Exile of George Grosz: Modernism, America, and the One World Order 9780520355859, 9780520281943

Table of contents :
Contents
Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Preface: Beyond Exile
Introduction: Exile and the American Century
1. Making an Exile Culture
2. Exile and the One World Order
3. Exile in the Age of Anxiety
4. The Exile Returns
Conclusion: Tears of the Clown
Notes
Selected Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index

Citation preview

THE EXILE OF GEORGE GROSZ

the publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the art endowment fund of the university of california press foundation, which was established by a major gift from the ahmanson foundation.

the publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the judy and bill timken endowment fund in contemporary arts of the university of california press foundation.

THE EXILE OF GEORGE GROSZ Modernism, America, and the One World Order

BARBARA McCLOSKEY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2015 by The Regents of the University of California All art by George Grosz is © Estate of George Grosz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Every effort has been made to identify the rightful copyright holders of material not specifically commissioned for use in this publication and to secure permission, where applicable, for reuse of all such material. Credit, if and as available, has been provided for all borrowed material either on-page or in an acknowledgment section of the book. Errors or omissions in credit citations or failure to obtain permission if required by copyright law have been either unavoidable or unintentional. The author and publisher welcome any information that would allow them to correct future reprints. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCloskey, Barbara, 1959– author. The exile of George Grosz : modernism, America, and the one world order / Barbara McCloskey. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-28194-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Grosz, George, 1893–1959. 2. Art—Political aspects—United States. 3. Art— Political aspects—Germany. 4. Expatriate artists—United States. 5. Artists— Germany. I. Title. n6888.g742m375 2015 759.3— dc23 2014014668 Manufactured in China 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

16

15

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

to my brothers and sisters in memory of our mother, bernadette (1921–2014)

Contents

List of Abbreviations / ix Acknowledgments / xi Preface: Beyond Exile / xv Introduction: Exile and the American Century / 1

1

Making an Exile Culture / 9

2

Exile and the One World Order / 55

3

Exile in the Age of Anxiety / 101

4

The Exile Returns / 145

Conclusion: Tears of the Clown / Notes / 183 Selected Bibliography / 221 List of Illustrations / 233 Index / 237

179

Abbreviations

AAA

Associated American Artists

ASSO

Assoziation revolutionärer bildender Künstler Deutschlands (Association of Revolutionary Pictorial Artists of Germany)

DMFA

Dallas Museum of Fine Arts

FBI

Federal Bureau of Investigation

GAH

George Grosz Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

GDR

German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or East Germany)

HANL

Hollywood Anti-Nazi League for the Defense of American Democracy

HUAC

House Un-American Activities Committee

ICA

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts

KPD

Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (German Communist Party)

ix

MoMA

Museum of Modern Art, New York

NATO

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NKFD

Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland (National Committee of Free Germany)

NSDAP

Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers Party)

OMGUS

Office of Military Government of the United States, in Germany

OWI

Office of War Information

PWAP

Public Works of Art Project

RIAS

Radio in the American Sector

SA

Sturmabteilung

SED

Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany)

SFMoMA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

x

SMAD

Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland (Soviet Military Administration in Germany)

USSR

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union

WPA

Works Progress Administration

abbreviations

Acknowledgments

IN 1997, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art staged its groundbreaking exhibition Exiles and Émigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler. Curated by Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann, the show introduced American audiences to the tragedy and achievement of those artists whose lives and livelihoods were forever changed by the spread of fascism and war in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.1 George Grosz was among the many illustrious European artists and intellectuals who fled to the United States during this period. My research into Grosz’s American years began when I was asked to lecture on the subject of his exile art for a symposium organized by Keith Holz. The symposium was held in conjunction with the opening of the Exiles and Émigrés exhibit. The panelists involved examined the meaning of exile and its impact on artistic production during and after World War II. The event also explored the continuing relevance of exile for an understanding of the accelerated forces of displacement that characterize our current era. The insights on exile set forth in the Exile and Émigrés show and symposium have continued to resound in my thinking and writing on Grosz’s years in America. My hope is that this book contributes to those insights by demonstrating how his art and activities of the past can be approached in ways that help to illuminate the complexities of exile and migrancy that define our current experience in a fitfully globalizing world. Following my talk at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1997, I presented various xi

aspects of my evolving study at College Art Association and German Studies Association annual meetings and in lectures delivered in Augsburg, Germany; Chicago, Illinois; Boca Raton, Florida; Columbus, Ohio; Tucson, Arizona; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The contents of some of those presentations have appeared in the following essays: “Hitler and Me: George Grosz and the Experience of German Exile,” in Helmut Koopmann and Klaus Dieter Post’s Exil: Transhistorische und transnationale Perspektiven (Paderborn: Mentis, 2001); “Cartographies of Exile,” in Alexander Stephan’s Exile and Otherness: New Approaches to the Experience of the Nazi Refugees (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005); and “Exile for Hire: George Grosz in Dallas,” in Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick’s Caught by Politics: German Exiles and American Visual Culture in the 1930s and 1940s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). I thank the editors of each of these volumes for inviting me to contribute my ideas to such outstanding venues. This project benefited from the editorial guidance of Kari Dahlgren and Jack Young at the University of California Press. Robin Whitaker thoughtfully and painstakingly proofread the manuscript. I can’t thank them enough for their support. Their efforts have made the process of bringing this book to fruition a genuine pleasure. My appreciation also goes to Lilian Grosz and Tobias Grosz for their generosity and efforts to help me track down reproductions of some of the more elusive works in George Grosz’s American oeuvre. Four research assistants at the University of Pittsburgh, James Johnson, Madeline Eschenburg, Isaac King, and Inga Meier, provided invaluable bibliographic assistance, located illustrations and copyright permissions, and commented on the manuscript. Veronica Gazdik also deserves my sincere gratitude for preparing high-quality reproductions for the book. Archivists and librarians at the University of Pittsburgh, the Houghton Library and Archives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Deutsches Exilarchiv at the German National Library in Frankfurt am Main, the Hoover Institution at Stanford, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Dallas Museum of Art, Southern Methodist University, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C., were instrumental in helping me to access important research materials. I thank them all. The students, faculty, and staff of the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh offered a sounding board for my thinking and continue to provide me with an intellectually engaging and professionally rewarding place in which to work. In addition, the German Academic Exchange Service awarded me a grant for research in the exile archive in Frankfurt am Main. The University of Pittsburgh has supported my efforts with Hewlitt International and University Center for International Studies resources. These funds allowed me to consult important libraries and collections in the United States. A university research grant also helped defray the cost of illustration copyright fees. Above all, I want to thank Sabine Hake, Keith Holz, Paul Jaskot, and James Van Dyke for their meticulous and incisive commentary on this manuscript at various stages in its development. It is a special privilege to count as dear friends these outstanding scholars whose work I so greatly admire. I have tried to do justice to their insights and advice. Any remaining shortcomings are solely attributable to me. I also want to thank Karl Werckmeister, my former dissertation adviser, xii

acknowledgments

whose writings continue to serve me as a source of critical inspiration. For this book, his “Hitler the Artist” essay of 1997 launched me on some of the most probing dimensions of my investigation into Grosz’s experience of exile.2 In this regard, I also want acknowledge Keith Holz, Sabine Eckmann, and the late Jutta Held for their friendship, encouragement, and outstanding work on German artists in exile.3 I gladly register my indebtedness to their pathfinding research and publications. Gretchen Bender, Heidi Cook, Pia Cuneo, April Eisman, Susan Funkenstein, Randall Halle, Elizabeth Otto, Cynthia Persinger, Kirk Savage, and Terry Smith have all helped me in various ways by their willingness to read aspects of this work, engage in conversation with me about it, and share with me their scholarly research in ways I continue to find inspirational. I also benefited from the insights of faculty and graduate students involved in a seminar on cosmopolitanism conducted in the summer of 2012 by Jonathan Arac, director of the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh, and Bruce Robbins, whose work on cosmopolitanism served as the focus of our seminar discussions. Finally, Fred Evans’s philosophical commitment to the problem of voices and their audibility in our current world has profoundly shaped my thinking about the imbrications of exile and world picturing explored in this project. Meanwhile, my own world is continually and in every conceivable way enriched by his love and companionship. I dedicate this book to him.

acknowledgments

xiii

Preface BEYOND EXILE

GEORGE GROSZ, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and the other artists and intellectuals considered in this book bore witness to the epochal crises of World War II and its aftermath. They did so, moreover, from the extraordinary vantage point of exile in the United States. Wrenched by history from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from home to elsewhere, their changed circumstances caused them to reflect with striking poignancy on the meaning of those perilous times for their lives, their livelihoods, and their art. Members of this German intellectual migration fled Nazi Germany and carried with them abroad one of the most advanced cultural traditions—in philosophy, the sciences, and the arts— of the Western world. Universities, institutes, film studios, museums, and galleries quickly embraced many of them upon their arrival in New York, Los Angeles, and other centers in the United States. The ease and rapidity of the exiles’ acceptance testified to the high value placed on the European cultural and intellectual heritage they represented. As the full scale of Hitler’s atrocities became known, however, the horror of the death camps overshadowed Germany’s achievements of the past. Two other German exiles, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, famously diagnosed this moment of historical rupture. For them Hitler’s revolution represented the culmination of a process in which Enlightenment rationality yielded to unreason and human understanding of nature surrendered to a world of inhumane domination.1 xv

The pall of the Third Reich transformed modernity’s dream of universal betterment and progress into nationalist fervor and imperialist war. This transformation included the logic of race with its privileging of the self and murderous exclusion of the other. In the case of Nazi Germany, that abject other included not only Jews but also political dissidents, homosexuals, artists, and intellectuals, who faced persecution, exile, or extermination. Hitler’s dictatorial plan died in 1945, but his grotesque Manichaeism did not. It instead took root during the Cold War under the guise of struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union and between capitalism and communism. This struggle, as we shall explore in the following pages, was in part underwritten by the exiles and their legacy. In his book Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Edward Said highlights the humanist tradition from which the exiles came and the manner in which that tradition was embraced, absorbed, and repurposed in the United States as a defensive nationalism during World War II. Said argues that this transformation effaced the liberatory potential of a more open, self-reflective, and democratic humanism in favor of a canonical roster of white, Western achievement leveraged by the “occident” against its “oriental” adversary.2 Since 1989, the updated version of this divisive logic comes steeped in the mythic language of good versus evil, clashing civilizations, and post-9/11 specters of a Christian West embroiled in mortal struggle with an Islamic East. Such logic imperils today, as it did after 1945, creative thinking about the potential for a better future in our world of accelerated contact, conflict, and irreversible interdependence. This study argues for the continuing relevance of Grosz’s exile art over and against a Cold War cultural narrative that has long dictated unfavorable art historical assessments of his American career, including my own. Indeed, work on this current study has challenged me to examine the assumptions and critical commitments that guided my earlier book on Grosz, titled George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936, which appeared in 1997. There, I explored Grosz’s role in Germany’s Expressionist and Dada avant-gardes and his political radicalization by the events of World War I. More explicitly, my 1997 book traced his rise to international recognition as the leading artist of the German Communist Party in the early 1920s. I described how his work served party interests by assailing authority and promoting proletarian revolution with bitterly satiric caricatures that pitted oppressed but unbroken workers against a panoply of avaricious capitalists and debased church, government, and military figures (figure 1). Repeated government attempts to suppress his incendiary images positioned Grosz at the center of the highly charged debates also explored in my book on the subject of art, politics, and freedom of expression in the Weimar Republic. In the late 1920s, Grosz encountered increasing right-wing vilification as Germany’s “Cultural Bolshevist #1.” This was especially true during his trial that commanded international attention between 1928 and 1930. He faced charges of blasphemy at that time for his portrayal of Christ on the cross wearing a gas mask and combat boots (figure 2). This and other anti-clerical images by Grosz served as backdrops for the leftist theater director Erwin Piscator’s anti-militarist play, The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schwejk, which was staged in late 1928 at the Nollendorfplatz Theater in Berlin.3 Grosz was eventually acquitted, but the Nazi Party’s Völkischer Beobachter xvi

preface

FIGURE 1. George Grosz, Die Besitzkröten (The

FIGURE 2. George Grosz, Maul halten und weiter

Toads of Property), from Das Gesicht der

dienen (Shut Up and Do Your Duty) from

herrschenden Klasse (The Face of the Ruling Class),

Hintergrund (Background). 1927. Hand-printed

1921. Lithograph, 48.1 × 37.6 cm.

drawing, 16.8 × 25.9 cm.

(Folkish Observer) newspaper nonetheless took advantage of the incident to assail Grosz as a preeminent example of communism’s corrosive effect on the German nation.4 By then, however, Grosz had in fact begun to distance himself from the Communist Party , especially after it became more Stalinized in the mid-1920s. In my earlier research I explored how his life and works served to illuminate the role of art in the complexities of the late Weimar years as the country faced world economic crisis and the looming specter of dictatorship and war. George Grosz and the Communist Party followed Grosz’s flight from Hitler in 1933 and his arrival in New York. The book concluded with his initial and highly equivocal reception by a left-leaning American art world anxious for Grosz to renew revolutionary commitments he had already left behind. Absent from this earlier study was any analysis of Grosz’s art and activities after 1936. Given the book’s concern with the intersection of art and left-wing politics, George Grosz and the Communist Party privileged instead the period of his vanguardism—both political and aesthetic— over beyond exile

xvii

the apoliticism and anti-modernism that appeared to settle in over his art beginning in the mid1930s. Grosz turned from politically engaged satiric caricature at that time and embraced the opaque historical allegories, landscapes, and nudes that replaced the political incisiveness of his earlier production. As critics at the time and since have recognized, the traditional figuration of these works placed his art at odds with an American art world increasingly in thrall to modernist abstraction. For many others, Grosz’s paintings and drawings of the exile years have remained aesthetically marginal to a cultural history that continues to be defined by America’s promotion of modernism as an emblem of democratic freedom in its struggle with the culture of Soviet dictatorship during the Cold War. In the following, I shift our frame of reference away from this Cold War evaluative criterion. My effort to do so is assisted by numerous studies that have begun to challenge the dichotomies of Cold War cultural politics, especially in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. These studies have turned instead to exploring mirror relationships and connections between the superpowers through art, design, mass media, and architecture, as well as the permeability of their political, economic, and social fortifications to exchanges between artists, intellectuals, and other cultural actors.5 More consequential for my analysis here is the manner in which the loosening grip of the Cold War has also given way to the international ascendency of market capitalism, awareness of worldwide environmental peril, and the newfound proximity of people and places around the globe made possible by the digital revolution. The planetary scale of our contemporary experience and consciousness thus offers both greater possibilities and greater challenges than those of the Cold War past to imagining and realizing a future world order unburdened by exploitation, social injustice, and conflict. These globalizing changes have also led me to reconsider Grosz’s exile art in a wholly different light that recuperates for it a critical import obscured by the Cold War assumptions that guided my earlier work. This new envisioning of Grosz’s work involves examining the manner in which he and his compatriots in American exile intuited, talked about, dismissed, and, in some cases, tried to realize a “one world order” or “globalism” called forth by the troubled modernity they were witnessing. Some grappled with perceptions of a world that appeared forever diminished by the crisis of the Enlightenment, the imperilment of humanist values, and the relativization of the West. Others, however, imagined universalism in a world beyond exile, in which borders and boundaries might lose their divisive and traumatic character. Scholars and thinkers today continue to ask what a nonhegemonic universalism might look like free of the specter of Enlightenment domination intoned by Horkheimer and Adorno.6 The challenges we now face differ importantly from those unleashed by the cataclysm of World War II and its immediate aftermath. Speculations regarding a better world order do not, however. In this study of German exile in the United States, I explore what the art and writings of Grosz, Mann, and others have to say about earlier universalist visions, their strengths and shortcomings, and their enduring relevance as the need to imagine and realize an improved world order imposes itself evermore insistently upon us.

xviii

preface

INTRODUCTION EXILE AND THE AMERICAN CENTURY

IN 1919, the victorious Allied powers gathered in Paris to weigh matters of guilt and reparations in the wake of Germany’s defeat. John Dos Passos was in the French capital during this historic moment, and it was there in a bookstore that he encountered the work of George Grosz for the first time. The American writer had witnessed World War I firsthand as a member of the ambulance corps in France and Italy. Radicalized by his experience, he found Grosz’s portrayals of bloated military leaders and corrupt government officials to be a timely assault on those responsible for those long and bloody years. Dos Passos told of his early contact with Grosz’s art in an essay that appeared in Esquire magazine in September 1936. Titled “Grosz Comes to America,” his account hailed the notorious German Dada and Communist Party artist as a brilliant satirist whose moralizing vision equaled that of Francisco Goya and Jonathan Swift. Like them, Grosz used his art to prompt “new ways of seeing” by ceaselessly attacking the status quo and unsettling habituated perceptions.1 Dos Passos claimed further that Grosz’s unsparing work was now responsible for his flight from tyranny to the United States. He also reported that growing numbers of European artists and intellectuals were following Grosz’s example. The America that awaited them had recently awakened from cultural provincialism and was ready to embrace their proud artistic and intellectual traditions. Most important, Grosz and the exiles’ desire for safe haven in the United States 1

confirmed for Dos Passos America’s standing as a beacon of democratic liberty in a world imperiled by dictatorship. He summarized the content of his Esquire essay by celebrating Grosz and the arrival of the European intellectual migration in incantatory terms: “The fact that first-rate men who can’t live in their own countries feel that they can breathe here makes you feel good about the country. The fact that George Grosz, the great visual satirist of our time, has come to live here, has taken out papers and considers himself an American makes you feel good about the country.”2 Esquire also announced Grosz’s appointment as an illustrator for the popular monthly journal. It reproduced several pen and ink caricatures by the infamous “fugitive from Nazi Germany” in its September 1936 issue and included a two-page color spread featuring his current works in watercolor. The editors emphasized the special status of their new contributor by insisting on the deep animus that existed between the artist and his country of origin. Esquire declared about Grosz: “There is no one the National Socialists hate more and there are few who have more reason to hate the Nazis.”3 Grosz thus found himself welcomed to America in a manner both sensationalist and long overdue. His first visit to the United States had in fact taken place four years earlier, in 1932, when he accepted a teaching appointment for the summer term at the Art Students League in New York. The German artist had harbored a long-standing dream of seeing “Amerika” firsthand, but need rather than desire ultimately drove his decision to realize it. Political turmoil and the devastating impact of the world economic crisis had spelled the collapse of a viable market for Grosz’s art in Germany. The league offer therefore came as a welcome degree of certainty in uncertain times. Letters sent to friends and family back home chart Grosz’s growing fascination with New York and his deepening appreciation for the safety of his new environs.4 He shared his conviction that living in the United States could afford him welcome distance from a politicized artistic past and the looming threat posed to his life and livelihood with Hitler’s rise to power. Soon after his return to Berlin in the fall of 1932, the Art Students League asked Grosz to accept a regular contract at the school. The appointment brought him permanently back to New York on 23 January 1933, just seven days before Hitler became chancellor. His wife, Eva, and their two young sons, Peter and Martin, joined him shortly thereafter as they embarked together on a new life under dramatically changed circumstances. In the coming years, the exodus of artists, writers, politicians, journalists, and trade unionists from Germany and occupied Europe would swell in numbers. Many of them flooded into New York, which became a leading haven for those fleeing the Third Reich. Some were members of Grosz’s former artistic circle in Berlin whom he helped with commiseration, financial support, and efforts to find employment. The writers Hermann Borchardt and Walter Mehring were among those who found temporary shelter in Grosz’s home while they struggled to establish themselves anew in the United States. Many of the exiles looked on their time in America as little more than a dreadful interlude. They waited, watched, and agitated from afar for Hitler’s defeat while longing for the day of their eventual return. Grosz was of an entirely different mind, however. He embraced his adopted home. He repudiated his communist past and worked assiduously to build a new career as an 2

Introduction

American artist. During his first years in New York, his art shed much of its satirical edge and softened into gentle caricatures and watercolors devoted to the city’s urban scene. He was an émigré, not an exile, Grosz insisted, and his decision to come to America had been voluntary, not forced.5 He was captivated by the promise of his new circumstances and harbored no desire to return to Germany. He was, in short, determined to leave his past firmly behind. Contrary to his wishes, this leave-taking proved increasingly difficult for Grosz as Hitler’s atrocities inside Nazi Germany became known to the world at large. In February 1933, the Reichstag fire furnished the Third Reich with a pretext for brutal repression of the communist opposition. Members of Grosz’s politicized artistic circle in Berlin promptly fled the country, including his friend and publisher, Wieland Herzfelde. Herzfelde wrote to Grosz from his exile in Prague telling him of the harrowing events that quickly ensued in the hours and days after the fire, including the confiscation of Grosz’s work from a storage space in Berlin, the ransacking of Herzfelde’s press, and the narrow escape of Herzfelde’s brother, John Heartfield, from the Gestapo.6 For Grosz, Nazi reprisal against Weimar Germany’s most notorious left-wing artist included the destruction of some of his graphic portfolios in the book burning of May 1933 and the revocation of his citizenship that July. His art was also held up for public ridicule at the Mannheim Kunsthalle in the first of a series of defamatory exhibits that took place throughout Germany in the coming years.7 Under the circumstances, the exile community, the artistic left in New York, and anti-fascists abroad invoked Grosz’s status as a dissident artist of the Weimar years and called on him repeatedly to resume his political work of the past. They claimed that a darkening situation in Europe required a return of his critical vision. Gallery exhibits, publications, and commentaries on Grosz’s art soon began to reinforce this demand by gravitating away from his American works and looking instead to his controversial art of the 1920s. In August 1934, Grosz wrote Herzfelde with a request for copies of his portfolios Gott mit uns (1920) and Ecce homo (1922).8 Both graphic collections had resulted in criminal charges against him and were condemned and censored during the Weimar Republic.9American audiences now sought out these examples of Grosz’s dissident art as documentary testament to the cultural turmoil that prompted Hitler’s rise to power. Similarly, the first major show devoted to Grosz’s New York production highlighted his artistic past at the expense of his current work. Marsden Hartley wrote a brief introductory catalogue for the exhibit, which was staged at Alfred Stieglitz’s American Place Gallery in 1935. Hartley’s commentary refrained altogether from discussing the examples of Grosz’s recent watercolors on view and instead dwelled on his incendiary, anti-fascist career of the 1920s.10 Dos Passos’s Esquire essay of 1936 added to this growing retrospection about Grosz also by focusing on the artist’s controversial years in Berlin. Indeed, his “Grosz Comes to America” summarized a climate of opinion that elevated the artist’s German past over his American present and set the tone for a wholly new, exile phase in his career. Like the American Place exhibit, Dos Passos’s published reminiscences marked something of a second arrival for Grosz, as the self-described émigré was now cast in the role of a famed exile from Nazi persecution. Numerous studies have illuminated the fate of those prominent artists and intellectuals who Exile and the American Century

