightening cross between “Chikago und Moskau,” a nasty mixture of “Amerikanismus und Bolshevismus.” Thus Berlin’s claim to stand for Germany seemed more problematical than ever, at least at home. Worried about this gulf between capital and nation, Kurt Tucholsky advised his fellow Berlin intellectuals to “radiate energy in the provinces instead of patting themselves on the back.” They should, he said, respond to the provincial outcry against the capital by speaking out “with the power of Berlin, which is light, to the provinces, where it is dark.” But what if the provinces preferred it in the dark? And what if the light from Berlin was rather like that cast by the moon: visible only under clear skies and ultimately dependent on an outside source?