In 1929 Piscator was back. Somehow he found the funds to return to the Theater am Nollendorfplatz with a production of Walter Mehring’s Der Kaufmann von Berlin, a play about an impoverished East European Jew who comes to Berlin and makes millions during the inflation. It had sets by Lászlê Moholy-Nagy and songs by Hanns Eisler, a sometime collaborator with Brecht. In one of the numbers, The Song of the Three Street Sweepers, the performers do away with some garbage of the inflation era—a pile of currency, a steel helmet, and the corpse of a Freikorps soldier— while singing “Crap: Chuck It Out!” To conservatives in the audience, it was the play that should be chucked out, and it folded after a short run.
Among Piscator’s most ardent champions in Berlin was the weekly journal, Die Weltbühne, which, in addition to theater, film, and music criticism, offered topical fiction, political commentary, and social satire. At one time or another, it employed just about everyone who was anyone in Weimar Berlin’s left-wing literary community. The editor during the later years of the Republic was Carl von Ossietzky, a native Hamburger who had become a passionate pacifist and internationalist before taking a job with the Berliner Volks-Zeitung in 1919. In 1927 he took over at the Weltbühne, then at the peak of its notoriety. Ossietzky’s Weltbühne became increasingly purist in its left-wing attachments. In 1929, when the SPD-controlled Berlin police suppressed a Communist May Day demonstration that was designed to embarrass the Socialists, the paper sided completely with the Communists, demanding the dismissal of the Socialist chief of police. This demand was at once obtuse and quixotic, as was the journal’s nomination of Hein-rich Mann for president of the Republic in 1932, which even Mann rejected as ridiculous. Ossietzky did not get along with Die Weltbühne’s best writer, Kurt Tucholsky, who had a much more realistic appreciation of Weimar’s political landscape. With his agonized love-hate for his native land, Tucholsky was a kind of latter-day Heinrich Heine. Like that great poet, he was haunted by a sense of futility regarding his effectiveness as a political educator; he worried that he and his paper were having little impact outside a narrow circle of Berlin sophisticates. And, native Berliner though he was, he came to despair for the German capital itself, seeing it as self-satisfied and complacent. “Berlin,” he concluded, “combines the disadvantages of an American metropolis and a German provincial city.” In the end, Tucholsky understood that Die WeltMhne’s relentless carping at Weimar from the left was aiding and abetting those who attacked the Republic from the right. After Hitler’s seizure of power he fled to Sweden, where, in despair over his and his colleagues’ failure to avert the worst, he took his life.
Kurt Tucholsky
Die Weltbühne, even in its later stages, retained a certain residue of expressionism in its passionate commitments. But in the mid to late Weimar period the reigning style in literature and painting was Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity)—a cool bath of skepticism and sobriety following the effusions of the immediate postwar period. Just as the earlier art and writing had mirrored the chaotic atmosphere of the times, so the new style seemed better suited to the politics of stabilization and accommodation during the second half of the decade.
Writing about the new style in painting, a contemporary critic declared: “The pictures and drawings by the artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit read like an account of events in Berlin during the Weimar period. They depict its desires, ideals, and disappointments, its evasions, conflicts, and shortcomings.” Most of the painters in question had earlier been identified with Dada or expressionism and had focused on the horrors of war, revolution, and inflation; now they turned a critical but somewhat jaded eye to the scene around them in the “era of fulfillment.” In one of his most famous works, Sonnenfinsternis (Solar Eclipse, 1926) Grosz depicted President Hindenburg being offered weapons by arms dealers while prisoners rot in jail, a donkey (symbolizing the public) feeds on a newspaper, and a huge dollar sign, Weimar Germany’s true source of light, blots out the sun. The major painters also focused attention on themselves and their artist friends as observer-shapers of the cultural scene. Rudolf Schichter painted Brecht in his leather jacket with a stogie and rendered Kisch bare-breasted and covered with menacing tattoos; Grosz depicted writer Max Hermann-Neisse looking like a gnarled troll; Otto Dix drew Sylvia Harden as an emancipated woman, bob-haired and smoking; Max Beckmann did himself in a tuxedo, peering back sardonically at his creator. Such works did not radiate grand visions or overarching beliefs. Hope had shifted to smaller, more attainable aims, such as capturing the essence of an object or a person on canvas with the same no-nonsense precision that went into building a fine car or an airplane.
George Grosz, Selbstporträt(Self-portrait), 1928
The young Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon arrived in Berlin at this auspicious moment in the city’s cultural history, though it was not the local art scene that initially attracted him. He had been expelled from his home in Ireland by his father for showing signs of incipient homosexuality. First he had gone to London and sampled that city’s extensive but beleaguered homosexual underground. Hoping yet to reclaim him for traditional morality, his father sent him on a visit to Berlin under the care of a manly uncle. The uncle’s virility, however, turned out to be indiscriminate, and young Bacon promptly found himself in bed with his guardian at the Hotel Ad-lon. Outside their opulent suite beckoned the whole world of “decadent” Berlin, which Bacon began exploring on his own once his uncle had returned to England. He recalled later:
There was something extraordinarily open about the whole place. . . . You had this feeling that sexually you could get absolutely anything you wanted. I’d never seen anything like it, of course, having been brought up in Ireland, and it excited me enormously. I felt, well, now I can just drift and follow my instincts. And I remember these streets of clubs where people stood in the front of the entrance miming the perversions that were going on inside. That was very interesting.
Berlin was a revelation to Bacon in other ways as well. He was struck by the luxury of the Adlon cheek by jowl with the poverty of the Scheunenviertel; the Unterwelt of gangsters and their molls; the cinemas playing Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin; the Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition at the Galerie Nierendorf in early 1927; the paintings of Grosz, Pechstein, Beckmann, and Dix, especially the latter’s haunting Big City Triptych. All this made a lasting impression on the young man and helped shape his own work in the coming decades.
The Berlin world with which Bacon became acquainted through his precocious wanderings and the works of its avant-garde painters was also under intense scrutiny by the city’s literary artists, many of whom, like the painters, had passed through Dada and expressionism to the rigors of Neue Sachlichkeit.