3

sought refuge in the United States as war and fascism spread across Europe.11 These accounts focus on the wrenching circumstances of the exiles’ expulsion from their countries of origin during the years of Hitler’s consolidation of power in Germany and the progress of the world war. In turning to the fate of the exiles once they reached the United States, studies have tended to follow one of the two trajectories of the exile experience identified by the philosopher Ernst Bloch in his essay “Disrupted Language, Disrupted Culture,” of 1939.12 On the one hand, Bloch observed, were those who sought to isolate themselves in exile by retaining their “old existence and consciousness, as if the journey to America had changed nothing.” Studies accepting this model of the exile response have therefore explored exile as an isolating experience in which differences of language, custom, and culture presented insurmountable barriers between the exiles and their new environs. On the other hand, according to Bloch, were those who adopted a wholly different tack to the exile experience by pursuing assimilation and attempting to cut themselves “completely adrift from everything on the other side of the water.”13 This assimilation model of exile has held particular saliency for studies devoted to the fate of leading visual artists in the emigration who found their arrival eased by an American art world grown receptive to their vanguard example. Unlike their lesser-known exiled artistic compatriots who simply struggled to survive, prominent artists within the emigration were readily incorporated into the American art world’s systems of patronage, promotion, and display.14 Art historians have devoted specific attention in this regard to the impact of Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, André Masson, and other European artistic exiles on Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and the American art world in general.15 Their studies recount how New York’s abstract expressionists encountered, absorbed, and ultimately transformed the lessons of the exiles’ challenging surrealist and nonfigurative art. They also insist that abstract expressionism quickly surpassed the exiles’ vanguard work as it set a course for what Irving Sandler called the “triumph of American painting” in the postwar years.16 A similar story of European cultural transfer and American artistic advancement informs histories of design and architecture. Scholars frequently describe Herbert Bayer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and other exiled representatives of the Bauhaus as catalysts for the integration of high modernist principles into American building, advertising, and graphic design during and after World War II.17 These enduring perceptions of the relationship between European exile culture and the American art world are themselves an artifact of the World War II and Cold War periods addressed in this book. Alfred H. Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the prominent art critic Clement Greenberg were foremost in establishing the terms on which the artistic contribution of the exiles was to be understood. Their writings and pronouncements subsumed exile work into a developmental history of modernist art. This history traced modernism’s origins to formal innovations that emerged in Europe in the nineteenth century and flourished there through the early years of the twentieth century. The trauma of fascism and war had served to drive this artistic legacy into American exile. For Barr and Greenberg, it also transformed the United States into the only viable place where modernism’s aesthetic innovations could progress unabated. 4

Introduction

The experimentalism and politically dissident character of Grosz’s expressionist, Dada, and Communist Party works of the Wilhelmine and Weimar eras earned them a secure place not only in my 1997 study on Grosz and the Communist Party but also in most historical accounts of artistic modernism.18 Excluded from those histories remain the allegorical paintings, portraits, depictions of the female nude, and landscape studies that dominated Grosz’s art from the mid1930s onward. These works contradict the modernist paradigm through their use of figuration, narrative, and allegiance to artistic traditions of the past, especially that of the Northern Renaissance. They nonetheless routinely appeared in exhibitions, received critical attention, and occasionally won prizes. After he gained citizenship in 1938 and before his death in 1959, Grosz was also recognized on more than one occasion as an outstanding artist on the basis of his American works. His American career nonetheless sacrificed more enduring notoriety for insistently swimming against the tides of abstraction, surrealism, and other forms of artistic experiment that commanded the attention of the New York art world during this period. Grosz’s career in the United States indeed differed markedly from his experience in Weimar Berlin, where he had occupied the center of Germany’s vibrant and politically contentious avantgarde. In America, he remained deeply loyal to members of his former artistic circle, some of whom he helped to escape from Nazi Germany by arranging employment for them as well as lodgings, at times in his own home. And despite his own often straitened finances, he attempted to ease the plight of friends and family caught in Europe’s postwar chaos with regular gifts of money, care packages, and empathetic letters. At the same time, Grosz’s personal and creative arena in the United States became smaller, lonelier, and often confined to the privacy of his own studio, especially as the war years progressed. Self-portraits and hermetic allegories populated his paintings and drawings at this time. Meanwhile, his still lifes, landscapes, and nudes appeared to confirm stories of his growing detachment from the outside world as they turned more introspective, brooding, and reflective in their tenor. Grosz’s problems with alcohol, dwindling sales, and bouts of resentment and jealousy over successes enjoyed by others in the exile community and in the broader American art world defined an irascible temperament that frequently alienated patrons, critics, and friends. His embittered skepticism deepened as time went on, resulting occasionally in misanthropic tirades about American superficiality and the gullibility of the masses and in his damning judgment of the German people and their support for Hitler. In his wide-ranging study of German exile in the United States, Anthony Heilbut summarized Grosz’s unsavory posture during these years as “increasingly grotesque.”19 For decades after his death, critics and art historians dismissed this anti-modernist, American phase of Grosz’s career as a period of personal and artistic decline. As I explore in the following pages, there is indeed much to appreciate and to condemn and much to sympathize with and to criticize about Grosz during his years in the United States. The American Grosz remains a contradictory and elusive figure, at times inexplicable in his withdrawal from friends and opportunities and at other times startling in his unflinching commitment to furthering his independent artistic vision. That vision, I argue, allowed his art to distill in largely unremarked, deeply personal, and yet historically revelatory terms some of the most Exile and the American Century

5

painful and probing dimensions of the crises that unfolded around him during the war and its aftermath. My analysis is indebted to M. Kay Flavell, who was the first to redress the historiographic neglect of Grosz’s years in the United States with the publication of her book George Grosz: A Biography in 1988.20 Birgit Möckel’s George Grosz in Amerika appeared in 1997 and further expanded our understanding of this overlooked period in the artist’s life.21 Flavell and Möckel’s studies have also been complemented in recent years by exhibits devoted to Grosz’s American career.22 Together these sources provide invaluable information about Grosz’s art and about the various artists’ groups, exile organizations, and other affiliations that constituted his affective environment between 1933 and 1959. At the same time, however, the biographical focus they each employ tends to delimit understanding of his art to what Grosz had to say about it and as a reflection of his preferred self-stylization as an inveterate individualist. His awareness of and connections to various groups, organizations, and affiliations thus become little more than foils for stressing his independence from them. With regard to his art, a general understanding emerges from these studies concerning Grosz’s American paintings and drawings as work rooted almost exclusively in his private and often tormented reflections on his German past. These accounts suggest further that such introspection rendered his art unintelligible not only to his new American audience but also to the organized exile community that he insisted on keeping at arm’s length. In the end, this isolated and isolating frame of reference reproduces rather than challenges the marginal significance ascribed to his production during this period. In contrast, this study explores numerous overlooked connections between Grosz’s art and the larger politicized culture in which he however reluctantly found himself. My approach to these connections derives from the writings of Edward Said, James Clifford, and Benedict Anderson.23 These authors have probed the notion of exile as an experience of trauma, as a posture of intellectual and creative autonomy, and as a process of national imagining that is permeable and responsive to changing historical conditions. With the understanding of exile therefore as both real and imagined, as lived and discursively constituted, my analysis of Grosz’s work in exile respects the personal dimensions of his experience. More important, I foreground the relationship of that experience to the complex historical moment that shaped his life and in which his art intervened. Grosz thus serves in this study as a critical vantage point from which to illuminate more than only the politics of Cold War cultural ideology. Through Grosz, I also explore how that ideology continues to obscure alternative visions advanced during the period of a world beyond the fortified antagonisms that defined World War II and its aftermath. The first chapter of this book, titled “Making an Exile Culture,” situates the large-scale allegorical paintings, self-portraits, and drawings that Grosz produced in the United States within the context of exile debates. I trace these debates through the writings and speeches of Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and others in the exile community as they reflected on their German legacy and agonized over the extent of their responsibility for the atrocity into which their country had descended. Previous commentators have regarded Grosz’s turn toward the Northern Renaissance tradition in his American works as symptomatic of his isolation and retreat into the artistic pro6

Introduction

cess. Instead, I explore the implications of his turn to tradition as it informed and responded to investigations undertaken by Mann, Brecht, and others who similarly plumbed Germany’s cultural past for insight into its troubled present. Modernist dismissal of Grosz’s American work remains in part based on this turn to tradition in his art. Others have defended against this dismissal by asserting the importance of Grosz’s exile art despite his rejection of modernism’s formalist imperatives of this period. For my analysis, Grosz’s work is significant precisely because of its refusal to conform to the prevailing demands of the American art world. Chapter 2 of my study, “Exile and the One World Order,” examines the manner in which his commitment to tradition rendered his work resistant not only to modernism but also to the narrative of cultural “triumph” that galvanized the American art world before, during, and after World War II. This narrative was given political focus in 1941 when media mogul Henry Luce proclaimed the dawn of the “American Century” in the pages of Life magazine.24 His words inaugurated the beginning of an era in which the United States assumed the mantle of a world superpower bent on asserting the universal, “one world” validity of its social, economic, and political system. I argue in chapter 2 that historical marginalization of Grosz’s U.S. career is grounded in the uncomfortable challenge that his art posed to the culture of progress, historical obliviousness, and optimism in which this vision of an American Century began to take shape at this time. I conclude this chapter with an extended analysis of Grosz’s most important oil painting of this period, titled Cain, or Hitler in Hell, of 1945. Interpreting the work as a veiled self-portrait of Grosz as Hitler, I situate the image within ongoing debates among members of the German exile community as they weighed questions not only of guilt and responsibility for the Nazi phenomenon but also of the import of an American Century for Germany’s place in the world after Hitler’s defeat. Chapter 3, “Exile in the Age of Anxiety,” addresses Grosz’s art of the early Cold War period when American Century universalism confronted the challenge of the Soviet Union and its dramatically different vision of a one world order to come. In the face of these competing American and Soviet futurities, Grosz shared with Horkheimer and Adorno a perspective that came to see exile, once descriptive of an existence “outside,” as evermore indicative of experience “inside” a new world order increasingly subject to the predations of capitalism, on the one hand, and dictatorship, on the other. I discuss in this chapter how Grosz’s art and life traced in often startling terms this changing meaning of exile from the experience of political persecution and expulsion to a larger and more pervasive sense of alienation as an existential condition in this postwar age of anxiety. Grosz’s existentialist works of this period confronted the threat to humanism signaled by the American-Soviet cultural confrontations of the Cold War and the questions concerning artistic freedom these confrontations raised. As this chapter explores, his works also, and of more importance, took their place in larger debates of the period concerning the possibility of continued human freedom in a postwar, post-Auschwitz world in which Enlightenment values appeared to have been extinguished. In the fourth and last chapter of this study, “The Exile Returns,” I examine the controversial Exile and the American Century

7

repatriation of Grosz’s art and German exile culture into a divided Germany between 1945 and the time of his death in 1959. During this period, the country served as the staging ground for the antagonistic one world projects of the United States and the Soviet Union. For Germany, this was also a period in which each side of the east-west divide laid claim to their shared history and cultural tradition as part of their competing bids for national legitimacy throughout the Cold War. As a leading figure of Weimar’s Golden Twenties, Grosz and his legacy were an important part of that history and tradition. This chapter explores how his life and art became debated, divided, and reinvented within and between Germany’s two worlds after 1945. The conclusion of this book takes its title “Tears of the Clown” from the Dada-inspired collage titled Self-Portrait as Clown and Variety Girl, which Grosz completed shortly before his death. I use this image as a metaphor for the notion of exile deployed in this study as both a figure of existential trauma and alienation and a performative condition subject, in Grosz’s case, to self-reflexive irony and permeable to changing imperatives and historical conditions. I also address in this conclusion how my approach to Grosz’s exile art allows his work to assume relevance to current theories of migrancy and cosmopolitanism and the perils and potentials of a “global” world order today. Reflecting on the role and responsibility of the intellectual and exile in Minima Moralia, Adorno wrote, “It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.”25 I argue that what makes Grosz’s work in the United States of particular significance is precisely its unhomeliness. Dislocated in space and time—​caught between emigration and exile, between his German past and the American future of which he was a part—​Grosz’s life and art offer a unique vantage point from which to explore the potentials and limits of universalist thinking and, in particular, the distinctly modern American universalism that he experienced as it came to the fore at this time. I maintain that his work after 1933 exposes the manner in which that modern universalism oftentimes obscured the complexities of the very modernity that gave rise to the American Century during and after World War II. The following pages explore this thesis, beginning with the response of Grosz, the German exile community, and the American art world to the sensational events of the Degenerate Art show of 1937.

8

Introduction

1

MAKING AN EXILE CULTURE It may interest you to know that Hitler and the Nazis are making you even more famous by giving you an exhibition in Munich this year. Letter to George Grosz, 24 July 1937

IN JULY 1937, George Grosz received a brief note from abroad telling him of a current display of his works in Germany sponsored by “Hitler and the Nazis.”1 Enclosed was a Paris World-Tribune report on the 19 July unveiling of the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. Grosz’s art appeared there among the more than 650 paintings, drawings, and sculptures by Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, and other leading modernists whose works had been confiscated from German museums and public collections in the preceding weeks. The Degenerate Art show sought to shape viewers’ understanding of the works on display through its unveiling in an unorthodox setting for the presentation of art. Staged in an archaeological institute, not a museum, it encouraged visitors to regard the exhibited objects not as works of art but rather as artifacts of a dead culture. Organizers hung paintings haphazardly on temporary partitions and scattered sculptures carelessly around the galleries. Graffiti-like slogans scrawled on the surrounding walls castigated the works on view as “an insult to German womanhood,” “deliberate sabotage of national defense,” “crazy at any price,” and “nature as seen by sick minds.” The Degenerate Art spectacle brought to political account Hitler’s long-standing negative judgment on modernist art, which he condemned as “spiritual madness” in his autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf (My Struggle) of 1925. For the Nazi leader and others who shared his views, 9

the formal experiment and challenging contents of modernist art were complicit in modernizing social and political changes they held responsible for Weimar Germany’s alleged cultural and spiritual decline. Hitler furthermore insisted that it was the task of a strong leadership to protect the people from modernism’s deleterious effects: “It is the business of the state, in other words, of its leaders, to prevent a people from being driven into the arms of spiritual madness. And this is where such a development would some day inevitably end. For on the day when this type of art really corresponded to the general view of things, one of the gravest transformations of humanity would have occurred: the regressive development of the human mind would have begun and the end would scarcely be conceivable.”2 Under Hitler, the Third Reich assumed this responsibility of cultural leadership. With the staging of the Degenerate Art exhibition it also made plain the regime’s plan to expunge modernist art from the nation’s cultural patrimony. Several outstanding studies have examined the Degenerate Art exhibition, its role in Nazi cultural policy, and its impact on the lives and livelihoods of modernist artists living in Germany.3 The following pages focus instead on responses to the Degenerate Art show in the United States, with specific attention to how reports of the exhibit prompted a turning point in Grosz’s reputation as an exile from the Third Reich. Before 1937, John Dos Passos, Marsden Hartley, and other American commentators had acclaimed Grosz as a victim of political persecution; in the wake of Degenerate Art, however, his fate also took on an aesthetic dimension. As we shall explore, Grosz and his work now became entwined with the plight of an artistic modernism faced with vilification and expulsion from the Hitler regime. This chapter addresses the evolving nature of Grosz’s exile experience as the enormity of events unfolding in Germany began to command world attention. Like Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, and other exiled artists and intellectuals, Grosz confronted the changing expectations of an American public increasingly alarmed by Hitler’s threat. Under the circumstances, he and others of the emigration became evermore intimately identified with their country of origin as observers and critics, and they themselves probed for insight into the country responsible for Nazism. For the exiles, self-reflection led to protracted debate as Grosz and his fellow compatriots weighed the nature of the culture they took themselves to represent. How could the land of poets and thinkers have given rise to such horror? To what extent were the exiles themselves implicated in, if not to blame for, Hitler’s crimes? In public addresses, newspaper columns, and private discussions, members of the emigration debated these questions, including the extent of their responsibility for the Nazi phenomenon and what the times now demanded of them as exponents of Germany’s tragedy. As we shall see, these debates concerning Germany and the Germans had a palpable impact on Grosz’s paintings and drawings beginning in the mid-1930s. Later in the 1930s, and especially with the outbreak of World War II, prominent voices in the exile community exhorted an end to American neutrality and the country’s long-standing reluctance to become embroiled in foreign conflict. This chapter explores Grosz’s controversial role in these efforts. It concludes with a discussion of how his art and life both aided and resisted exile attempts to promote a “better” Germany worth defending to an isolationist America poised on the brink of entry into World War II. 10

Making an Exile Culture

The Persecuted Modernist Under the headline “Modernism Is Now Verboten,” New York Times reporter Benedict Nyson described the Degenerate Art exhibit as the “passing of an era” in which modernist art of the Weimar Republic was now officially expunged from German cultural life.4 Nyson also told of the first Great German Art Exhibition, which opened in Munich on 18 July 1937, the day before Degenerate Art. In stark contrast to the makeshift installation accorded the modern works shown at the city’s archaeological institute, the Great German Art Exhibition opened with a week of celebration and parades in honor of German culture. It also served to inaugurate the spacious galleries of the newly opened House of German Art. Designed by Hitler’s first state architect, Paul Ludwig Troost, the modernized classicism of the structure programmatically linked the cultural achievements of the Third Reich to those of ancient Greece and the origins of Western civilization. Planning and construction of this first monumental building project of the Nazi regime began in 1933 shortly after Hitler was appointed chancellor. Inside the House of German Art’s light-filled interior spaces, the first Great German Art Exhibition showcased paintings, sculptures, and drawings by over five hundred state artists whose works served as examples of the “healthy national art” now favored by the führer.5 Unlike their modernist counterparts, works in the Great German Art show followed academic standards of naturalism in the rendering of form and space. They also adhered to subject matter that celebrated the German nation, its history, and its land. Nazi cultural functionaries deemed this art diametrically opposed to the “degenerate” works they condemned. They also promoted this patriotic art as more ennobling for and intelligible to the German people, for whom they now claimed to speak. The New York Times article announcing recent events in the German art world illustrated for its readers the difference between Nazi Germany’s “forbidden” and “approved” art by juxtaposing Grosz’s large-scale painting Eclipse of the Sun (1926) with Hitler’s Old Abbey at Messines (1914) (figure 3). The formal complexity and critical content of Grosz’s painting suited well the task of showing all that was currently reviled in Hitler’s Third Reich. Among his most ambitious modern history paintings of the Weimar years, the work combines Dadaist caricature and simultaneity with the penetrating verism of the New Objectivity. It also represents one of the last pieces in which Grosz foregrounded the assault on the church, state authority, and capitalist exploitation, which had motivated much of his art as the German Communist Party’s leading artist of the early 1920s. Eclipse of the Sun emerged from the fragile period of stability that marked Germany’s post–​ World War I economic recovery, which was enabled by the American-sponsored Dawes Plan in 1924. The work provides a virtual compendium of the signs, symbols, and debased physiognomies that populated many of Grosz’s politicized satiric illustrations of the period, beginning with its unflattering portrayal of the rotund president of the Weimar Republic, General Paul von Hindenburg (figure 4). Grosz depicts the general presiding over a meeting of headless ministers. Arrayed on the table before him is a bloodied sword and a small cross painted the nationalist colors of black, gold, and red. This unholy alliance of church, state, and militarism is joined by big capital in the guise of the top-hatted industrialist who whispers in Hindenburg’s ear. As a harbinMaking an Exile Culture

11

FIGURE 3. George Grosz, Eclipse of

the Sun, 1926; and Adolf Hitler, Old Abbey at Messines, 1914, in the New York Times, 25 July 1937.

12

FIGURE 4. George

Grosz, Sonnenfinsternis (Eclipse of the Sun), 1926. Oil on canvas, 207 × 182.5 cm.

ger of apocalypse, an American dollar sign blocks out the rays of the sun and casts the work’s fragmented pictorial space into darkness. A feeding trough that doubles as a ballot box “stuffed” with papers balances precariously on a plank at the table’s edge. The blinkered donkey of the German electorate threatens to upend the plank as it stands poised to feed from the trough. In this scathing vision of the republic teetering on the verge of collapse, Eclipse of the Sun assailed Weimar’s era of stability as a contrived fiction promulgated by American capital and a corrupt German order beholden to militarism, big industry, and religion. By contrast, Hitler’s Old Abbey at Messines communicates the formal restraint and patriotic message that were then expected of German art. The work dates from Hitler’s time as an enlisted infantryman and portrays the charred remainder of a Belgian town captured by the Germans from the British in 1914. Several of Hitler’s watercolors from this period were exhibited and published between 1935 and 1937 as part of propaganda efforts to assert the führer’s patriotic service during World War I.6 In 1935, Time magazine noted one of the first of these exhibits when it reported on a small show in Munich featuring five of Hitler’s “competent” watercolors.7 Time also informed Making an Exile Culture

13

readers of the German leader’s long-standing interest in the arts, including his unsuccessful attempt to enroll in the Vienna Kunstakademie in 1907. Life magazine expanded on Hitler’s artistic exploits the following year with a two-page exposé featuring color reproductions. Among them was Old Abbey at Messines, which the journal praised for its “remarkable flow and feeling.”8 These restrained yet favorable assessments of Hitler’s art typified the increasingly well-disposed tenor of American mainstream media overall as the new Nazi regime moved beyond its time of transition to power and began consolidating its control over political and public life in Germany. This response differed from the period immediately following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, when major U.S. newspapers carried front-page stories detailing the Third Reich’s crackdown on its political enemies. Headlines also drew attention to the regime’s persecution of Jews, which included not only sadistic acts of violence and public humiliation but also the enactment of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service in April 1933, which barred Jews and political undesirables from civil service. These reports unleashed large-scale demonstrations across the United States that protested escalating violence and, in particular, the worsening plight of Germany’s Jews.9 Negative press abated in the United States after an address of May 1933 in which Hitler asserted his peaceful intentions and willingness to enter into a nonaggression pact.10 Among those reassured by the speech was syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann, whose highly influential commentaries for the New York Times and other news outlets helped quell public concern over turmoil in the new Germany. According to him, the country’s nationalistic fervor, militarism, and punitive economic measures exacted against sectors of its citizenry (that is, Jews and other undesirables) could be traced back to legitimate grievances over the stringent terms of the Treaty of Versailles.11 Imposed on a defeated Germany in 1919 by the victorious powers, the treaty demanded German disarmament and the payment of reparations, which had pushed the nation to the brink of economic collapse in the early years of the Weimar Republic. Most major newspapers agreed with Lippmann that the regime would resume normalcy once the upheavals of its transition to power had settled down.12 In a letter to Wieland Herzfelde of January 1934, Grosz too registered that initially unfavorable responses of the American public to Hitler had quickly subsided: “And after he gave such pretty speeches about peace, people don’t find him quite so bad anymore—​one has simply gotten used to his gaping mouth and small, comic moustache.”13 Moreover, his anti-Semitism appeared to be little more than part of a general growth in anti-Semitism that prevailed “everywhere” at the time. In any case, Grosz observed, the media had already turned back to headlines about kidnappings and other lurid events that better satiated the American desire for sensationalism.14 This generally quiescent response to Hitler’s political activity in the American press and public opinion was matched by the favorable response to his art that appeared in the pages of Time and Life magazines in 1935 and 1936, as noted earlier. Hitler’s activities and status as an artist figured differently in discussions that took place within the German emigration and anti-fascist resistance, however.15 Naïve optimism among the exiles gave rise to early reports that focused on Hitler’s mediocrity, laziness, and underachieving character. These deficiencies were epitomized 14

Making an Exile Culture

for some by the führer’s fruitless attempt to enter art school and the unremarkable nature of his brief forays into landscape and postcard painting during World War I. Bertolt Brecht, who fled Germany immediately after the Reichstag fire, lampooned Hitler’s failed artistic aspirations in his “Anstreicherchoräle” (Housepainter Anthems), which he shared with Grosz in August 1934. These anthems satirized the Nazi leader as a mere housepainter of paltry creative achievement whose fundamental incompetence was certain to bring the Third Reich to a quick end. Grosz wrote back to his long-time friend thanking him for his anthems and expressing his delight in Brecht’s “brilliant” mockery of Hitler.16 Forced into exile for his stature as one of Weimar Germany’s preeminent left-wing theater directors, Brecht fled from Hitler, first through Prague, Vienna, Switzerland, and Paris. He eventually settled on the island of Fyn, near Svendborg, Denmark, where he was to remain for the next six years.17 In exile, he abandoned neither his commitment to revolutionary Marxism nor his belief in an eventual return to a post-Hitler Germany. For his part, Grosz found it impossible to share his friend’s political outlook and any optimism about the regime’s limited viability that Brecht’s “Housepainter Anthem” satires appeared to indulge. Brecht’s perspective in this regard accorded with that of Herzfelde and others of Grosz’s Marxist friends in exile who remained committed to the revolutionary worker’s movement that Grosz by 1934 had long since disavowed. For him, the ultimate failure of the German masses to resist Hitler’s rise to power had proven such faith in the redemptive power of the working class misplaced. Much to the dismay of many in the emigration during this period, he made his contrary views known by repeatedly and often belligerently insisting that Hitler was in fact not only precisely the leader the German people desired but also the one they deserved. Herzfelde remained undaunted by Grosz’s cynicism, however, and was joined by others who made several attempts to solicit his contribution to various anti-fascist publication efforts in the early years of the Hitler regime. But Grosz typically refused such overtures, noting that his revolutionary art of the 1920s had done nothing to stop Nazism’s triumph. Referring to the fate of his portfolios and illustrated volumes in the book-burning campaigns that inaugurated Hitler’s assumption of power, Grosz insisted that his “unburnable” works remained those that hewed to no political line but instead confronted “military brutality” and the grimacing face of a humanity capable of such horror.18 In a letter of June 1934, he confessed to his friend and former publisher that the ongoing threat of dictatorship and war confirmed his skepticism about the efficacy not only of organized political struggle but also of his own politically engaged art.19 Grosz’s deepening pessimism appeared borne out by rapid changes in Germany. These included the bloody Night of the Long Knives putsch of June 1934, which eliminated Ernst Röhm and other leaders of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary SA (Sturmabteilung) as perceived threats to Hitler’s hold on power. In March 1935, the regime also reinstituted the military draft in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. At the Nuremberg Party Rally that September, Hitler announced the so-called Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of their citizenship and prohibited “race mixing” between Jews and “Aryan” Germans. The following year began with another infraction of the Treaty of Versailles when Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland, a territory ordered demilitarized by the victorious powers following World War I. Making an Exile Culture

15

FIGURE 5. George Grosz, Art Is Eternal, in Interregnum, 1936. Lithograph, 19.5 × 29.1 cm.

This darkening news convinced Grosz that war in Europe was imminent.20 He summarized his current views with the publication of his lithographic portfolio Interregnum, which appeared in 1936. The portfolio served, first and foremost, to erase any lingering doubts about his retreat from his communist commitments of the past.21 In a letter to Herzfelde of 1935, Grosz remarked, “all USA papers compare Stalin with Hitler” as part of an emergent totalitarian thesis to which he too now subscribed.22 Particularly after Stalin began his purge of political opponents in the Moscow Show Trials of 1936, commentators increasingly elided distinctions between Nazism and Communism and condemned both as diametrically opposed to the values of American liberal democracy.23 Accordingly, several of Interregnum’s sixty-four images portrayed Nazism as simply another face of communism by rendering the two systems as mirror images of each other. Other works in Interregnum, such as Art Is Eternal, expressed Grosz’s conviction about the futility of art in the face of war and these forbidding totalitarian powers (figure 5). The image shows the diminutive figure of an artist precariously suspended between two chairs occupied by the colossal figures of Nazism and communism, which flank the artist at either side. Grosz’s misanthropic attitude toward the masses surfaces in other plates of the portfolio that configure groups of workers and storm troopers mimicking one another’s actions as they fall into lock-step behind the banners of dictatorial repression. The remaining drawings of Interregnum unfold a catalogue of pettiness, exploitation, and unspeakable brutality unleashed in a world dominated by the twin forces of communism and Nazism and enabled by those subjected to their rule. The importance of this portfolio to Grosz’s subsequent American production should not be underestimated. It served not only as the last major portfolio of his career but also as a reservoir 16

Making an Exile Culture

FIGURE 6. George

Grosz, So Cain Killed Abel, in Interregnum, 1936. Lithograph, 21.5 × 28.2 cm.

of reflections to which he repeatedly returned. As we shall see, Grosz reworked several of Interregnum’s images into full-scale allegorical oil paintings in the coming years in ways that calibrated his changing responses to the drama of his historical moment. Of particular importance in this regard is plate number 50 of the portfolio, titled So Cain Killed Abel (figure 6). As will be described in chapter 2, this work later reemerged in dramatically altered form as Cain, or Hitler in Hell (1945), the most significant oil painting of Grosz’s World War II career. In the painting’s precursor, the Cain drawing from Interregnum, Grosz adopts some of the mocking attitude toward Hitler that circulated inside and outside the exile community during the early years of the Nazi regime. However, unlike Brecht’s “Housepainter Anthems,” which ridiculed the führer on the basis of his failed artistic aspirations, Grosz’s image takes aim at Hitler’s low-rank infantry status during World War I. So Cain Killed Abel depicts Hitler as a hapless, perspiring corporal. The drum on which he sits recalls Hitler’s role as the propaganda leader, or “drummer,” of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) in 1920, the year before he became the party’s chairman. Allegorized as Cain from the fourth book of Genesis, Grosz’s beleaguered Hitler mops his brow with one hand as he clutches a limp bunch of flowers in the other. With his rifle propped against his shoulder, he turns away from the body of his brother Abel, who lies face down in the mud beside him. A barbed-wire perimeter and an armed sentry guard protect crenellated and gabled structures in the background from the scene of Hitler’s murderous act. Like Cain, he is cast out for his unspeakable crime and condemned to a life of permanent exile from the social order to which he belongs. Recalling the Röhm putsch and the flagrant attacks on Jews and political opponents that had Making an Exile Culture

17

become a staple of everyday life under Hitler, Grosz’s caricature summarizes events of the time in Germany as little more than a senseless and pathetic act of fratricide. The sense and purposefulness of Hitler’s malevolence soon contradicted Grosz’s satiric portrayal of the Nazi leader, however. His imperialist intentions became clearer with Germany’s formation of the Axis alliance with Italy and the signing of an anti-Comintern pact with Japan in 1936. Under the circumstances, whatever early illusions Grosz and the emigration may have entertained concerning the Nazi leader’s humble origins and bumbling incompetence began to fade. Moreover, the staging of the Degenerate Art show in 1937 established Hitler’s attitude toward art as part of a new and sharpened understanding of his threat inside and outside the exile community. The regime’s radicalized policy on the arts announced to the world at large that its political and militarist designs would also include the conquest of German culture itself. Observers also noted with alarm the extent to which Hitler had assembled an unprecedented mass media juggernaut of radio, film, and print journalism through which to propagate his perspective on art among the German populace.24 Meanwhile, the emigration contended especially with the claim that Nazism’s cultural blandishments already had on the allegiance of some leading artists and intellectuals inside Germany. Grosz’s friend Gottfried Benn was, for a time, among those seduced by Hitler’s promise of German cultural renewal, as were Martin Heidegger and Emil Nolde, among others. Though twenty of Grosz’s paintings and graphics were held up for pillory in the Degenerate Art exhibit, Eclipse of the Sun, which was featured in Benedict Nyson’s New York Times commentary on the event, was not among them.25 The work’s reproduction, along with Hitler’s watercolor, nonetheless helped to solidify in visual terms the contrast between “forbidden” modernism and the “approved” academicism now on offer in the Nazi regime. Before the unveiling of the Degenerate Art show, Grosz’s new American audience had acclaimed him as an early anti-fascist on the basis of his incendiary art of the Weimar years. After the opening of the exhibit, he also came to exemplify the culture of artistic experiment forced into exile by Hitler. By then, however, Eclipse of the Sun, which Grosz brought with him to New York in 1933, had languished out of public view for four years as part of a creative past he disavowed.26 Moreover, the new direction that soon became evident in his art bore no resemblance to the persecuted modernism that was now associated with his name.

The Turn to German Tradition In 1936, Grosz and his family relocated from Bayside to Douglaston, on Long Island. The move inaugurated a period of intense artistic introspection for Grosz that continued through the next several years. The following year, he won a Guggenheim fellowship, as did the American social realist painters William Gropper and Joe Jones and other awardees in science and the arts.27 The Guggenheim gave Grosz national recognition, greater financial stability, and time to devote to his art free of his teaching obligations at the Art Students League. The award was also renewed in 1938. The New York Times announced the renewal in terms that underscored the award’s height-

18

Making an Exile Culture

FIGURE 7. George Grosz,

Still Life with Mexican Hat and Mask, 1936. Oil on canvas, 64.8 × 50 cm.

ened meaning in light of Grosz’s status as an “exiled German painter” whose work had recently been excoriated in Munich “as an example of ‘degenerate’ art.”28 Grosz retreated to the solitude of his studio and abandoned the gentle watercolor caricatures of New York social types that had resulted from sojourns through the streets of Manhattan and Harlem during his first years in the city. He surrounded himself instead with handmade brushes, pigments, papers, and canvas as he dedicated his art to exploring old master techniques. He filled the walls of his studio with reproductions of works by Rogier van der Weyden, Matthias Grünewald, and other exemplars of the northern medieval and Renaissance traditions. His subject matter became more intimate, resulting in sensitive charcoal drawings of his children, loving portraits of his wife, Eva, and renderings of her in the nude. Studio props—​hats, carnival masks, wicker baskets, bottles, and pieces of colorful fabric—​populated his canvases devoted to lavish still life explorations of color and texture (figure 7). Further, in the summer of 1937, Grosz and his Making an Exile Culture

19

FIGURE 8. George

Grosz, Draped Dummy, 1936. Charcoal on paper, 63.1 × 48.2 cm.

family vacationed for the first time in Cape Cod, and they retreated there regularly through 1945. From these visits, he produced an extensive body of drawings and watercolors that explored the region’s beaches, wind-swept dunes, and gnarled plant life. Macabre elements also entered Grosz’s artistic contemplations at this time, including drawings devoted to a Grimm’s fairy-tale world of witches, spiders, and predatory vultures. The macabre surfaced as well in a series of grotesque and unsettling drapery studies for which he used a mannequin crudely fashioned from linen.29 Grosz carefully recorded the makeshift dummy’s deformities with an exacting draftsmanship that detailed its missing head, awkwardly formed hands, riveted torso, and puckered genitalia (figure 8). Such works abandoned the graphic abbreviations of caricature in favor of academic drawing techniques that recalled Grosz’s training at the Dresden Academy in the pre–​World War I years. In some cases, he used these drawings as pre-

20

Making an Exile Culture

liminary studies for oil paintings, a medium that he turned to once again for the first time since his departure from Berlin. Grosz’s Guggenheim application indicated his desire to use a period of independent work for study of early modern Italian frescoes, particularly those of Orcagna, Michelangelo, and Giotto. He wrote that their engagement with themes of war and hell suggested “a very close relationship between the present turmoil in the world, and the things which were in the artist’s mind in those days.”30 His letter to the Guggenheim Foundation thus rehearsed programmatic statements of the late Weimar years in which he expressed a similar interest in the relationship between artistic tradition and periods of upheaval. In 1931, he contributed an essay to Paul Westheim’s monthly art journal Das Kunstblatt on this subject, titled “Among Other Things, a Word for German Tradition.” His discussion of German tradition formed part of a round table devoted to the question of art’s relevance in an era increasingly overshadowed by economic collapse and political turmoil. His contribution decried interest in the example of French art and absorption in formal problems at the expense of socially engaged content evident in art produced by certain factions of the German avant-garde. He also argued that such artistic retreat from the world provided no model for German artists confronted with the complexity of their time. Grosz exhorted his fellow artists to turn instead to the German tradition of Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Brueghel, and other Northern Renaissance masters in their efforts to make an art of consequence to the crises of their own unsettled age. Grosz’s Kunstblatt essay was careful to distinguish between the promotion of Northern Renaissance tradition and the völkisch nostalgia advocated at the time by Paul Schultze-Naumberg and other nationalist ideologues. Contrary to the placid nineteenth-century romanticism preferred by the German right, Grosz looked instead to the Northern Renaissance example of Bosch and Brueghel for traces of historic rupture similar to the “new Middle Ages” of waning humanism that beset the late Weimar years.31 Probing the nature of mysticism, torment, and human failing, Bosch and Brueghel’s imagery also charted a northern, Germanic path to the modern world that Grosz believed history now charged German artists to explore and illuminate. A half decade later and settled in New York, Grosz returned to his own injunction of 1931 for the first time since his arrival in the United States. His engagement with German history and tradition contradicted his current image as a persecuted modernist from Hitler’s Third Reich. However, it resonated at the same time with a similar turn to the past that characterized the work of Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bertolt Brecht, Stefan Zweig, and other German writers of the literary emigration during this period.32 This artistic retrospection continued patterns of endeavor that many, like Grosz, had begun in the later 1920s as part of the New Objectivity movement.33 Engagement with the past then served as a mode of critically engaging with the causes and consequences of an increasingly threatening present. After 1933, such meditations became only more urgent as the exiles found themselves contending with developments unfolding in the Nazi regime. As soon became plain, Hitler too was bent on reclaiming history, but for the dramatically different purpose of fashioning the German past to suit the future order of his Thousand Year Reich. Making an Exile Culture

21

As it had in the late Weimar years, the Northern Renaissance once again became the specific touchstone of Grosz’s historical consciousness. Poised between medieval mysticism and the enlightenment of the modern age, this period functioned for him as an allegory of the tensions between reason and unreason that characterized the German present. Bosch’s and Brueghel’s hellish red palettes and tormented sensibility surface in a number of apocalyptic landscapes Grosz produced during this period. Among the first is Polarity (1936), a canvas that captured Grosz’s growing conviction that in life “construction and destruction always go hand in hand.”34 Accordingly, the image relegates the engineering marvels of the Queensboro Bridge and the skyscrapers of Manhattan to little more than faintly perceptible traces amid the glowing maelstrom of smoke, fire, and water in the lower right corner of the composition (figure 9). Northern Renaissance precedents also made their way into a series of self-portraits Grosz produced between 1936 and 1938. Most notable is Remembering, which he completed in 1937 (figure 10). The work collapsed past and future into a traumatic present by invoking Grosz’s experience of World War I as a second world war loomed on the horizon.35 Accordingly, he depicts himself huddled amid the smoking timbers of a crumbling, burned-out building as he clutches a thin trench coat around his hunched shoulders. One figure helps another to safety behind him, leaving Grosz alone and abandoned in the foreground of the scene with no assurance of return to the familiarity of a life that now lay in ruins. The artist’s detailed rendering of his sunken eyes, averted gaze, and deeply furrowed brow underscores the painting’s theme of profound psychological trauma and impenetrable loss. The torment captured in Remembering was likely inspired by the increasingly harrowing stories of Grosz’s friends and loved ones, some of whom were still trapped inside Germany while others were scattering into exile. The self-portrait’s bleak tenor becomes all the more apparent when compared with a portrait photograph of Grosz from 1928 on which Remembering was likely based (figure 11). The photo was taken atop his parents-in-law’s house on Savignyplatz in Berlin. The crumbling timbers depicted in the painted self-portrait find their origin in the low brick wall on which Grosz sits in the photograph. The photo captures him in a moment of casual assuredness, leaning forward with his elbows resting in his lap as he squints into the camera lens. In Remembering, his huddled form and averted gaze emphasize instead the painting’s temporally disoriented and psychologically disorienting structure. The artist renders himself not as though in mirror reflection or with the certainty of the camera eye but rather as an “other” who looks away as his existence becomes narrated by and subject to Grosz’s artistic scrutiny. Remembering invokes a Western convention of self-portraiture that since the Renaissance has served as a marker of artistic mastery not only of the oil painting medium but also of the self. Grosz’s disturbed self-portrait pointedly challenges the coherence of that convention in its psychic doubling and refusal of such self-mastery. In other works of this period, including Self-Portrait (1937) (figure 12) and Myself and the Barroom Mirror (1937) (figure 13), Grosz similarly depicts himself looking sidelong into mirrors and through fractured planes to suggest a self that has become progressively decentered and oblique. By 1937, the American life that had grown pleasantly familiar to Grosz during his first years 22

Making an Exile Culture

FIGURE 9. George Grosz,

Polarity/Apocalyptic Landscape, 1936. Oil on canvas, 50.5 × 61 cm.

FIGURE 10. George Grosz, Remembering, 1937. Oil on canvas, 73 × 93 cm.

23

FIGURE 11. George Grosz on

rooftop of his parents-inlaw’s house, Savignyplatz 5, Berlin, 1928. FIGURE 12. George Grosz,

Self-Portrait, 1937. Charcoal on paper, 63.4 × 48.1 cm.

24

FIGURE 13. George Grosz,

Myself and the Barroom Mirror, 1937. Oil on canvas, 76.7 × 64 cm.

in New York became progressively distant for him. Meanwhile, his German past was evermore painfully and inescapably present. Current events in Germany had indeed rendered the émigré an exile and a stranger in his new home. Those same events also estranged him from the internalized verities of a now discredited German culture and tradition. Grosz configures this desperate sense of displacement by portraying himself in Remembering not as an exile but more specifically as a refugee: as one reduced to the clothes on his back, severed from his place of origin, and bereft of the exile’s vision of a future return.

The Exile Community Organizes Grosz put the finishing touches on Remembering in April 1937. In July, his friend Hermann Borchardt arrived in New York thanks to the efforts of Grosz, Brecht, and others to secure his release from the concentration camp at Dachau.36 Borchardt had gone to teach in Minsk in 1934, where he joined other specialists and technicians invited to work in the USSR in the early 1930s.37 With Hitler’s assumption of power came suspicion of German foreign nationals, however. Making an Exile Culture

25

Borchardt was therefore soon expelled from the Soviet Union and sent back to Germany. There, he landed in Dachau, where his Jewish ethnicity and affiliation with communist circles put him in special peril. His brutal treatment in the camp resulted in the mutilation of his right hand and a persistent problem with nervous tremors.38 Safe in New York, he found refuge in Grosz’s home. Grosz worked to establish contacts and employment for Borchardt as he grappled with his traumatic experience and tried to adapt to his changed circumstances. Thomas Mann also arrived in New York in the spring of 1937 with his wife, Katia, for his third visit to America prior to his exile to the United States in 1938. Grosz and Mann had met before, first in Berlin in 1930 and then in New York in 1934, when Mann was on tour to promote the English translation of his Tales of Jacob. Grosz wrote of his 1934 encounter with Mann in a letter to his friend Ulrich Becher, a playwright from his former artistic circle who was then living in Austria.39 He began by acknowledging receipt of Becher’s recent account in which he described the brutal murder of the German Jewish anarchist writer Erich Mühsam in the Oranienburg concentration camp.40 Against the backdrop of this Nazi “bestiality” done to such a “completely harmless, idealistic anarchist,” Grosz’s encounter with Mann had provoked in him little more than exasperation. The celebrated German writer had joined the ranks of the politically naïve, Grosz concluded, especially with regard to his fervent belief in the German masses. Naïve too was his conviction that the Nazi phenomenon would be short lived: “I recently had lunch with Tom Mann. . . . Yes, it was very interesting. Tom is made for writing books, not revolutionary politics. He thinks Hitler won’t remain in power much longer. I believe he’ll last longer than many assume—​carried by the love of his German subjects, heavy industry, the glorious army, and the efficient Gestapo.”41 Grosz also maintained that the same masses in which Mann placed his faith would never have any use for the legacy of Goethe and Schiller that Mann so earnestly continued to defend and uphold. In this regard, Grosz’s dismissive reaction to Mann in 1934 deviated little from the long-standing enmity that existed between Grosz’s radicalized artistic circle and the German writer during the Weimar years. Since the publication of his Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man) in 1918, Mann had acquired a reputation inside and outside the German left as a political conservative and cultural elitist. His controversial text had defended Germany’s authoritarian militarist leadership and its prosecution of World War I. He insisted that the war had been necessary to preserve German Kultur and its towering achievements in the arts and letters against the leveling effects of a democratizing Western Zivilisation. After the war and the collapse of the German monarchy, he continued to maintain his reservations about democracy as an appropriate political form for the German people.42 Mann’s politics were undergoing significant change at the time he and Grosz encountered each other in New York, however. His international renown as Germany’s leading author had continued to grow throughout the Weimar years, culminating in 1929 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. By then, deepening economic crisis and mounting political polarization had prompted him to reevaluate his earlier views. In his “Appeal to Reason” address, delivered in Berlin in 1930, the formerly “nonpolitical man” summarized his new stance by championing 26

Making an Exile Culture

social democracy as the best safeguard of German culture in an era beset by political extremism of both the left and the right.43 Mann was abroad on a European lecture tour when Hitler assumed power in 1933. He chose not to return to Germany and instead settled in the town of Küsnacht, near Zurich in Switzerland. Unlike his children Klaus and Erika and his brother Heinrich, Mann refrained from taking a public stand against Hitler during the first years of the Nazi regime. His conspicuous silence caused consternation among many in the exile community who repeatedly urged the Nobel laureate to use his international stature for the purpose of rallying opposition to the Third Reich.44 This silence came to an end after the announcement in December 1936 that Mann had been stripped of his German citizenship and his property seized by the regime.45 The revocation of his honorary doctorate at the University of Bonn soon followed. With his ties to Germany forcibly severed, Mann released his essay “I Accuse the Hitler Regime” for circulation in the international press in March 1937. The Nobel laureate announced that recent events had rendered his idealist belief in a necessary separation between art and politics untenable: “In the Word is involved the unity of humanity, the wholeness of the human problem, which permits nobody, today less than ever, to separate the intellectual and artistic from the political and social, and to isolate himself within the ivory tower of the ‘cultural’ proper.”46 He denounced Hitler’s Germany as a betrayal of the true German nation and implored the country’s leadership to rededicate itself to a Europe of peaceful national coexistence. Grosz commented on Mann’s statement just days after it appeared. He wrote derisively once again to his friend Ulrich Becher about the essay’s cultivated restraint and the “belated” character of Mann’s response to the urgent political demands of the moment.47 But Grosz found his negative views quickly sidelined by the outpouring of public support that greeted Mann when he arrived in New York the following month. Interviews, speaking engagements, and national tours rapidly established him as the recognized leader of the German emigration in the United States. Alvin Johnson, head of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of the New School for Social Research in New York, was among the first to offer Mann a lecture invitation.48 Johnson’s “University in Exile” at the New School had provided a home since 1933 for some of the thousands of scholars deprived of their teaching positions under the Nazi regime.49 A second prominent exile institution, the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, also embraced Mann on his arrival. The guild was established in 1935 by the German journalist and politician Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein, who was an early and outspoken critic of Hitler. He and his wife, Princess Helga Maria von Schuylenburg, fled with their daughters after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor and immigrated first to Austria and England before coming to the United States. Upon his arrival, Löwenstein sought the backing of luminaries in the Hollywood film industry in his quest to bring Hitler’s crimes to world attention.50 He also worked to build support for his guild, which provided financial aid and intellectual community for exiled writers and artists in the United States and abroad. The guild tirelessly promoted the universal validity of Germany’s contribution to world civilization over and against the perversion of German culture then on offer in the Third Reich. Indeed, Making an Exile Culture

27

Löwenstein envisioned his organization as the embodiment of this “other Germany” of enlightened culture and sought to raise international alarm over its imminent extinction under Hitler. In its founding charter, the guild declared its commitment to upholding German tradition “and the true spirit of Germany as expressed by such writers as Lessing, Kant, Schiller and Goethe.” To that end, the organization’s ultimate aim was to help overthrow the Nazi regime and return the exiles to their rightful home as the authentic bearers of Germany’s culture.51 In the meantime, it provided material assistance to Heinrich, Erika, and Klaus Mann, as well as Sigmund Freud, Lion Feuchtwanger, Ernst Toller, and many other leading figures in American exile and abroad. Thomas Mann became a member of the guild’s board shortly after his arrival in New York. Mann’s work with Johnson’s and Löwenstein’s organizations dramatically raised the public profile of the exile community. His changed circumstances also launched Mann on the difficult task of attempting to dismantle the well-entrenched isolationist sentiment that dominated American political culture before 1941. He argued that U.S. entry into the war was necessary to the defense not merely of European culture. Rather, world civilization as a whole now relied on America to safeguard it against the destructive forces of barbarism and tyranny. After a brief return to Europe, Mann ended up once again in the United States in February 1938, where he would remain until his return to Switzerland in 1952. Greeted by the press as he arrived in New York, Mann announced, “Where I am, there is Germany. I carry my German culture in me.” Exile had become for him that of German culture itself, as it too faced persecution and expulsion under Hitler.52 Early 1938 found Grosz socializing with leading members of the exile community, including his friend and patron Felix Weil, founder of the Frankfurt School for Social Research. Weil had begun supporting Grosz’s career with a regular stipend beginning in 1920, a practice that continued after Grosz moved to New York in 1933. An entry in Grosz’s diary records a pleasant dinner at the Park Vendome with Weil, Karl Wittfogel, Max Horkheimer, Friedrich Pollock, and Julian Gumperz in late January 1938 as the Frankfurt School for Social Research was in the process of reconstituting itself in exile at Columbia University.53 Under Horkheimer’s directorship, the school was then formulating its wide-ranging historical and sociological study of anti-Semitism. It also began its critical analyses of German culture before the Third Reich, which endeavored to understand the authoritarian and anti-Semitic roots of Nazism in German society.54 Grosz made other entries in his diary in 1938 that record the growing numbers of friends and acquaintances from his former artistic circle in Berlin who were making their way into American exile. Among them was his former Dada collaborator, Richard Huelsenbeck, for whom Grosz tried in 1934 to arrange a position at Alvin Johnson’s New School.55 Grosz’s diary also noted lectures at the New School by Bertolt Brecht’s collaborator, the composer and committed Communist Party artist Hanns Eisler, who fled Germany immediately following Hitler’s assumption of power.56 After stops elsewhere in Europe and in Latin America, Eisler obtained a permanent visa for the United States in 1938 and began conducting composition courses at the New School. Grosz also made note of the “bad news” coming out of Germany concerning what was left of

28

Making an Exile Culture

his formal ties to his country of origin.57 Nazi functionaries seized his Berlin bank account and property belonging to his wife, Eva, in February of that year.58 His German citizenship, which had been unofficially revoked in early 1933, was legally nullified in March 1938. This action prompted a renewed round of vitriol against him in the Nazi press. Writing to John Heartfield in London, Grosz confessed his mordant pleasure in knowing that Hitler’s minions still regarded him as the country’s “Number One: Cultural Bolshevist.”59 March 1938 also marked the Anschluss, Germany’s annexation of Austria. Newspaper headlines underscored the plight of Austria’s 185,000 Jews who were now certain to swell the ranks of those seeking asylum in the United States and elsewhere. Reports also described Sigmund Freud’s thuggish treatment by Nazi authorities in Vienna, which prompted the psychoanalyst’s flight to exile in London.60 Under the circumstances, Grosz found it all the more impossible to subscribe to redemptive visions of an “other” or “better” Germany then circulating in the exile community. Grosz had occasion to share his current sentiments in a letter of June 1938, which he wrote to his former collaborator Erwin Piscator. Part of Grosz’s leftist artistic circle of the Weimar years, Piscator had solicited his help in 1928 with the staging of an anti-militarist play, The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schwejk, for which Grosz had produced his incendiary caricature of Christ on the cross wearing a gas mask and combat boots. After Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933, Piscator departed for Moscow, where he headed up the International Revolutionary Theater Union. In 1936, he immigrated to Paris. By 1939, he was in New York, where he established the Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research. Steadfast in his leftist convictions, Piscator was among those in the exile community who repeatedly attempted to win Grosz back to his political commitments of the past. He also sought to enlist Grosz’s support for the more radical resolution to Germany’s current nightmare that he and others on the Marxist left began to advance at this time. They did so over and against the social democratic alternative, championed most notably by Thomas Mann in his many public addresses of this period in which he attempted to envision what a post-Hitler Germany might look like. Writing to Piscator in 1938, Grosz refused his friend’s overtures. He also registered his disdain for Piscator’s continued allegiance to Communist Party politics. But neither was he prepared to lend his support to the liberal humanist and social democratic visions embraced by Mann and others. For him, the contentious relationship between communist and social democratic adherents that began to roil the exile community simply and exasperatingly reprised the infighting that had facilitated Hitler’s rise to power in the late Weimar years. Furthermore, both factions still clung to a misguided belief in a Germany worth redeeming, Grosz railed. The only refuge for him now was his art. Life in the United States allowed him the chance not only to start over but also to escape from a German culture he now held in contempt: “Look, Erwin, I tell you, I don’t belong to the patriots à la Mann or Brecht. I only belong to American painting—​and I’m also no ‘better’ German. I can’t ‘see’ any new Germany. . . . NO, dear Erwin, horrible. Bankrupt, broken, debased! One can only do one thing: settle in and work earnestly, that is, begin anew.”61

Making an Exile Culture

29

FIGURE 14. George Grosz, A Piece of My World II (The Last Battalion), 1938. Oil on canvas, 100 ×

140.3 cm.

Looming War Further notations in Grosz’s diary at this time record the Czech crisis and the signing of the Munich Agreement in late September by the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and France’s prime minister Édouard Daladier. The agreement allowed Hitler to annex the Germanspeaking region of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia as part of the Allies’ misguided effort to stem the Third Reich’s imperialist aims. Grosz’s diary entries also include his speculation on the imminence of another world war as he finished A Piece of My World II (The Last Battalion) (figure 14).62 The work depicts a band of bearded, aging warriors marching through a rat-infested landscape dotted with charred and crumbling structures. They wield in their hands the maces, makeshift pitchforks, bayonets, and rifles of wars past and present. One figure leads the way, carrying aloft a tattered standard inscribed with the image of a piece of meat impaled on a fork. Perpetrators and victims, causes and consequences no longer explain the history of human violence in Grosz’s Spenglerian vision. Civilization gives way instead to the brutishness of nature as war becomes nothing more than a ceaseless struggle for food and survival. Echoing the chaotic, forbidding spaces and glowing palettes of Bosch and Brueghel, Last Battalion points to Grosz’s deepening interest at this time not only in Northern Renaissance artistic traditions but also and more specifically in the irrationalist contents of those traditions. Last Battalion departs from the taut surfaces and cleanly delineated forms that characterize Grosz’s Neue Sachlichkeit paintings of the late Weimar years. Its turbulent layers of muddy 30

Making an Exile Culture

FIGURE 15. Karl Hofer,

The Wind, 1937, plate 1 of the Carnegie Institute International Exhibition of Paintings catalogue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1938. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

brown, sickly green, and blood red pigment contribute to the work’s overall sense of extremity. In 1909, Grosz had begun his training at the Dresden Kunstakademie imbued with the values of Prussian militarism. He aspired in those days to become a history painter dedicated to recording the glories of the battlefront. The Last Battalion returns to those youthful ambitions with a savage pessimism that dispenses altogether with the honorific and didactic purposes of the history-painting tradition. By 1938, that tradition had become for Grosz part and parcel of a tragic and inevitable human condition of struggle, violence, and decay. Last Battalion was exhibited for the first time in late 1938 at the Carnegie International Exhibition of Paintings in Pittsburgh. Homer Saint-Gaudens, director of fine arts for the Carnegie Institute (now the Carnegie Museum of Art), summarized the show’s genesis and curatorial vision in the pages of Carnegie Magazine.63 His tour through Europe to solicit artworks for the international had taken him to Vienna, where Nazi flags and German troops were much in evidence. A visit to Munich had exposed him to the artistic repression under way there and was followed by a trip to Berlin in time to see an iteration of the Degenerate Art show. As a rejoinder to these developments, the 1938 international deliberately hosted a plurality of artistic approaches. Saint-Gaudens defined the show in general as a plea for cultural tolerance in an era when such tolerance appeared to be evermore in jeopardy. Special interest at the international attended the work of Grosz and other German artists in response to the Degenerate Art exhibit in Munich of the year before. Jurors awarded top prize to Karl Hofer for his allegorical painting The Wind (1937) (figure 15). Hofer had faced repeated Making an Exile Culture

31

attacks in the Nazi press for his criticism of the regime’s cultural policies and was dismissed from his teaching post at the Berlin Academy in 1934. Eight of his paintings were displayed in the Degenerate Art show.64 The Wind featured the restrained style of semiabstract naturalism characteristic of Hofer’s work during this period. The painting depicts two women who huddle together and clasp their loose draperies about them as they face in the direction of an oncoming gale. Wind whips their hair and clothing as they stand framed against a backdrop of a low and distant landscape dominated by darkening sky. The fragile vulnerability of the two female figures heightens the portentous subject matter of the image in ways that no doubt resonated with current concerns. The award of first prize to Hofer made him the first German artist to be so honored by the Carnegie International in its history.65 Indeed, late 1938 marked a high point of international alarm over events inside Nazi Germany. The regime’s increasingly radicalized policies against the Jews became evident to the world with the so-called Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) of 9 November 1938. The pogrom was sparked by the actions of a German-born Jewish refugee living in Paris who assassinated a German diplomat in the hopes of drawing world attention to Nazi persecution. In retaliation, synagogues throughout Germany were destroyed, and mobs smashed and ransacked some seven thousand stores owned by Jews. Over ninety German Jews were murdered and another thirty thousand German Jewish men were thrown into concentration camps.66 Grosz responded to the Kristallnacht pogrom with a lament of self-loathing recorded in his diary. “Events in Germany disgusting . . . one is ashamed to be a German,” he wrote.67 Grosz was not alone in his sense of revulsion. Extensive news coverage of Kristallnacht prompted a sea change not only in American public opinion but also in government policy. The German-language New Yorker Staatszeitung und Herold, which had earlier defended Hitler, joined a growing press chorus by condemning the Nazi regime.68 President Roosevelt recalled the U.S. ambassador to Germany and pressed for increased defense spending in anticipation of war.69 He now also used his presidential authority to bypass the immigration quota and entrenched public resistance to expanding immigration by easing restrictions on Jews seeking to enter the country. In addition, he moved to extend indefinitely visitor visas held by German and Austrian Jews already in the United States.70 Meanwhile, Roosevelt continued an ineffectual international dialogue on how to provide for the mounting number of refugees, including the large number of Jews among them, who were then desperately seeking refuge abroad.71 A few short weeks after Kristallnacht, Grosz became an American citizen. Reporters covered the registration of the famed exile at the federal court in Brooklyn. In an interview with the New York Times, Grosz attempted to dispel perceptions that all Germans endorsed anti-Semitism. “Many so-called Aryans now in Germany were opposed to the Nazi persecution of the Jews,” he insisted.72 His fresh status as an American citizen was inaugurated with the display of his work at the Whitney Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, which was held in November and December 1938. The new American Grosz was represented by his brooding self-portrait Remembering (1937), a work dedicated to memories of a past from which Grosz’s recent citizenship and formal entrée into the American art world promised to insulate him. 32

Making an Exile Culture

Whatever reassurances Grosz might have anticipated from American citizenship were immediately compromised both politically and economically by the worsening situation in Europe, however. The number of refugees fleeing to the United States grew dramatically following Kristallnacht and the further radicalization of Nazi policies within Germany. German immigration reached its peak in the years 1938 through 1940.73 Fear of fascism abroad became fear of fascism at home as the arrival of those fleeing the Third Reich drew greater attention to the German presence in the United States. Press coverage of Fritz Kuhn’s German American Bund helped to fuel growing anti-German sentiment.74 In 1939, the pro-Nazi group held a rally with speeches praising Hitler at Madison Square Garden, which numbered some twenty thousand participants in the audience.75 Popular fears were further stoked by the April 1939 release of the Hollywood thriller Confessions of a Nazi Spy. The widely reported foiling of a Nazi spy ring in New York City the previous year provided the film’s sensational storyline.76 Such events aroused concern that more Nazi spies might infiltrate the stream of refugees.77 Klaus and Erika Mann attempted to counter these negative perceptions with the publication of their book Escape to Life in 1939. Klaus had immigrated to New York in 1936 and was followed the year after by Erika. In compiling Escape to Life, the two made use of Grosz in their volume’s effort to offer a less threatening image of the exile community to an increasingly wary American public. The first part of Escape to Life, “The European Scene,” detailed the oppressive conditions that drove the exiles from their home. The second, “Exiles in America,” considered the activities of the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom and the many contributions of the exiles to film, literature, music, and the visual arts since their arrival in the United States. The Manns insisted that these exiles represented a “true German culture” categorically opposed to Nazism and committed to values of democracy and freedom.78 The Manns presented Grosz in Escape to Life as an example of the positive assimilation of advanced German art and artists into the culture of the United States. They acknowledged that the misanthropic satirist of the Weimar years was still in evidence from time to time, particularly when Grosz insisted on making unsavory comments (“Hitler—​that’s the man the Germans like”) about the German people and their allegiance to the Nazi regime. But these outbursts had become fewer and further between since his arrival in the United States, the Manns claimed. His new environs had changed Grosz for the better. Now a lyrical landscape painter, “he loves America. Surprising as it may seem, America has softened him,” they wrote.79 Escape to Life’s privileging of Grosz’s landscape work over his self-portraits and historical allegories overlooked the more troubled and troubling dimensions of his recent production. It also brushed aside the Manns’ earlier political conflicts with him in the interest of a new image of the exile community Escape to Life sought to present. In 1936, Klaus Mann joined those on the left who attacked Grosz for his refusal to engage in the Popular Front struggle against fascism and his abandonment of politically engaged art.80 Escape to Life suggested that such political fractiousness among the exiles had now become a thing of the past. A softened presentation of Grosz and his art assisted the Manns in their effort to portray the German exile community as a positive, depoliticized, cultural contribution to an American public increasingly discomfited by its presence. Making an Exile Culture

33

The Manns thus attempted to ameliorate some of the negative cultural politics that confronted the German exile community as its ranks began to swell. But economic factors also took their toll as lingering effects of the Great Depression further worsened conditions for refugees from the Third Reich. In May 1939, Grosz wrote to his friend the writer Walter Mehring, who had recently fled to France in the hopes of eventually making his way to the United States. Mehring spent considerable time in Paris in the 1920s and had managed to establish a literary reputation for himself there. Grosz advised him to remain in France, where he was known, rather than subject himself to the anonymity and hardship that confronted those trying to reestablish themselves in American exile. Most found it nearly impossible to find work and were reduced to taking charity. Moreover, their prospects had only become worse in recent months as their numbers continued to grow.81 Grosz’s own financial outlook became more precarious during this period as public response to his current work floundered. A solo exhibition of his art opened at the Walker Galleries in New York in March 1939. The show featured the full range of Grosz’s recent production, including Last Battalion and a selection of his Cape Cod landscapes, still lifes, and depictions of the female nude. A Time magazine review praised Grosz’s still life and nude studies but was more tentative in its evaluation of the “ruined landscapes” featured in his oil paintings.82 It described Last Battalion as “a grey and dirt-colored allegory of war which, like the Thirty Years War in Europe (1618–​48), lasted so long that men forgot, in disease, starvation and insanity, what they were fighting for.” The grim imagery of such works contrasted with the lighter, more accessible quality of his still life and nude compositions. Time concluded that Last Battalion also harked back to Grosz’s condemnations of militarism during World War I, suggesting that his “ruined landscapes” pointed more toward Grosz’s artistic past than toward a new direction for his art. More damning, however, was the review of Grosz’s Walker Galleries exhibit by Elizabeth McCausland, art critic for the Springfield Sunday Union and Republican newspaper, in Massachusetts.83 McCausland took the opportunity of Grosz’s recent production to render a broader judgment on the German exile community and its responses to Hitler’s escalating menace in Europe. Her impassioned comments, in which she assailed Grosz’s apparent retreat from political engagement in his art, gained a wider art world audience when they were made the subject of an article titled “Citizen or Artist?” which appeared in the Art Digest the following month.84 The impetus behind McCausland’s analysis was a recent speech delivered at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York by the exiled architect and former Bauhaus director Walter Gropius. Gropius spoke in December 1938 in connection with MoMA’s landmark Bauhaus, 1919–​ 1928 exhibition, which introduced American audiences to the high modernist achievements in architecture and design that had emerged at the Bauhaus during the years of Gropius’s leadership of the school. After its founding in 1919, the school became renowned among some and vilified by others, the latter particularly by those of Germany’s nationalist right, for its socially progressive pedigree and ability to attract an international array of leading artists, architects, and designers to its staff. MoMA’s Bauhaus, 1919–​1928 exhibition suppressed these politically controversial aspects of the school in favor of a display that foregrounded its achievements in solely aesthetic terms.

34

Making an Exile Culture

Accordingly, Gropius’s speech to his MoMA audience abstained from political commentary and made plain his current conviction that art has fundamentally nothing to do with politics.85 In her review of Grosz’s Walker Galleries exhibit, McCausland observed that Grosz too had evidently adopted Gropius’s position, given the character of his recent art. This change was for her all the more egregious in the face of Grosz’s recent acquisition of American citizenship. Asking “Shall the artist concern himself only with his art or shall he take part in the wider life of a citizen?” McCausland claimed that his experience of tyranny in Germany demanded from him a special responsibility to use his art in defense of the freedom he now enjoyed in the United States. By contrast, Thomas Mann served McCausland as a positive example of those exiles who had thrown themselves into the struggle to defend American democratic liberties against the threat of dictatorship and war. Grosz’s landscapes and nudes, as well as the relentless pessimism of his painted allegories, offered little of value in this regard. He had surrendered to an “expressionist ideology,” McCausland lamented, and had proven himself more concerned with exploring inner emotions than with making his art of use to the current struggle. The untimeliness of Grosz’s abstinence from politically directed work was thrown into high relief in late 1939 with the opening of the Museum of Modern Art’s Picasso retrospective. The exhibit dominated art press coverage well into 1940 for its display of Guernica, Picasso’s impassioned plea for world attention to the spread of fascism and war in Europe. A despondent note in Grosz’s diary records that none of his works in the Walker Galleries show found a buyer.86 More bad news came in the form of a letter from his patron Felix Weil, who had helped to support Grosz’s career with a monthly stipend. He told Grosz that the amount of the stipend would be reduced, in part because Weil’s own finances were low. He also wanted to direct what he had to those more in need, including others who were struggling in exile or were currently interned in camps.87 Grosz’s response to his declining fortunes was increasing bitterness and estrangement from those he derisively referred to as the exile “elite.” His letters and diaries express his outright jealousy of artistic and intellectual luminaries of the emigration who enjoyed greater support than their fellow exiles from welcoming American institutions and organizations. This support eluded him and others, Grosz complained, who were left to struggle on their own to get by. He also began to view this exile elite as synonymous with a self-congratulatory “other Germany,” confident of its restoration to cultural leadership in Germany after Hitler’s defeat. In a letter to Borchardt, who was also struggling at this time, Grosz described his recent attendance at a lavish cocktail party hosted by Erwin Piscator, who had arrived in New York in January 1939. The fact that Piscator’s comfortable lifestyle and enviable financial “independence” had been made possible by his wife’s fortune did not escape Grosz’s disdainful notice.88 Among the “hundreds of the finest heads in the emigration” in attendance at Piscator’s party were Princess Löwenstein, Hanns Eisler, Lotte Lenya, Ernst Toller, and Felix Weil. Grosz bitterly satirized the “aristocratic” gathering as deluded by the belief they would one day march triumphantly through the Brandenburg Gate as their fellow countrymen welcomed them back with open arms.89 Contrary to Grosz’s ungenerous comments regarding prominent members of the emigration, many among them also struggled to survive within the new and dislocating environment to which Making an Exile Culture

35

they were now subjected. This misapprehension was made poignantly clear by the suicide of Ernst Toller on 22 May 1939. Since his flight to the United States, Toller had emerged as a tireless and courageous voice of the anti-fascist resistance. However, his attempts to find his financial footing and reestablish his career as a writer in exile were repeatedly frustrated. His bouts of depression and decision to take his own life shocked the exile community; it also became emblematic for many of the fragility and tragedy that haunted their efforts to resume their lives amid the disorientation of their changed circumstances. By early 1939, Grosz’s letters, diaries, and experiences thus reflected in personal and embittered terms the political and economic factionalism that compromised attempts to organize the broader German exile community from within. From without, the release of an unabridged edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf of 1924 heightened international alarm and subjected the exiles and their activities to more intensive scrutiny by their American hosts.90 Published by the New School for Social Research, the unexpurgated translation presented a different Hitler to those who had previously underestimated his threat. Commentators and analysts had tended to dismiss the German führer’s notions of racial hegemony and territorial expansion as shallow propagandistic ranting with little import for the regime’s policies. Many also mistook his hatred for the Jews as an incidental, not central aspect of Nazi ideology. By contrast, the new edition of Mein Kampf revealed that such notions were long-standing in Hitler’s plans, methodical, and rooted in political calculation.91

Brother Hitler Against this backdrop of inflamed suspicion regarding Hitler, Germans, and the growing exile population, Esquire magazine featured an essay by Thomas Mann in March 1939 that attempted to address the reality of Hitler’s continued grip on power despite earlier predictions of his short-lived viability. Titled “That Man Is My Brother,” the essay diagnosed the führer’s sway over the German populace by turning to the theme of Hitler as a failed artist. This theme had animated Brecht’s “Housepainter Anthems,” which he shared with Grosz in 1934 and circulated more broadly within the emigration as a satiric assault on the Nazi leader in the early years of his rule. In Mann’s hands, the subject of the führer’s artistic capacities now departed from satire and assumed the gravitas that a darkening situation in Europe demanded of attempts to come to terms with the Hitler phenomenon. Mann’s Esquire essay built on psychoanalytic analyses of Hitler that had appeared in the English-language press in the mid-1930s. Most important among these was a study published by the exiled journalist Konrad Heiden in 1936.92 His Hitler: A Biography described the Nazi leader as a split personality, or “two Hitlers,” whose disturbed psychology placed him at odds with normative society. Heiden explained that Hitler’s psyche was torn between his identity as an underachieving postcard illustrator on the one hand and his thirst for grandiosity and control over the masses on the other. To explain the support that such a disturbed figure enjoyed among the German people, Heiden looked to economic factors and the impact of the Great Depression. These 36

Making an Exile Culture

desperate times had prompted the Germans to identify positively with Hitler as someone who arose from humble origins to unparalleled power. Heiden theorized that the Nazi leader symbolized for them the possibility of one day overcoming their own adverse circumstances.93 In his “Appeal to Reason” address of 1930, Mann had argued, contrary to Heiden, that economic factors alone could not explain the attraction of the German electorate to Nazism in the waning years of the Weimar Republic.94 With the publication of his “That Man Is My Brother” in 1939, Mann expanded on his rejection of Heiden’s economic determinism. He argued that the root of the problem lay not in Germany’s economy but in its vaunted notions of German Kultur, including its legacy of romantic nationalism. According to Mann, contemporary Germans were heir to this nineteenth-century tradition and its cult of creative genius. That cult, in turn, predisposed them to a worshipful regard for Hitler and an egoistic identification with the appeal of a strong leader.95 Moreover, their reverence for German culture in general now served to legitimate the arrogant nationalism that fueled Nazism’s imperialist aims. Mann’s use of the notion of brotherhood to describe his relationship to Hitler in the pages of Esquire recalls Grosz’s So Cain Killed Abel, of 1936, in which he too addressed this theme of kinship. In Grosz’s caricature, however, the story of Cain and Abel served to underscore the criminality of Hitler’s act as a betrayal of fundamental human bonds. So Cain Killed Abel portrayed Hitler, true to the biblical allegory, as a social outcast condemned to permanent exile for his unspeakable crime. By contrast, Mann used the notion of brotherhood to dramatically different ends. Emphasizing familial kinship over fratricide, “That Man Is My Brother” instead used the notion of brotherhood as a means to probe the aberrant as an aspect of—​not a deviation from—​the German culture that had given rise to Hitler. Most startling in this regard were Mann’s observations concerning Heiden’s psychological portrait of Hitler as a disturbed, asocial personality. Such a personality was indeed that of an artist, Mann maintained. Like an artist, Hitler indulged hostility for mainstream culture, idealized power, and longed to shape social reality according to his aesthetic ideals. The Nazi leader was, in short, no mere housepainter but rather an artist in the profoundest and most unsettling sense possible. In Mann’s view, the task that lay before the emigration was to confront their monstrous kinship with Hitler, not only as fellow Germans, but also as fellow artists. He admitted that such a painful process of self-scrutiny was not without peril for the exile community. Like the many Germans—​including notable artists and intellectuals—​who enabled the Nazi regime, they too might abdicate their historical responsibility by “forgetting how to say no” to the powerful seductions of Nazism: “A brother—​a rather unpleasant and mortifying brother. He makes me nervous, the relationship is painful to a degree. But I will not disclaim it. For I repeat: better, more productive, more honest, more constructive than hatred is recognition, acceptance, the readiness to make oneself one with what is deserving of our hate, even though we run the risk, morally speaking, of forgetting how to say no.”96 The German-language version of Mann’s Esquire essay, titled “Bruder Hitler,” appeared simultaneously in Leopold Schwarzschild’s Das neue Tage-Buch, the most influential journal of the international German exile community.97 It soon ignited heated controversy among exiles in the Making an Exile Culture

37

United States and abroad. For many, “Brother Hitler” conjured unthinkable associations between the German exile community and the Nazi phenomenon; it also countered the efforts of those who had worked scrupulously to distance themselves from such associations, especially in a time of escalating anti-German sentiment.98 As war loomed on the horizon, attention shifted in the exile community from resisting fascism to contemplating Germany’s fate in the coming conflict. Though Mann’s “Brother Hitler” implied the capacity of the German people for critical enlightenment, it also suggested the presence of deep-seated cultural inclinations among the German masses that might prove difficult to uproot. Beginning in 1940, Mann worked with the BBC in London to produce broadcasts targeted at Germany that urged German citizens to distance themselves from Hitler and to prove to the world that the terms German and Nazi were not one and the same. Meanwhile, Schwarzschild further fanned the flames of debate concerning the German masses by expressing his own conclusions on the question of the country’s postwar future. His editorial “The Day After” appeared in Das neue Tage-Buch in July 1939. It argued that Germany’s history was one of a weak relationship to democracy as evidenced most recently by the fatal instability of the Weimar Republic. Schwarzschild concluded that Germany would therefore have to be administered by occupying powers after the war. Such administration would last for an indefinite period as it undertook the necessary and painstaking task of weaning the Germans away from their penchant for authoritarianism and educating them in the ways of liberal democracy.99

German Exile and the American Art World As the exile community thus turned its attention to Germany’s fate in a post-Hitler future, the role of German exile art and artists in a rapidly consolidating American vision of that same future became apparent in the spring of 1939. In May, the Museum of Modern Art staged its Art in Our Time show to coincide with the beginning of the New York World’s Fair. Art in Our Time marked MoMA’s tenth anniversary and inaugurated the opening of the museum’s new building on 53rd Street in Manhattan. The exhibit featured a wide-ranging display of American and European modernism dating from the late nineteenth century to the present in painting, sculpture, graphic media, photography, architecture, the industrial arts, and film. In the wake of the Degenerate Art show, Art in Our Time also set forth MoMA’s new understanding of its cultural mission in the face of growing tyranny abroad. In his opening statement, museum director Alfred Barr described the current struggle as one between the innovative pluralism of modernist art championed by MoMA and a backward-looking academicism demanded of artists under the twin dictatorships of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In the case of Soviet Russia, the imposition of socialist realism stemmed from Lenin’s professed dislike for the avant-garde in the early 1920s. In Germany, the recasting of the German art world was similarly beholden to Hitler’s personal taste. His hostility toward modernism had succeeded in degrading an artistic culture that Barr had once ranked as second only to that of France. The MoMA director further excoriated the führer’s academicism for pandering to the lowbrow standards of his party 38

Making an Exile Culture

FIGURE 16. Max Beckmann, Abfahrt (Departure), 1932–​33. Oil on canvas, triptych, left and right panels:

215.5 × 99.5 cm, central panel: 215.5 × 115 cm. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Digital image © 2013 MoMA, NY.

minions and the simmering resentment of those artists whose careers had been eclipsed by the success of modernism in the Weimar years: “In spite of his radical political philosophy Hitler’s taste in art is as reactionary as was that of Lenin in the Russian revolution of twenty years ago. Hitler was at one time a painter of feeble and mediocre academic water-colors—​a fact which seems permanently to have affected his taste. His antipathy toward new forms of art and architecture found a good deal of sympathy among the less cultivated Brown Shirts, as well as among academic artists who seized the opportunity to recover some of their lost prestige.”100 The presence of German modernism at the MoMA show was headlined by Max Beckmann’s triptych Departure, which was completed by the artist in 1933 as Hitler came to power (figure 16). Beckmann had enjoyed international renown as Germany’s leading expressionist painter of the 1920s. In May 1933, he was deprived of his teaching post at the Frankfurt Academy. He and his wife, Mathilde (“Quappi,” as she was known), chose to remain in Germany until 20 July 1937, the day after the Degenerate Art show opened in Munich. They then fled into exile in Amsterdam. Characteristically aloof from politics throughout his career, Beckmann maintained his defense of art’s autonomy from political manipulation, not only by the Nazi regime, but also by German exile groups that attempted to recruit him and his work for their anti-fascist endeavors.101 In the context of the Art in Our Time exhibit, Departure functioned not only as an allegory of exile but also as evidence of MoMA’s important role in an ongoing project of cultural rescue. In the wings of his Departure triptych, Beckmann portrays sadistic tortures that take place in cramped, darkened spaces. The center panel, by contrast, presents an oarsman and a royal family as they sail off into a wide-open blue sea. True to his belief in the separation of art from politics, Making an Exile Culture

39

Beckmann consistently denied any political allegory in this image of leave-taking. The triptych’s style and subject matter nonetheless lent itself to the larger theme of modern art’s flight from tyranny presented by the Art in Our Time exhibit in 1939. Not only artists but also works of art were now to be saved by the United States and given harbor within the museum’s walls. The MoMA catalogue informed viewers of Beckmann’s current status by describing Departure as a symbol of his exile “caused by official disapproval of his art” in Hitler’s Germany.102 MoMA thus capitalized on its defense of modernism in expressly political terms as contributing to the support of democratic freedom against dictatorship. Contrary to the larger political message of the exhibit, a strategy of depoliticization nonetheless characterized Barr’s presentation of Beckmann and works of art by other German modernists in Art in Our Time. This presentation followed Barr’s long-standing curatorial commitment to formalist innovation over and against extra-artistic concerns of political or social engagement. Under Barr’s direction, MoMA first presented German modernism to the New York art world with the staging of its German Painting and Sculpture exhibit in 1931. In the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936) and Bauhaus (1938) exhibits that followed, MoMA continued to integrate German art into its evolving formalist history of modernism. This included expunging socially critical works from the overall presentations of modern German art these shows might otherwise have entailed and downplaying the politicized context that had shaped the emergence and continued practice of modern art in Germany. In Art in Our Time, Dada and its association with leftist politics were therefore notably absent. So too were any exponents of Germany’s New Objectivity movement and its uncomfortable associations with the academic verism dictated by political reaction under the Nazi regime. With its emphasis on psychological interiority, expressionism instead became the depoliticized representative of the whole of Germany’s contribution to the history of modernism.103 Works by Beckmann, Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and other expressionist artists displayed in the Art in Our Time show were praised for their figural distortions and subjective use of color. They were also lauded for their insistence on individual expression and a distinctly German form of inner-directedness rooted in a pathos and melancholy often suggestive of “an intense, even violent, emotional state.”104 Insofar as expressionism’s pathos might be understood to gesture beyond the realm of art, it was only to register the impact of Germany’s troubled history on the personal temperaments of these artists. Their works had now found refuge in MoMA’s collection and continued to serve in exile as their country’s most towering representatives of advanced art. The German art dealer Curt Valentin of the Buchholz Gallery in New York loaned Departure to MoMA for the duration of the Art in Our Time exhibit.105 As records from the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture) reveal, Valentin was one among several art dealers who received authorization from the Nazi government to sell “degenerate art” abroad, with proceeds to return to the Reich. Valentin also served as intermediary for MoMA’s acquisition of five works “exiled” from Hitler’s Germany included in the Art in Our Time show and reproduced in its catalogue.106 The five works were Henri Matisse’s Blue Window (1912), formerly in the collection of the Folkwang Museum in Essen; André Derain’s Valley of the Lot at Vers (1912), from the Cologne Museum; Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Street Scene (1913) and Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s Kneeling Woman 40

Making an Exile Culture

(1911), both from the Berlin National Gallery; and Paul Klee’s Around the Fish (1926), from the Dresden Gallery. Three of these, the Kirchner, Lehmbruck, and Klee works, had been featured in the Degenerate Art exhibit of 1937; all were subsequently purchased at the Gallery Fischer auction of 1939 in Lucerne, Switzerland, where modernist art confiscated under the Third Reich was sold off for revenue to support Hitler’s expansionist war.107 In his radio address to dedicate the opening of the new museum building, President Roosevelt hailed MoMA as a “citadel of civilization.” He praised in particular the museum’s plans for traveling shows devoted to contemporary developments in architecture, industrial design, painting, film, and other areas of creative endeavor. Roosevelt linked these plans to the legacy of the Federal Art Project, launched under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s. Like this federal program, MoMA’s exhibitions would help to elevate the aesthetic standards of the people while ensuring broad public access to art in the spirit of the country’s democratic ideals.108 The president also made plain how current events had cemented the connection between aesthetic experiment and democratic liberty: The arts cannot thrive except where men are free to be themselves and to be in charge of the discipline of their own energies and ardors. The conditions for democracy and for art are one and the same. What we call liberty in politics results in freedom in the arts. . . . A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions of a free life and you nourish the arts too.109 The presence of European modernist works in MoMA’s Art in Our Time thus testified to Roosevelt’s vision of the United States as a haven of democratic liberty. Given Grosz’s pillory inside Nazi Germany, his art of the past might also have served a similar function had it been included alongside other exemplars of persecuted European modernism in the MoMA display. Because of his new U.S. citizenship, however, his works appeared instead in the section devoted to American watercolors. Two watercolors, In the Park (1933) and Chef (1934), depicted New York social types, and the third, Punishment (1934), portrayed the aerial bombardment of a city. Together the works spanned the range of gentle caricature and social criticism that had characterized Grosz’s production during his first years in New York City. Excluded from the display were any of the tormented allegories, self-portraits, and mordant fairy-tale imagery that constituted his more recent art. The MoMA catalogue heralded Grosz as a welcome newcomer to a vibrant school of American watercolorists that included Maurice Prendergast, George Overbury Hart, John Marin, Charles Demuth, and Charles Burchfield. It also insisted that his work had undergone significant change since his arrival in the United States: “In America he has abandoned in large part the vitriolic caricatures which made him admired and hated in Germany, and has taken his place as one of our foremost watercolorists.”110 A review of the exhibit in Life magazine classified Grosz among those currently contributing to the “good health of our national art today,” not by forging new directions

Making an Exile Culture

41

in art, but rather by reviving for American audiences and artists the lessons of the European old masters.111 The presentation of Grosz’s watercolors in Art in Our Time was similar to the manner in which he and his work were promoted at the New York World’s Fair, which opened concurrently with MoMA’s exhibit. Fair organizers, too, emphasized his value as an exemplar of European cultural traditions of the past made available to the present and future advancement of American art and culture. His work titled Tramp (1937), which depicts a vagrant slumped against a wall on a city street, was put on display in the fair’s Gallery of American Art Today along with twelve hundred works by other American artists.112 When the Soviet pavilion at the New York World’s Fair was dismantled in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 23 August 1939, Grosz was also among those honored in the American Commons that took its place. Included in the commons were twenty-one panels inscribed with over six hundred names of “American Citizens of Foreign Birth, American Indians and Negroes who have made Notable Contributions to our Living, Ever-Growing Democracy devoted to Peace and Freedom.” His name appeared under the German section on a Wall of Fame that presented the “immigrant and what he has brought to America.” Listing seventy-nine names in all, Germany boasted the highest number of those who had contributed to the American melting pot in the fields of music, law, science, education, literature, and other realms of creative and intellectual endeavor. The names of Albert Bierstadt, Emanuel Leutze, Thomas Nast, and many lesser-known German-born artists appeared alongside Grosz’s as representatives of Germany’s contribution to American culture in the visual arts.113 Through these strategies of depoliticization and historicization, MoMA’s Art in Our Time and the New York World’s Fair thus helped lay the groundwork for German art’s positive assimilation into an emergent narrative of American cultural hegemony. That narrative included the promotion of modern art as an emblem of America’s commitment to democracy and individual, free expression against the repressive forces of tyranny. Ironically, these values of democracy and freedom were severely tested by the controversy that arose over the presentation of Germany’s national contribution at the fair. After the Nazi government declined official participation, Thomas Mann and others of the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom urged the German exile community to take responsibility for representing Germany at the event. Mann argued that such a display should not only denounce Hitler’s Germany but also demonstrate the positive, creative dimensions of German culture past and present.114 Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein served as go-between for the American Guild and the Deutsche Kulturkartell, an umbrella organization of German exile groups based in Paris, which undertook the task of preparing a presence for the Europe-based German exile community at the world’s fair. The Kulturkartell’s efforts resulted in plans for the Freedom Pavilion, consisting of an art gallery and a hall of science. These spaces were intended to showcase contributions made to American culture by New York–​based exiles and to bring to American attention works by authors banned in Germany, including Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Erich Maria Remarque, and Stefan Zweig. 42

Making an Exile Culture

Debate erupted over the Kulturkartell’s plan for the Freedom Pavilion’s image and text panel display, however.115 The placards for the display, which was titled Germany of Yesterday—​Germany of Tomorrow, were collaboratively composed by over thirty exiled journalists, historians, and artists (among them Max Ernst, Hans Kralik, and Eugen Spiro). They enumerated the various oppressive measures taking place in Nazi Germany, including the regime’s persecution of Jews and its suppression of modernist art. Using bold graphics and montage, the panels attempted to redirect the Third Reich’s manipulative use of mass media imagery and communicative strategies to underscore the urgency of the Nazi assault on German culture. In addition, the narrative structure of the Germany of Yesterday—​Germany of Tomorrow display entered into debate with the Hitler regime over the course of German history. The panels nominated the sixteenth-century Peasant’s War as the origin of a democratizing process that culminated in the spread of French revolutionary ideals into Germany after 1789. Contrary to the Nazi historical imagination, the display argued further that the Prussian regime of 1871 and Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933 were nothing less than historic betrayals of Germany’s rightful claim to enlightened thought.116 In New York as elsewhere, the presentation of German art in exile was subject to the rapidly changing vagaries of international diplomacy, commercial interests, and isolationism. Fair organizers, more concerned with maintaining positive political and business ties with Nazi Germany than championing the cause of democracy and free expression, quashed the Freedom Pavilion at the last minute. And though Hitler’s Germany had no formal presence at the world’s fair, state-sanctioned art was nonetheless included in the IBM pavilion. Thomas J. Watson, president of International Business Machines, also served as president of the International Chamber of Commerce. As Laura Hobson of The Nation pointed out, Watson had been specially “decorated” by the Third Reich in 1937 for his business connections to the regime.117 Mann responded to the derailment of the exile community’s protest exhibit by helping Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York lay the cornerstone of the Palestine Pavilion at the fair’s opening ceremonies.118 La Guardia had faced severe press condemnation for actions he took against German business interests in New York following the passage of the Nuremberg Laws.119 The dedication of the Palestine Pavilion took place against the backdrop of lingering attention to the plight of the SS St. Louis, a ship of Jewish refugees that left Hamburg in May 1938. Roosevelt refused its entry into the United States after the ship was turned away from Cuba in a move that some construed as evidence of the president’s insensitivity to the plight of the Jews.120 As the tragedy of the refugees continued to go unanswered, Roosevelt appealed to Britain to allow for the politically less volatile option of allowing Jewish refugees to settle in Palestine, despite Arab uprisings against the flow of Jews into the area.121 In response to anti-Semitic Nazi press claims that the exile community’s proposed Freedom Pavilion at the World’s Fair was nothing more than a “pavilion of Jewish jetsam,” Mann pointedly spoke at the dedication of the Palestine Pavilion concerning the current persecution of the Jews abroad and his solidarity with Roosevelt’s plan for the building of the Jewish colony in Palestine. At the same time and more controversially, his comments also highlighted the presence of

Making an Exile Culture

43

anti-Semitism in the United States and the ongoing efforts of Mann, members of the exile community, and American progressives to confront this growing racist sentiment.

The War at Home and Abroad In October 1939, Ludwig Wronkow of the German-American Writers Association solicited Grosz’s contribution to a journal that had been organized in response to this specter of intensifying anti-Semitism on American soil. Titled Equality, the journal began publication in May 1939 for the purpose of countering Catholic priest Father Coughlin’s right-wing paramilitary group, the Christian Front, and his anti-Semitic magazine, Social Justice.122 Coughlin used his radio broadcasts and the pages of Social Justice to warn of Jewish infiltration and to fulminate against Roosevelt’s New Deal as a communist plot. Equality’s mission was to provide an alternative image of the religious community by advocating tolerance and promoting an alliance between Jews and Catholics in the struggle against racism and anti-Semitism. In his letter to Grosz, Wronkow noted that Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Oskar Maria Graf, and others of the German-American Writers Association had agreed to contribute their views on Hitler’s Germany to a special edition of Equality. He assured Grosz that he need not create anything new but could instead use something from one of his earlier portfolios. Wronkow explained his request by noting that the message of Grosz’s earlier art remained shockingly current. “Twenty years ago you had indeed already and prophetically intuited today’s Germany,” he observed. Grosz’s initial response is captured in an exasperated notation (“Can’t do it, why should I reproduce old work? Belong to another time”) on the back of Wronkow’s solicitation.123 Grosz nonetheless acquiesced despite his evident dismay at this appeal to his creative past. A version of his notorious image of Christ on the cross wearing a gas mask and combat boots appeared in the April 1940 edition of Equality. As discussed in the introduction to this book, Grosz first produced his image of Christ for Piscator’s staging of The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schwejk in 1928. There it formed part of the radical theater director’s anti-militarist, Marxist left critique of the church and its complicity in Germany’s resurgent militarism and exploitation of the working class. Reproduced in Equality in 1940, Grosz’s image now complemented instead the issue’s admonition against religious and racial hatred as causes of the ongoing war in Europe and growing social conflict in the United States. Equality was among numerous liberal and leftist publications that also took a stand against the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee during this period. HUAC continued the role of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, which was founded in 1934 for the purpose of rooting out Nazi and fascist groups. In 1938, the Democratic congressman Martin Dies of Texas became HUAC’s head at a time when the U.S. Congress instructed the committee to step up its investigations of foreign nationals thought to be seditious. Under Dies, HUAC evolved into part of the anti-communist crusade pursued not only by Father Coughlin but also by the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover. Its anti-communist witch hunt served to stoke the xenophobia of an isolationist America. Even though President Roosevelt 44

Making an Exile Culture

himself denounced the Dies committee, a Gallup poll of American public opinion found that 74 percent of its respondents wanted the HUAC investigations to continue.124 Suspicion about communist sympathies among the German emigration escalated with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939. American intelligence circles became bent thereafter on rooting out so-called Communazis.125 Perceptions of seditious sympathies among the exiles were also inflamed from within the emigration at this time. Leopold Schwarzschild, who had become militantly anti-communist in the wake of the Moscow show trials, launched an attack on Klaus Mann, Oskar Maria Graf, and others associated with the Schutzverband deutscher Schriftsteller im Exil (Association of German Writers in Exile) as pro-Bolshevik.126 Thomas, Klaus, and Erika Mann were among those in the exile community who remained under FBI surveillance in the coming years as the American government continually scrutinized their political leanings. After the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, the agency sought in particular to control the exiles’ role in policy debates concerning the new German government to be installed after Hitler’s defeat. War and especially American resistance to being drawn into the conflict also precipitated a change in the critical response to Grosz’s current art. A case in point was the display of his Last Battalion. The work appeared in Pittsburgh’s Carnegie International Exhibition of 1938 and was shown again in the international of the following year, which opened shortly after Hitler’s march into Poland on 1 September 1939. In her lengthy review for the Magazine of Art, Helen Buchhalter warned that the 1939 international might be the last such exhibit.127 Armed aggression abroad threatened the international as a symbol of free exchange among countries. She further insisted that current circumstances called for “a measure of extra-esthetic sentiment” far removed from the depoliticized modernism promoted at MoMA in New York just months before. In acknowledgment of the current crisis, the Carnegie exhibit devoted a special section to émigré artists. It featured twenty-six works by refugees from Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere affected by the spreading war.128 Buchhalter observed that pieces presented in the German and Italian national sections exhibited a retreat to the past and romanticism that reflected “possibly a general frame of mind which was itself contributory to the rise of dictatorship.”129 By contrast, Grosz’s Last Battalion, which appeared in the American gallery, constituted for her “the only staggeringly impressive painting in the show.”130 Earlier criticism of Grosz’s American works had assailed his retreat into art and condemned the pessimism of Last Battalion and his other allegorical oil paintings as contrary to an affirmative defense of democratic liberty in its ongoing struggle against dictatorship. However, with the outbreak of the European war and within the context of an American isolationism still loath to take sides in the ensuing conflict, his Last Battalion assumed powerful and unrivaled currency for Buchhalter as a generalized condemnation of war. It would endure as testament to the artist’s independent vision and as a historical document of unfolding events: “Here true enough is an artist who by the very nature of his work could not survive under a dictator’s rule. A passionate outcry against the evils of our time, this may be the one painting in the show to survive as a mirror of those destructive forces when they have played themselves out.”131 After U.S. entry into the war, Making an Exile Culture

45

FIGURE 17. George Grosz,

God of War, 1940. Oil on canvas, 119.5 × 90 cm.

the pessimistic character of Grosz’s images would assume yet another and more controversial meaning as they confronted a culture of patriotism that defined the American art world of those years. Following its assault on Poland, Germany quickly pressed its imperialist campaign into Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg. Grosz noted the spreading war in a letter to Ulrich Becher of October 1939: “Yes, it is probably the eternal and always the same ‘battle over pure power,’ I think . . . perhaps this whole humanistic era is now coming to an end . . . and Spengler was right about that . . . but we still labor under the old ideas and accustom ourselves with difficulty to the likely ghostliness to follow.”132 He also committed his thoughts to another large-scale allegorical oil painting at this time. Titled God of War, the work depicts Mars adorned in plumes and feathers and giving the Sieg heil salute (figure 17). An arm raised behind him echoes Mars’s gesture, as do the 46

Making an Exile Culture

many extended hands that double as the cockade of his antique warrior’s helmet. Another figure, with his neck clamped in a wooden stockade, kneels before the god of war with his ears battened, eyes closed, and mouth locked and nailed shut. His hands, which have been severed from their wrists, nonetheless ritualistically fold together in homage under the sign of a hovering swastika. The young boy crouching in the foreground of the composition resembles one of Grosz’s sons, whose quiet activities of reading and drawing the artist had captured in sensitive portrait studies years before. In God of War, the young boy appears oblivious to the martial seductions of the war god behind him. His absorption is not in any youthful reverie, however. Instead, the innocence of the child gives way to the sins of the father as he busies himself with the intricacies of a machine gun and its ammunition belt. In his Last Battalion of 1938, Grosz had similarly offered up no reprieve from an ageless cycle of human violence. In God of War, the spatial indeterminacy of the composition suggests further that the demarcations between the child’s world and that of the god of war, between the private and public realms, and between the home front and the battlefront have also dissolved into a singular image of ceaseless war mongering and brutality. In June 1940, France fell to Hitler’s invading forces. The U.S. State Department responded by ending all immigration from Germany and central Europe with the signing into law of the Alien Registration Act.133 In the coming months, Varian Fry’s efforts on behalf of the Emergency Rescue Committee would secure safe passage into exile for some two thousand expellees from Nazi Europe. Klaus and Erika Mann, along with Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art, proved instrumental in expanding the scope of the Rescue Committee’s charge beyond political refugees to include artistic and intellectual luminaries. Max Ernst, André Breton, André Masson, and other leading figures of the artistic avant-garde were among those Fry’s efforts brought into American exile.134 Mid-1940 also brought another round of controversy within the German exile community. This time, debate was sparked by the announcement that the Allies sought the dismemberment of Germany as part of any postwar settlement. Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein responded with an essay published in the German-language New Yorker Staatszeitung und Herold in March 1940 that condemned such aims. More startling was his ascription of blame for Germany’s militarist aggression to Britain and France and the vengeful terms they set forth against a defeated Germany in 1919 with the Treaty of Versailles.135 Klaus Mann responded immediately with an attack on Löwenstein’s essay as “pure, open propaganda against the powers defending the west from Hitler’s aggression.” He excoriated Löwenstein further for publishing his comments in a newspaper that was, in Mann’s words, “three-quarters Nazi.” Worse still was the fact that Löwenstein had also said next to nothing about Germany’s World War I atrocities, which had precipitated Allied action in the first place.136 Klaus and his sister Erika distanced themselves further from Löwenstein’s views with the publication of their second major exile volume, The Other Germany, in mid-1940. Their text argued vociferously against claims that Germany’s collective insanity could be blamed on the French, British, or anyone else. The Manns insisted that this insanity was instead deeply rooted within Germany’s character and psyche. However, against those who would seek to reduce the Making an Exile Culture

47

country’s modern history to its irrationality and Faustian penchant for anti-Enlightenment values, the Manns pleaded for recognition of “the other Germany” that was equally a part of this history.137 Borrowing from the notions of split personality and brotherhood that had served Konrad Heiden and Thomas Mann in their earlier descriptions of Hitler, Klaus and Erika thus described Germany itself as afflicted with a dual identity. The Manns assured their readers that this dualism was soon to be resolved when the “other Germany” responsible for the country’s towering contributions to Western civilization would prevail. This level of circumspection about Germany’s history and its responsibility for the world tragedy it now unleashed was altogether missing from Löwenstein’s incendiary comments in the New Yorker Staatszeitung und Herold. His statements ultimately precipitated a permanent break between him and the Manns. It also spelled the end of the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, which formally ceased operations in January 1941.138 Grosz spent an unpleasant evening with Felix Weil, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Hanns Eisler, and Löwenstein shortly after the appearance of Löwenstein’s essay. The night was filled, in his words, with “boring” and “ugly” talk no doubt inflected by the Löwenstein controversy.139 Concern over Germany’s future evoked by the incident also heightened the stakes involved with Grosz’s long-standing negative convictions regarding the German masses. The sharpened and increasingly unsavory political relevance of his views likely also contributed to the strained tenor of the evening.

Isolationism or Internationalism? Political debate on the post-Hitler status of Germany thus rent the exile community apart following the outbreak of war in Europe. Meanwhile, the American presidential campaign of 1940 foregrounded the question of isolationism versus internationalism as talk of America’s role in a future world order began to captivate mainstream political discussion. Firmly in the isolationist camp were pacifists like the socialist political leader Norman Thomas.140 So too were anti-Semites and supporters of Germany like Father Coughlin, aviator Charles Lindbergh, America’s ambassador to Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, media mogul William Randolph Hearst, and Henry Ford.141 Bolstering U.S. intervention in the spreading conflict were Wilsonian ideas that revived again after years of resistance to internationalist visions that had followed America’s failure to endorse the League of Nations in 1919.142 Erika and Klaus Mann concluded The Other Germany with acknowledgment of this turn in American political discourse. They cited both H. G. Wells’s speculations on “the new world order” to come, as well as Clarence Streit’s Union Now and his platform for envisioning a future world at peace. Union Now, which appeared in 1939 and went through fourteen editions by 1941, promoted a global federation based on the American model of legally autonomous democratic states united under one system of defense, finance, and communications. Thomas Mann, Clare Boothe Luce, and Dorothy Thompson were among the many luminaries who not only endorsed Streit’s plan but also spoke out publicly to attract greater support for his federation idea.143 Thomas Mann was also a cosignatory of The City of Man, which appeared in 1941.144 The vol48

Making an Exile Culture

ume was organized under the auspices of Alvin Johnson’s New School and compiled by Mann and sixteen other leading American and exile intellectuals. The City of Man argued for the institution of a world government grounded in humanist principles. Mann and the others argued that leadership for this plan necessarily fell to the United States, given the apparent frailty of democracy in Europe following Britain’s signing of the Munich accords and the fall of France. The tract also called for an affirmative, even militant, defense of democracy as necessary to the establishment of a new world order of peace and justice. However, the United States’ commitment to democracy required more than its willingness to defend it militarily abroad. The City of Man also called for a renewal of democracy’s demand for justice at home by eradicating racial prejudice against blacks and Jews in America and curbing capitalism through socialist modification of the country’s economic system. Mann and the volume’s other signatories urged that “the American creed must be the American deed” in order for the country to fulfill the historic mission of world leadership that now lay before it.145 Klaus Mann’s newly founded journal Decision praised The City of Man for its “idealistic socialism and democratic universalism.” However, it also hewed more closely to Wilsonianism by pointing to the contradiction between the universalism symbolized by a “city of man” and the identification of any single nation, including the United States, as the guiding national genius of that universalism. Decision maintained that genuine world democracy must embody the aspirations of all nations and regions committed to the “primacy of morals over economics” and a future of peaceful coexistence.146 Regardless of their differences, The City of Man and Decision shared a plea for self-scrutiny among America’s leadership and the public at large as they contemplated the country’s future role in the world. This critical circumspection bore little resemblance to the exuberant American nationalist internationalism envisioned by the Republican nominee Wendell Willkie in his bid for the presidency. The former utility executive’s campaign against Roosevelt preached the global spread of U.S. capitalism as the best means by which to end conflict, assure prosperity, and secure a world at peace.147 His advocacy of private enterprise earned him the support of leaders in finance and industry and of publishers like Henry Luce.148 Luce’s influential “American Century” essay, which appeared in the pages of his widely circulated Life magazine in February 1941, also argued for internationalism under the banner of the United States’ laissez-faire capitalism. In a departure from Willkie’s idealistic view of spreading American influence, Luce’s more bellicose formulation insisted further on the need to create an international order, not only under American political control, but also bent to American interests. He called on the country “to accept whole-heartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”149 Growing conflict abroad demanded that America’s system of free enterprise should now evolve into a vital international economy and moral world order in which the United States would lead world trade and commerce. Though Grosz supported Roosevelt in his bid for reelection, he nonetheless noted with approval the words of another Willkie supporter, syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann, who Making an Exile Culture

49

also weighed into the isolationism versus internationalism debate in the summer of 1940.150 Like Luce, Lippmann supported Willkie’s internationalist and pro-business stance in 1940, but he eventually rejected Wilsonianism and Willkie’s vision of the peaceful spread of capitalism as too idealistic.151 He endorsed instead a postwar alliance based on military force to maintain a world balance of power between democratic and nondemocratic states. His conviction that such force would be necessary to ensure peace ultimately accorded with Roosevelt’s own at the end of World War II.152 In 1940, however, Roosevelt refrained from endorsing any internationalist plan. After winning election to his third term as president he delivered his “Four Freedoms” State of the Union address in January 1941. His address announced instead a more modest vision for the United States as a nation committed to working in cooperation with other countries dedicated to the freedom of speech, religion, and the absence of want and fear. Roosevelt’s restraint concerning growing political and corporate demands for an end to American isolationism accorded with the widely held views of an electorate suspicious of foreign involvement and still reeling from the economic dislocations of the Depression. The internationalism versus isolationism debate also led to increasing polarization in the American art world during this period. Since the fall of France and the growing influx of European modernist artists arriving in the United States for safe haven, the increasingly internationalist cast of MoMA and other powerful institutions of art became a matter of growing controversy. Grosz made note of a provocative essay concerning the current situation in the American art world published by his friend George Biddle in the New Republic in late 1941.153 A leading social realist painter, Biddle’s prominence stemmed first and foremost from his tireless efforts that had resulted in the creation of the federal arts projects of the 1930s.154 New Deal art programs reached their highest level of employment in 1936, with more than forty thousand artists on its rolls, including musicians, painters, actors, writers, and photographers.155 By the late 1930s, government support for these projects had all but disappeared, however. Conservative congressional critics took offense at several instances in which left-wing artists had used federal art program commissions to protest problems of social and economic injustice. Others cited the negative examples of Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan, where government sponsorship was used to repress freedom of expression and subordinate the arts to overt propagandistic manipulation.156 During the Depression, federal arts support had been viewed as an important aspect of economic recovery and the construction of a national culture. With the spread of war and dictatorship, however, such support increasingly came to be seen as antithetical to American values and potentially injurious to freedom of expression. In his New Republic essay, Biddle responded to these changing realities in the art world by accusing New York dealers and MoMA of engendering a new form of isolationism in contemporary art. This time, isolation represented not the exclusion of foreign influence on American art but rather the exclusion of American artists from an art world grown increasingly beholden to a “star system” of European artists. This system was injurious to the masses of American artists, many of whom were still struggling from the effects of the world economic crisis.157 Biddle thundered further that the New York art world was especially guilty of recycling shop-worn surrealism 50

Making an Exile Culture

and abstraction from France over and above other tendencies and to the detriment of a healthy American art. The importance of the French contribution to modern art was undeniable, Biddle claimed. But its penchant for varying modes of abstraction nonetheless rendered it divorced from life and incapable of grappling with urgent matters of the day.158 During this period Biddle found himself among a growing number of figurative and socially engaged artists who saw their works increasingly dismissed. They witnessed from the sidelines as the lineaments of a different American art world—​committed to varying modes of abstraction as an emblem of democratic freedom—​began to solidify. Grosz, too, felt the impact of these changes in the American art world as his sales continued to flounder following the poor reception of his Walker Galleries show in 1939. The end of his Guggenheim fellowship and dwindling finances compelled him to resume teaching at the Art Students League in 1940. His letters of this period reveal his growing resentment over the competitive marketing and commercialism of the American art world to which financial need forced him to submit. On the advice of his dealer, Maynard Walker, he devoted more of his time to the production of nudes and landscapes. Such works were better received by critics and proved to be more salable than his tormented allegorical canvases. This reorientation of his efforts bore positive fruit in March 1941, when Paintings of the Nude by George Grosz opened at Walker Galleries. The exhibit enjoyed positive critical response as well as sales.159 Other opportunities also provided Grosz with glimmers of a financial turnaround at this time. Among them was an illustration contract from the journalist and successful Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht. Born to Russian Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side in 1894, Hecht began his career as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News. He and Grosz encountered each other for the first time in Berlin while Hecht was serving as a war correspondent for the newspaper in 1918 and 1919. He became part of Grosz’s Dada circle at that time, and the two continued thereafter to share a penchant for cynicism and biting satire, as is evident in Grosz’s art and Hecht’s plays, short stories, and novels. Hecht’s particular brand of iconoclasm became a matter of public controversy in 1931 when Covici-Friede published his novel A Jew in Love. Due to its anti-Semitic portrayal of Jews, the book was banned in Canada and withdrawn from stores in the United States. Hecht, meanwhile, was assailed as a self-hating Jew. His views began to change after the adoption of the Nuremberg Laws in Germany and in the face of growing prejudice in the United States, however. He emerged after 1935 as a leading voice against anti-Semitism at home and the persecution of Jews abroad.160 Grosz’s American correspondence mentions Hecht for the first time in 1936, when he went to see a production of Hecht’s circus-inspired musical and variety show Jumbo, starring Jimmy Durante at the Hippodrome Theater on Broadway.161 In 1941, Grosz provided eighty-six illustrations for Hecht’s collection of pieces reprinted from his column “1001 Afternoons in New York” in the PM 5 Cents New York Daily newspaper.162 The pieces displayed the talent for urban reportage and satiric portraiture that Hecht had developed during his years as a journalist. Some of his vignettes captured the life and times of hucksters on Broadway, bohemians in Greenwich Village, bums and whores in the Bowery, and Nazi acolytes Making an Exile Culture

51

in the German neighborhood of Yorkville. Others spoke to Hecht’s increasingly strident stand on “the Jewish question” through their satiric assault on the anti-Semitism of Lindbergh, Kennedy, and Hearst as well as on the prevarications of a world leadership seemingly unwilling to come to the aid of Europe’s suffering Jews. Grosz’s specific views on Hecht’s evolving militancy at this time remain unknown. But the lacerating treatment of “the German savage” evident in “Birth of a Nazi,” “These Were Once Conquerors,” and other tales in “1001 Afternoons in New York” no doubt struck a responsive chord with Grosz’s own love of misanthropic satire and contempt for Nazism.163 As we shall explore in the next chapter, this contempt brought Hecht and Grosz back into contact with each other shortly before the end of the war. Grosz approached his friend at that time about joining him on a visit to war-ravaged Europe in order to document—​in Hecht’s words and Grosz’s images—​the monstrosity of Germany’s crimes. Teaching, better sales, and illustration contracts still did not provide Grosz with the kind of financial security he continued to seek, nor did they alleviate his growing anxiety over the competitive and commercialized nature of the art world in New York. In the spring of 1941, he grudgingly bowed to these pressures by signing on with Reeves Lewenthal, founder of the Associated American Artists (AAA). Convinced that “American art ought to be handled like any other American business,” Lewenthal shared none of the art world’s characteristic qualms concerning art’s commodity status.164 Founded in 1934, the AAA hired artists to do inexpensive prints for retail outlets and mail order. Lewenthal also developed contracts with some fifty department stores nationwide for the display and sale of AAA prints. In the late 1930s, he expanded his business by opening a spacious gallery on Fifth Avenue in New York City and later added branches in Chicago and Beverly Hills. His innovative Art for Advertising Department, which linked artists with corporate clients, persisted into the 1940s. By the time Grosz joined Lewenthal in 1941, the AAA styled itself as the “largest commercial art gallery in the world.”165 Among its more recognized artists were leading regionalist painters, including Thomas Hart Benton, who made twenty thousand to thirty thousand dollars a year through AAA sales between the mid-1930s and late 1940s. John Steuart Curry, who joined Lewenthal’s enterprise in 1941, received four thousand dollars in commissions in the first three weeks.166 Under the terms of his contract, the AAA received a commission of 33⅓ percent on all of Grosz’s sales through the gallery.167 Lewenthal’s first exhibit of Grosz’s drawings and watercolors took place in October and November 1941 and was timed to coincide with the opening of a traveling retrospective of Grosz’s paintings, drawings, and prints at the Museum of Modern Art. The MoMA display consisted of some sixty works spanning Grosz’s production from 1914 to the present. By presenting audiences with an overview of Grosz’s Weimar and American works, the pairing of these two exhibits threw into high relief the divided reception that had dogged Grosz’s career since his arrival in the United States in 1933. In his review of the AAA and MoMA shows, the New York Times critic Edward Alden Jewell rehearsed his favorable response to Grosz’s shift from the social content characteristic of his early work to his current concern with technical proficiency. Particularly impressive to Jewell in the current exhibits was the distinctive blur technique evident in Grosz’s watercolors devoted to landscape themes and depictions of the nude.168 52

Making an Exile Culture

Grosz’s friends and admirers on the left reached different conclusions about the significance of the AAA and MoMA displays, however. Felix Weil visited both and wrote that he had come away saddened not only by the loss of the early Grosz but also by the “American conformist” into which he had evidently transformed.169 Grosz sent an embittered reply in which he accused Weil of a “banal social democratic and somewhat tired hostility to art” that confused art with propaganda.170 For his part, he was now devoted to emulating the old masters and no longer suited to the task of illustrating “statistics,” as Weil and others on the left demanded of him. Milton Brown echoed Weil’s sentiments in his essay “Death of an Artist,” published in Parnassus magazine in May 1941. He bemoaned Grosz’s retreat into the studio and his current concentration on technique: “Whereas one may rail against the failure of a mediocre talent, one can only weep at the demise of a genius. To see the exhibition of George Grosz at the Walker Galleries is to witness the last act in the murder of one of the finest talents of our time. The pity is that it is self-murder. The shame is that it is done amidst cheers.” For Brown, Grosz’s earlier work had exhibited a correspondence between vanguard form and critical content. Now only form remained. Without content, he maintained, Grosz’s work could only devolve into a pointless solipsism.171 In December 1941, Fortune magazine featured Grosz and his painting Last Battalion in an essay titled “The Great Flight of Culture: Twelve Artists in U.S. Exile.”172 In their criticisms of Grosz’s recent art, Weil and Brown had accused him of assimilating too fully by abandoning his socially critical work of the Weimar years and willfully surrendering to the commercial imperatives of his new American environs. Fortune, on the other hand, celebrated Grosz’s otherness as an exile and his role as part of a revered European high cultural tradition that circumstances had now driven to American shores. Featured along with him in the exposé were Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Amédée Ozenfant, Marc Chagall, André Masson, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Eugene Berman, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Kurt Seligmann. Their exodus from Europe had conferred on the United States “opportunities and responsibilities of custodianship for a civilization.” Fortune observed that it also gave America the chance to overcome its provincialism through study and appreciation of the exiles’ high-cultural example. The journal concluded that through such means, Grosz and other exponents of this historic artistic migration would help America to move beyond its uncultured preference for Disney cartoons, film, and other forms of low-brow mass entertainment and to assume its destiny of world cultural leadership. Largely unintelligible to most American critics remained Grosz’s troubled portraits and apocalyptic war paintings. As we have seen, these works were rooted in a German past that current circumstances would not allow him to leave behind. Through his investigations of the Northern Renaissance tradition, Grosz attempted to confront the horror of the discredited German culture his life and art had come to represent. At the same time, the traumatic character of his portraits and war paintings addressed the fundaments of a Western humanist tradition that also appeared mortally imperiled by atrocity and war. In this regard, his work shared in painted form a prefigurative consciousness indulged by Mann and others in the exile community as they came to view Germany’s fate as that of Western civilization itself during this period. Making an Exile Culture

53

As we have also encountered, however, Grosz’s role in the making of a German exile culture in these years before U.S. entry into the war was no less fraught than his attempt to place his career on a firm footing in the American art world. Leading figures in the emigration worked to establish a cohesive and positive image for the exile community in their bid to salvage a “better” Germany and to press their demand for American assistance in combating the spread of dictatorship and war in Europe. But while Mann and others in the emigration engaged Germany’s troubled history in their effort to imagine a redemptive future for the country and its culture, Grosz’s cynicism looked back on the German past and forward to the country’s ultimate fate with a jaundiced eye that frequently infuriated his exiled compatriots. His misanthropic outbursts and the apocalyptic content of his recent art rendered him and his work ill-suited to the task of forwarding the exile community’s aim of anticipating Germany’s positive role in the world order to come after Hitler’s defeat. As the coming years were to demonstrate, Grosz’s life and art also proved ill suited to U.S. visions of that same world order as the “American Century” began to captivate the nation’s political culture during World War II.

54

Making an Exile Culture

2

EXILE AND THE ONE WORLD ORDER I left because of Hitler—​you know he is a painter too, and there didn’t seem to be room for both of us. George Grosz, CBS broadcast “Art under Hitler,” 1942

IN APRIL 1940, the Foreign Policy Association issued the War Atlas, consisting of forty-five maps with explanatory texts written by Varian Fry.1 The atlas provided an ominous history of recent geopolitical changes in Europe. Map after map showed menacing arrows emanating from Nazi Germany and arcing across European national borders to incorporate Austria in March 1938, subjugate Czechoslovakia in March 1939, and invade and partition Poland later that year. In a map of April 1940, blackened territories demarcated Germany’s occupation of Denmark and Norway. The latter part of the War Atlas widened its scope to the rest of the globe by depicting Japan’s advance through the Far East and the place of the United States in this changing world. One map in particular emphasized American dependency on world trade. Its black and gray graphic tentacles extended out from the continental United States to Europe, East Asia, Canada, and Latin America (figure 18). Varian Fry’s accompanying text made plain the difficulties involved with neutrality in the spreading conflict. Given America’s intimate reliance on international imports and exports, its efforts to render itself materially independent would likely plunge the country into another economic depression. “Even if we were willing to stand the costs, we could still not erect a Chinese wall around the United States and hope to maintain the kind of life we now lead,” Fry warned.2 55

FIGURE 18. “U.S. Foreign Trade,” in War Atlas: A Handbook of Maps and Facts (New York: Foreign Policy

Association, 1940), 85.

Many of the War Atlas maps had previously headlined the New York Times and other mass media organs as America’s cartographic awareness expanded to world scope during these years. Japan’s continued march through East Asia and Hitler’s threat to western Europe and the Soviet Union pried an isolationist American public into a framework of consciousness consonant with speculations on a coming new world order voiced in texts by Clarence Streit, Henry Luce, and others discussed in the last chapter. With the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States four days later, this consciousness became a matter of urgent and immediate reckoning as America was drawn into World War II. Chapter 2 examines how Grosz and his art responded to imaginings of this new world order as the United States emerged from isolation and began to project the universal validity of its system in the American Century. Before the country’s entry into World War II, the American art world embraced European modernism as part of the United States’ claim to the defense of free expression and democracy against tyranny. During the war years, this defense of culture changed into the affirmative projection of a new, vanguard “globalism” in the arts. Europe’s exiled artistic legacy was fundamental to such globalist imaginings, as that legacy was now to be overtaken and transformed by American artists and advanced internationally under an American banner. Grosz’s use of traditional figuration and the pessimistic content of his paintings and drawings made his work unavailable to this ascendant, patriotic cultural ideology. Relegated to the status of an old master of European modernism, Grosz began to perceive an ever-widening gulf between the European high culture from which he came and a U.S. culture overrun by war propaganda campaigns and commercialism. 56

Exile and the One World Order

Though his untimely skepticism placed Grosz at odds with the American art world, it nonetheless began to approximate all the more closely the views of others in the exile community. Differences indeed remained between his gloomy, misanthropic reflections on the human capacity for betterment and the hope for an improved postwar order imagined by social democrats like Mann and committed Marxists like Piscator, Brecht, and Herzfelde. Despite these differences, they all found themselves caught up in visions of an American Century premised on vanquishing the fascist nightmare from which Grosz and others of the emigration had fled. Especially unsettling for some was the manner in which this American Century was also advanced in the name of the humanist legacy the exiles took themselves to represent. This enlistment of their legacy in America’s hegemonic aspirations caused debate within and beyond the exile community. By war’s end, Nazism’s toll caused some exiles to be especially circumspect about all universalizing claims, whether they emanated from Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich or Roosevelt’s “arsenal of democracy,” as the president described the evolving U.S. war effort in his radio address of 1940.3 This circumspection shaped the character of Grosz’s work as he too reflected on the experience of exile under conditions of a consolidating, American-style one-world order during this period. I conclude this chapter with an in-depth analysis of Cain (1945), Grosz’s most significant painting of the war years. I describe this work as a veiled self-portrait of the artist as Hitler, a connection made evident by knowledge of Grosz’s previous self-portraits, but one that was likely unintelligible to those who saw the work in 1945 and thereafter. Allegorizing himself as Hitler, Grosz addresses in Cain his final and profoundly negative judgment on the Germanic culture and tradition, which began to consume his artistic consciousness in the mid-1930s and continued to do so, if only more intensively, as America entered into the war. The allegorical veiling of this connection between Grosz and Hitler in Cain ensured that the sense of self-loathing and guilt suggested by the painting remained fundamentally and painfully private. At the same time, however, the sentiments it implied also participated in a larger, more public discourse on the question of German guilt that circulated within and beyond the emigration at this time. As rendered in Grosz’s painting and expressed in the words of Thomas Mann at war’s end, this guilt served as a vehicle of devastating self-scrutiny. Chapter 2 concludes with a discussion of how Grosz’s and Mann’s reflections also offered a poignant object lesson for the American Century and a tacit, though largely ignored, plea for the sort of critical circumspection that a world brought to the brink of civilizational collapse appeared to demand.

Reflections on War The United States suffered a string of military defeats in the first six months of its entry into World War II. These setbacks deepened xenophobic responses to citizens of German and Italian descent and recent émigrés whose ethnicities linked them in the public eye to the war’s combatant nations. In the immediate wake of Pearl Harbor, Aufbau, the leading American news journal of the German Jewish immigration, warned its readership to avoid speaking German in public.4 Exile and the One World Order

57

In an essay for Decision, the journal edited by his son Klaus, Thomas Mann had weighed in against growing American xenophobia shortly before the United States’ entry into the war. He argued then that the European conflict should be understood not as a struggle between nations but rather as a struggle between civilization and barbarism in a world civil war. Moreover, Mann insisted that the global circumstance of ongoing hostilities dissolved boundaries between countries and rendered the very idea of national differences meaningless. In this regard, the German emigration prefigured for Mann a future order of world citizenship in which aliens and exiles would cease to exist: There is a growing realization that nationalism has seen its day, that the age of national states and national culture is rapidly nearing its end, and that this war, which sunders minds rather than nations, is the instrument of their dissolution. . . . Emigration is no longer what it was—​a search for a temporary shelter abroad, an impatient watchful waiting for the return. We are not waiting for the return—​frankly, we shudder at the very thought. We are waiting for the future—​and that belongs to a new world state of unity and the extinction of national sovereignties and autonomies to which our emigration, this Diaspora of culture, is but the prelude.5 After Pearl Harbor, Mann joined other exiled luminaries in voicing his alarm over an American hostility to foreign nationals that became all the more acute as the country was drawn into the war. Hoover’s FBI arrested over one thousand Germans and Italians even before the United States formally declared war on the Axis powers. Meanwhile, the Justice Department detained for questioning some sixty thousand mostly German foreign nationals.6 Along with G. A. Borgese, Albert Einstein, Bruno Frank, Arturo Toscanini, and Bruno Walter, Mann issued an open letter to President Roosevelt on this pressing subject.7 The letter alerted Roosevelt to “a large group of natives of Germany and Italy who by present regulations are, erroneously, characterized and treated as ‘Aliens of Enemy Nationality.’ ” The signatories urged that a “clear and practical line should be drawn between the potential enemies of American democracy on the one hand, and the victims and sworn foes of totalitarian evil on the other.” Dated 13 February, the open letter appeared just days before a government decree ordered the internment of Americans of Japanese descent living on the West Coast. More than 110,000 Japanese Americans were deprived of their livelihoods as U.S. citizens while they languished in hastily established and deplorably maintained concentration camps until the end of the war. Grosz’s response to the escalation of World War II diverged dramatically from Mann’s impassioned appeal for a universal and democratic humanism that would render nations and national differences a thing of the past. On the contrary, as he wrote to his friend and patron Erich Cohn, recent responses to his art had only intensified his disdain for politics, his sense of otherness, and his desire to explore more fully the echt Deutsch (Germanic) character of his art.8 His current views had been shaped by the disparate assessments that had greeted recent exhibitions of his work. On the one hand, favorable reception of his landscapes and nudes had resulted in welcome sales. On the other hand, he also faced growing condemnation. He wrote to Cohn that critics had assailed 58

Exile and the One World Order

FIGURE 19. George Grosz, I

Woke Up One Night and I Saw a Burning House, 1942. Oil on canvas, 66 × 51 cm.

his work as the product of a “disillusioned former fighter” who failed to live up to the political incisiveness of his earlier art. These divided responses failed to register not only the divided nature of his production itself but also its shared affinity with Goya’s in that regard. Like the Spanish master, who produced at one and the same time images of unspeakable horror as well as lavish court paintings, Grosz too maintained both a dark and a positive side in his work. Grosz’s letter went into further detail about one of his most recent apocalyptic paintings. The work’s title, I Woke Up One Night and I Saw a Burning House, underscores the painting’s melding of dream and waking into nightmarish reality (figure 19). In Last Battalion of 1938, Grosz had portrayed a group of aging, degraded warriors marching off to fight yet another war in their ceaseless struggle for food. By contrast, I Woke foregrounds the moment of battle itself, which takes place in a rat-infested, muddy landscape surrounding the ruins of a house. Grosz punctuates the fiery maelstrom that engulfs the composition with the depiction of rifle muzzles pointing out from the Exile and the One World Order

59

FIGURE 20. George

Grosz, I, I Was Always Present, 1942. Oil on canvas, 91.4 × 71.1 cm.

window of the structure’s upper story. Parachuting figures can also be made out as they descend from the sky in the painting’s upper left corner. Grosz directed Cohn’s attention to a vignette that appears over the crumbling roof of the house, where “brother fights against brother to the end before everything sinks into rubble, slime, bloody fire, explosion, and death.” Grosz admitted to Cohn that some might want to interpret I Woke as a reference to the escalating war. He insisted, however, that the work’s intent was symbolic and not literal: “You see, the painting doesn’t portray any kind of a real house—​perhaps it is the house of us all—​a completely ruined pile of stones, but a few survivors still defend themselves—​so ‘optimistic’ indeed we 60

Exile and the One World Order

FIGURE 21. George

Grosz, Manifest Destiny, in Interregnum, 1936. Lithograph, 28.3 × 21.4 cm.

humans are—​while below the rats live on forever, feed off of the cadavers, and do well for themselves.” Symbolism thus removed this and other examples of Grosz’s current production from the specificity of the moment. His use of allegory, moreover, allowed him to express his deepening conviction that the most enduring and transcendent aspects of the human condition were those rooted in man’s apparently unquenchable desire for destruction. Grosz continued his letter to Cohn with an account of others of his recent echt Deutsch works. Their imagery, he wrote, traced its genealogy back to the Middle Ages and responded to a time in which angst, horror, and death prevailed. A case in point was his Germanic canvas titled I, I Was Always Present (figure 20), in which Grosz reworked the figure of an apocalyptic rider that had appeared in the plate titled Manifest Destiny, in his Interregnum portfolio of 1936 (figure 21). The painted version of 1942 modifies the specificity of the World War I doughboy helmet, gas mask, and rifle worn by the rider in Manifest Destiny. The later painting instead depicts the Exile and the One World Order

61

rider wearing a battered helmet crowned by a nearly leafless wreath of laurel and is similar in its rounded, skull-covering shape to the kettle helmets worn by medieval infantrymen. Moreover, in I, I Was Always Present, the gas mask of the rider in Manifest Destiny falls away to reveal the skeletal visage of death in a rendering that hews more closely once again to the medieval origins of the subject matter. Meanwhile, the rider’s horse gallops wildly forward, lacking the harness Grosz used in his earlier handling of the theme, underscoring the unchecked fury of death’s advance. At the same time, the fiery red pigment that bathes the composition transforms the muddy field and explosions present in Grosz’s earlier line drawing into an all-encompassing hellish environment. Grosz concluded his letter to Cohn by informing his patron that he had just begun work on another echt Deutsch oil derived from his Interregnum portfolio, this time based on his portrayal of Hitler in So Cain Killed Abel. Titled Cain, the work was finally completed in 1945. We will turn to an extended discussion of Cain at the end of this chapter when we consider Grosz’s final judgment on the Germanic tradition that occupied his artistic consciousness throughout the war years.

Pep Talks Everywhere With the beginning of U.S. involvement in World War II, government support for the federal programs that had sustained thousands of artists through the Great Depression virtually disappeared.9 The patriotic fervor that accompanied the reorientation of the American economy to a war footing was given added impetus by those, including Grosz, who sought opportunities to sustain their livelihoods by dedicating their work to the struggle. In April 1942, the New York Post publicized an upcoming ball at the Art Students League with a photo showing league instructors Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Jon Corbino putting the finishing touches on their oversized caricatures of Hirohito and Mussolini.10 Another publicity photo captures Grosz’s contribution to the event. It shows him with brush in hand, perched on a ladder before his satiric image of Hitler (figure 22). In late May 1942, Grosz attended a lunch meeting at the Whitney Museum of American Art convened by museum director Juliana Force.11 The topic was what artists could do to contribute to war propaganda. The poet and librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish was in attendance. Director of the federal government’s Office of Facts and Figures, MacLeish became the “principal architect of U.S. public diplomacy” and war propaganda after he joined the Office of War Information (OWI), founded in June 1942.12 His presence at the Whitney Museum luncheon signaled the extent to which the federal government was intent on integrating artists into its propaganda efforts at this early stage in the war. MacLeish, Force, and Grosz were joined at the event by artists Henry Varnum Poor, William Gropper, Eugene Speicher, and Grosz’s dealer, Reeves Lewenthal, of the Associated American Artists. In response to government appeals for assistance in generating propaganda, Poor and Lewenthal were among those who pledged their support to the War Department as it sought to establish a combat art program. George Biddle was selected to chair the department’s Art Advisory Committee, which included the director of the National Gallery of Art, David Finley; the director of the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts, Edward Rowan; and the acclaimed novelist 62

Exile and the One World Order

FIGURE 22. George Grosz

painting a caricature of Hitler for the annual ball at the Art Students League, 1943.

John Steinbeck, in addition to Poor and Lewenthal. Biddle defined the mission of the combat art program in a memo of March 1942.13 He noted that the current war, unlike any before, would be subject to “factual reporting” in the form of film and photographs. By contrast, the work of combat artists was to go beyond the merely documentary. Their paintings and drawings were instead to synthesize human experience of the war and to serve as a lasting testimony to America’s involvement in the struggle. The committee selected twenty-three artists in uniform and nineteen civilians to go to fronts around the world. Biddle, Poor, Joe Jones, and Aaron Bohrod were among those who traveled to scenes of American engagement in Europe and the South Pacific as part of the program. In mid-1942, a public opinion poll indicated that three out of ten Americans, despite Pearl Harbor, desired a negotiated settlement with the Axis powers. The OWI turned to the resources of the film and advertising industries to assist the agency in all-out propaganda efforts designed Exile and the One World Order

63

to counter this lingering isolationism. Both industries had already rallied to the cause and were eager to demonstrate their patriotic support. Some of these efforts included war loan drives, for which John Steuart Curry and other prominent artists produced advertising images. Grosz was among those who periodically donated his artworks for sale as part of these war bond fundraising campaigns.14 Grosz also took part in the Artists for Victory exhibit that went on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in late 1942. Artists for Victory was an umbrella organization for over thirty different groups representing some ten thousand artists nationwide. The organization formed just days after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and brought together artists who voluntarily pledged their talent and work to further the war effort. Artists for Victory sponsored patriotic exhibitions throughout World War II. Its members also secured commissions from some of the federal agencies that sought out artists for the production of wartime propaganda. Alfred Barr and Juliana Force were among the jurors for the Artists for Victory display at the Metropolitan Museum, which resulted in $12,480 (roughly $180,000 today) in sales. Grosz’s Woman in Dunes and Last Battalion were among the more than fourteen hundred paintings, sculptures, and prints that filled twenty-eight galleries of the museum. His two canvases were featured in the exhibit catalogue along with those of other prominent artists, including Thomas Hart Benton, Ivan Albright, Isabel Bishop, Peter Blume, John Steuart Curry, Stuart Davis, Lyonel Feininger, and William Gropper.15 Grosz’s support of these endeavors was at best tentative, however. He confided to his diary that his current art was decidedly out of step with the patriotic “pep talks everywhere” fervor that commanded the American art world in the early months of the United States’ entry into the war.16 In September 1942 Grosz wrote a letter to an acquaintance living abroad in which he explained his fundamental unwillingness to dedicate his art to the cause. Age prevented him from following in the footsteps of Biddle and other artists who were taking themselves off to the battle front. More to the point, however, was Grosz’s inability to move beyond his entrenched skepticism. He confessed, “I can’t subscribe to the war as a blessing, and I’m also not young enough anymore to freely sign up with the pilots. I see the apocalyptic and the destructive, much less the grand, heroic, and true.”17 While other artists rallied for patriotic service, Grosz returned to the theme of the futility of art in the face of dictatorship, which he had advanced in several images of his Interregnum portfolio in 1936. In The Mighty One on a Little Outing Surprised by Two Poets he depicts two poet-artists, one carrying a text with a swastika scrawled on its front cover and the other a lyre, as they grovel masochistically at the feet of an imposing figure (figure 23). A whip extends like a satanic tail from behind the figure’s coat as snow blankets his shoulders and falls from his cap in a world made bleak and frigid by his presence. The poets at his feet appear with ears battened shut and bare buttocks that display lash marks. These diminutive artists persist in their degraded and degrading subservience to the mighty one whose Napoleonic comportment and facial features combine characteristics of Hitler and Stalin. In his description of the work for an AAA press release, Grosz described the poets in savage terms as “shrunken men” whose abject figures represented “the negation of free expression in any form; speech, literature, art, music, worship and free will.”18 The 64

Exile and the One World Order

FIGURE 23. George Grosz,

The Mighty One on a Little Outing Surprised by Two Poets, 1942. Oil on high-density fiberboard, 71.5 × 51 cm.

work highlights Grosz’s persistent belief in the gulf between art and propaganda and the essential inability of art to intervene for positive change in an increasingly irredeemable world.

Exile and American Art In the years leading up to the United States’ entry into World War II, commentators inside and outside the exile community made much of the positive impact that European tradition could make on American culture as the country became refuge to artists and intellectuals fleeing the spread of war and fascism abroad. The reality of U.S. involvement in combat changed things, however. Under the circumstances, xenophobic fears intensified, not only in the broader political Exile and the One World Order

65

culture, but also in the art world. Critics weighed with increasing divisiveness the import of this historic moment of European cultural transfer for American art and the livelihoods of American artists. Did the artistic emigration help to enrich and renew American artistic traditions? Or would the presence of exile artists instead threaten to diminish exhibition and sale opportunities for needy U.S. artists? The year 1942 represented a high-water mark for the presentation of exile art and artists to this wary art world; it also spelled a turning point of much larger consequence, as exhibits of these exiled European traditions provided the critical context in which the stirrings of an American vanguard first began to make itself felt. Included in exhibitions of exile art at this time was the Free German Art show, which was unveiled at the Museum of Modern Art in June 1942 and featured the museum’s recent acquisitions of works by German modernists. Among them were sculptures by Ernst Barlach, whose pacifist memorials of the Weimar era had made him a target of Nazi vilification up until the time of his death in Rostock, Germany, in 1938. Works by Käthe Kollwitz and Emil Nolde were also included in MoMA’s recent purchases as examples of work by modern artists who still lived in Nazi Germany. In his opening statement for the exhibit, MoMA director Alfred Barr described the anxious obscurity in which these artists were forced to work. Their perseverance nonetheless affirmed for him a commitment to artistic nonconformity and the value of the expressive freedom to which their paintings and drawings testified. Barr took the opportunity of his opening address to rehearse MoMA’s role as a defender of individual artistic expression against tyranny and the strictures of Hitler’s parochial taste.19 He also situated the works in Free German Art within the larger context of a historic transfer of enlightened German culture to America’s shores. The MoMA director explained that Barlach had died unappreciated in Germany and that Beckmann, Kollwitz, and Nolde remained trapped inside Nazi Europe, where their art continued to be pilloried: But in free countries they can still be seen, can still bear witness to the survival of a free German culture which finds its archetype in Goethe and its living exemplars, so far as the other arts are concerned, in the musicians Hindemith and Schoenberg, the architects Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, the writers Mann and Werfel. These men and their works are welcome here, and although the painters Beckmann and Nolde, and the draftsman [sic] Kollwitz, cannot now leave Europe, the museum is proud to acquire and show their work, as well as the work of Ernst Barlach, the great sculptor who died recently (and without honor) in his own land. Free German Art also announced MoMA’s acquisition of Max Beckmann’s iconic triptych Departure (1933), which had served as a centerpiece of the museum’s Art in Our Time display of 1939.20 MoMA’s Free German Art exhibit thus drew public attention to the fate of modern German artists still working under the Third Reich. It did so, moreover, at a particularly volatile moment in public awareness concerning the extent and ferocity of the assaults against Jews then taking place in Nazi-occupied Europe. On June 29, CBS Radio was one of the handful of American news outlets to report on the World Jewish Congress conference then underway in London. The confer66

Exile and the One World Order

ence released a now infamous report compiled by observers in Poland that provided some of the most concrete evidence to date regarding the Nazi regime’s brutality against the Jews, including the use of mobile gas chambers as part of its evolving extermination campaign. Though understanding of the systematic nature of Nazi plans to annihilate the Jews remained elusive, the World Jewish Congress reports nonetheless made plain the appalling scope of Nazi atrocities.21 In the words of CBS broadcaster Quincy Howe: A horrifying reminder of what this war means to certain noncombatants comes from the World Jewish Congress in London today. It is now estimated that the Germans have massacred more than one million Jews in Europe since the war began. That’s about one sixth of the Jewish population in the Old World. Moreover, those Jews who survive lead a subhuman existence on a fraction of the already short rations to which the rest of the population of Europe is reduced. The Jewish population of Germany has declined from 600,000 to 100,000 since Hitler took power. Sweden, Switzerland and Portugal are the only countries in continental Europe where Jews still possess human rights.22 A month after this radio report, CBS and the Metropolitan Museum of Art approached Grosz about contributing to a broadcast interview on the topic “Art under Hitler,” concerning the current state of affairs for artists in Germany.23 As the interview typescript records, the subject for discussion was inspired by the writings of Wallace R. Deuel, the Berlin correspondent for the Chicago Daily News.24 Deuel was one among a group of U.S. correspondents who were in Germany at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack and were subsequently imprisoned and then exchanged for Axis nationals after the United States declared war on Germany, Italy, and Japan. On his return, Deuel reported on the mass graves and bonfires used to dispose of bodies he observed as evidence of ongoing Nazi efforts to rid Europe of its Jews.25 His book People under Hitler, published soon after, diagnosed the spread of Nazism and war as symptomatic of an ongoing “world counter revolution” against the enlightenment values of liberty, freedom, and the betterment of humankind. The Daily News correspondent also made unapologetic use of “racial explanation . . . advanced by the Nazis themselves” to assert the biological, physiognomic, cultural, and psychological factors that predisposed the German people to submit to Hitler’s rule.26 For his contribution to the “Art under Hitler” broadcast, Grosz was asked to respond to Deuel’s thesis concerning Nazism and whether a similar counterrevolution could also be perceived in the arts under Hitler. Rather than address the character of Nazi-approved art or the regime’s “counterrevolutionary” vilification of modernist tendencies, Grosz launched instead into a perversely playful disquisition in which he described his relation to Hitler as that of a doppelgänger. Specifically, he noted how both came from struggling petty bourgeois families. And they had both started out their artistic careers as “calendar painters,” making cheap reproductions and postcards. Since then, moreover, their fates had continued to shadow one another. Finally, their shared artistic status had compelled Grosz to depart his country of origin: “I left because of Hitler—​you know he is a painter too, and there didn’t seem to be room for both of us,” he explained. In his People under Hitler, Deuel had reached the conclusion that all Germans were not only alike Exile and the One World Order

67

but also similarly prone to Nazi leanings. By insisting on his likeness to Hitler, Grosz thus willfully confirmed Deuel’s racist thesis. He did so, moreover, with a mordant irony and a dark sense of humor that not only exposed the absurdity of Deuel’s speculations but also was likely altogether lost on CBS listeners. Grosz’s radio interview and the display of modern German art at MoMA in the summer of 1942 thus took place when anti-German sentiment in the United States was at an all-time high. Under the circumstances, the echt Deutsch character that Grosz insisted on foregrounding about his life and art did little to improve his sales and reputation. He, like other artists, also grappled with dwindling opportunities to exhibit at this time, as museum and gallery schedules were curtailed in general. In the case of German art specifically, the display and sale of such work became virtually untenable during the war.27 By far the most consequential presentations of exile art in mid- to late 1942 were those devoted to the School of Paris, whose leading exponents had been driven out by the fall of France. André Breton, Max Ernst, and other representatives of surrealism were recently arrived in New York thanks to Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee. In March 1942, the Pierre Matisse Gallery staged its Artists in Exile exhibit featuring the work of fourteen émigrés, including Ernst, Marc Chagall, André Masson, and Yves Tanguy. According to James Thrall Soby, who wrote an introductory essay for the catalogue, the presence of the exiles confronted the American art world with a stark choice. That choice was either to retreat into isolationism by continuing to uphold nationalist tendencies of regionalism and American scene painting or to embrace a new internationalism premised on the legacy of the exiled European modernism now in its midst. In his view, xenophobic reaction was beginning to loosen its grip with the first inklings of a positive change already underway: The choice is of final gravity, yet no one with vision will hesitate long over it. . . . Our enemies themselves have defined the disaster of which I speak—​by declaring that art is national or that it does not exist, they have established what may well be their most absolute perversion of truth. Fortunately, numbers of American artists and interested laymen are aware that a sympathetic relationship with refugee painters and sculptors can have a broadening effect on native tradition, while helping to preserve the cultural impetus of Europe. These Americans reject the isolationist viewpoint which 10 years ago sought refuge, and an excuse, in regionalism and the American scene movement. They know that art transcends geography. . . . These men know if the world is not lost, its borders must narrow, its lines of communication quicken and extend, until ideas achieve an almost immediate parlance around the earth. . . . These [exiled] artists have brought us art in high denomination. Let us therefore say to them, for their sakes but also for ours: Welcome, and welcome again.28 Artists in Exile was followed in October 1942 by the First Papers of Surrealism show, staged at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion on Madison Avenue. The exhibit was sponsored by the Coordination Council of French Relief Societies and organized by the recent émigrés Marcel Duchamp and 68

Exile and the One World Order

André Breton in collaboration with Sidney Janis. That same month, Peggy Guggenheim opened her Art of This Century Gallery, which programmatically addressed the relationship between European modernist traditions and an emergent American vanguard. It did so by routinely displaying Parisian avant-garde works along with those of younger, up-and-coming American artists. These exhibits of exiled artists solidified surrealism’s introduction to the United States. They also marked a turning point in which the surrealist vanguard came to be understood in the American art world as belonging to an artistic heritage now mainstreamed, commercialized, and slated to be surpassed.29 This perception of surrealism had been long in the making, largely because of the art and activities of Salvador Dalí, whose first major U.S. exhibit took place in 1934 at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York. In his correspondence at that time, Grosz noted the enormous success of the Levy Gallery show and the vogue Dalí’s art quickly came to enjoy among New York’s “highbrow-circles.”30 He also told of Dalí’s visit to the Art Students League in 1935, which was followed by lectures at the Museum of Modern Art and a surrealist-inspired bon voyage party before Dalí’s return to Europe.31 Grosz’s confidence that the impact of the Spanish surrealist would be shortlived, however, was soon belied by his growing appeal inside and outside the New York art world. Before and after his formal immigration to the United States in 1940, Dalí had proven himself adept at applying surrealist notions of fantasy and desire to the needs of mass advertising and the fashion industry in New York.32 His outrageous antics, including his destruction of shop windows at Bonwit Teller, his work with designer Else Schiaparelli, and his Dream of Venus pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, also demonstrated his talent for media-savvy self-promotion. Such antics had led to Dalí’s expulsion from the surrealist group by 1939; they also contributed to his reputation as America’s best-known exemplar of current European artistic tendencies. Dalí’s autobiography, titled The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, appeared in late 1942 to publicity and fanfare, which testified further to his popularity as a surrealist media icon.

Torn in Two Commercial success also led to charges of Dalí’s and surrealism’s waning significance in the artistic vanguard, however. Much to his dismay, Grosz too found his current work drawn into this eroding surrealist orbit. The occasion was a review by Edward Alden Jewell, of the New York Times, concerning Grosz’s work in the Whitney Museum’s annual show of contemporary American painting, sculpture, and graphic art in late 1942.33 Although Jewell had favorably assessed the technical proficiency and softened content of Grosz’s watercolor landscapes and nudes in his reviews of Grosz’s exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Associated American Artists gallery in 1941, he was significantly less impressed by Grosz’s I Woke Up One Night and I Saw a Burning House, which appeared in the 1942 Whitney show and was subsequently purchased by the museum for eight hundred dollars.34 For Jewell, Grosz’s I Woke still testified to his status as a master of technique. However, the “mystifying” content of his painting could be explained only by his unrewarding capitulation to a tired gimmickry increasingly associated with the surrealist fad. Exile and the One World Order

69

The critic summarized his response to Grosz’s work in brief and dismissive terms: “If surrealism at length means anything at all I suspect that the term would fit this strange nightmare.” Grosz complained of Jewell’s ungenerous review in a letter to Hermann Borchardt of December 1942.35 He acknowledged that I Woke entailed something of a nightmarish mysticism but insisted that the work bore no comparison to the “sophisticated game-playing” associated with surrealism. His art was in fact realist and better understood as a latter-day exponent of the northern masters and Adolf Menzel than of the “overly excitable surrealists,” he maintained. Grosz explained the situation to Borchardt as one of unintelligibility. He concluded from Jewell’s negative response that his work had acquired a seriousness that was now simply out of reach for the lighter tastes of American audiences. Surrealism’s waning fortunes were given added impetus in February 1943 when Klaus Mann attacked the movement in the pages of the American Mercury magazine. Grosz recommended the essay to his artist friend Arnold Rönnebeck and took particular note of Mann’s assault on Dalí and Breton.36 Calling surrealism “Nazioid,” Mann denounced current interest in the style as the cultural counterpart to the political “spirit of illogic, negation, [and] vandalism” characteristic of Nazism.37 Once a serious, revolutionary vanguard movement, surrealism in exile had devolved into the fashionability demanded of it by Park Avenue. Moreover, Dalí was only the first to sell out. Mann railed that his example had also been taken up by the recent émigrés Breton, Ernst, and others as evidenced by their presentation at the First Papers of Surrealism show. Given current circumstances, their playfulness could only be seen as a mode of diffident refusal to confront the current tragedy from which many of the surrealists had fled. Mann concluded, “The surrealists repeat themselves with dreary obstinacy. They fail to understand that their time is over. They do not grasp that their play-acting has become silly against the backdrop of a universal cataclysm. If they were not lacking in elementary tact, they would feel how stupid it is to praise the Marquis de Sade when hordes of sadists are making a shambles of civilization.”38 Growing demand for an art of relevance to the current world crisis served as the backdrop for an exhibit of Grosz’s work that opened at the Associated American Artists Gallery in February 1943. Organized by Pegeen Sullivan of the AAA, it was the only solo show of Grosz’s work to take place in New York during the war years. Though it included examples of his nude and landscape studies, the AAA highlighted his images devoted to themes of war and destruction. Of the thirty-eight works on view, several had already appeared in prominent exhibitions, including Last Battalion (1938), Apocalyptic Landscape (1938), Remembering (1937), I Woke Up One Night and I Saw a Burning House (1942), and Myself and the Barroom Mirror (1937). The AAA exhibit also introduced several additional pieces to New York audiences for the first time, such as The Mighty One on a Little Outing Surprised by Two Poets (1942) and The Wanderer (1943), an image that took its place in a series of Grosz works depicting a lone figure making its way through a stormy, mud-filled landscape (figure 24). Elements of death and destruction pervade The Wanderer, including scavenging birds that hover over decaying human remains and explosions that take place on the far horizon. An allegory of lost humanity, Grosz’s wanderer steadily continues—​with no apparent origin or destination—​through a ceaselessly grim landscape. 70

Exile and the One World Order

FIGURE 24. George Grosz,

The Wanderer, 1943. Oil on canvas, 75.5 × 101 cm.

In her review of Grosz’s show for Art Digest, Helen Bosworth confronted the dual nature of Grosz’s American production. She informed readers that lighter works reminiscent of the nudes and landscapes the artist had produced in previous years were indeed present in the show. Bosworth insisted that the current war had caused the artist to abandon the escapism of these themes, however. Their relevance now paled in comparison to the ferocity of Grosz’s “hell” pictures, which the critic praised for their powerful topicality. In Bosworth’s interview with him, Grosz traced the root of his current art to his “tortured memory” of World War I as yet another war raged on. He also clarified that the range of his works on display in the AAA show should not be viewed in the manner encouraged by Bosworth’s analysis. They did not, in short, define two different phases—​an escapist past and an engaged present—​in the artist’s creative production. His landscapes, nudes, and “hell” pictures betrayed instead his divided consciousness: “Like Goya, I am torn in two,” Grosz confessed. “It is like living in a haunted house. You can’t escape it and you can’t forget.”39 Bosworth’s favorable (if oversimplified) review contrasted with that of Jewell in the New York Times, whose estimation of Grosz’s art continued to decline. For him, the artist’s superior technique could no longer obscure the gratuitous nature of the grim and elusive subject matter of his oil paintings, which were without larger meaning. Such pointlessness also began to compromise the favorable evaluation Jewell had ventured in 1941 with respect to Grosz’s nudes and landscape works. In short, the artist’s current work in general struck the critic as shopworn. Though some of his American work had shown potential, his art in this later period had yet to live up to the quality of his Weimar production: “Themes in themselves terrifying or grim prove little more than demonstrations of a painter’s subtle and charming brush technique. Personally, too, I think we have now had about enough of those nudes in landscapes. That Grosz is a very able and sensitive Exile and the One World Order

71

painter none will deny. But he has not, save in the earlier caricatures and satires, put his art on an all-out basis. The real tests are to come.”40 Pegeen Sullivan wrote a commiserating letter to Grosz in which she dismissed Jewell’s lackluster review as akin to so much “French . . . talk of purity in art.” She complained that the New York Times critic was simply incapable of understanding work like Grosz’s, which continued, despite the current vogue for modernist abstraction, to recognize the importance of content and “deeper things to be said.” She also noted that Lloyd Goodrich of the Whitney had arrived at a different conclusion about Grosz’s current art. He was “excited over the whole exhibition” and considered Grosz one of the top American artists of the day, Sullivan wrote.41 Jewell himself came under attack shortly after the closing of Grosz’s AAA show. His review of a Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors exhibit held that June unleashed a firestorm of controversy when he confessed his befuddlement over the works of federation artists Adolf Gottlieb and Marc Rothko. Jewell was particularly at a loss to explain how their cryptic, surrealist-derived art could be understood to advance the organization’s expressed aim of ending nationalism and placing art on “a truly global plane.” Barnett Newman joined Gottlieb and Rothko in responding to Jewell with a polemic titled “Globalism Pops into View,” which appeared in the pages of the New York Times. In his authoritative study of the cultural politics of Abstract Expressionism, Serge Guilbaut has identified this controversy as a turning point in the establishment of an independent American vanguard at this time.42 The political polarization between new tendencies in American abstraction and styles of art that remained rooted in the figurative, such as Grosz’s, became all the more stark at this point, as evidenced by the publication of Sam Kootz’s New Frontiers in American Painting in 1943. Kootz’s prescription for the art world’s “new frontier” praised the virility and strength of the American vanguard then taking shape and denounced as fascist those artists whose work remained tied to the conventions of regionalism and American scene painting.43

We Challenge War Art This globalist sentiment in the art world mirrored broader interest in internationalist solutions to the current world crisis that fitfully claimed the attention of the American public beginning in mid-1942. A Gallup poll of July 1942 indicated that 73 percent of those questioned favored America’s entry into a new “united nations” after the conclusion of the war.44 This number was up from 33 percent in 1937 and 50 percent in 1941. Such sentiment was spurred on throughout the summer of 1942, which saw turning tides in the war with Japan’s defeat at the battles of Midway and Guadalcanal. In November 1942, German reversals at Stalingrad also captured headline news, as did the arrival of Allied troops in North Africa. However, the internationalist cause suffered a setback in the U.S. Senate and House elections of late 1942. Isolationist candidates won a series of upset victories over internationalist rivals as a result of growing public dissatisfaction with hardships engendered by the war. Internationalists at home and observers abroad began to fear America’s return to its staunch isolationism of the past.45 Roosevelt’s administration found it necessary to counter this isolationist sentiment as the 72

Exile and the One World Order

need to gird the increasingly war-weary public for further combat and greater sacrifice became apparent. In the spring of 1943, the Office of War Information launched a new bond campaign designed to counter flagging commitment to the war. Its most successful endeavor enlisted the work of Norman Rockwell, illustrator for the Saturday Evening Post. Rockwell’s patriotic covers for the Post worked throughout the war to forge consensus among the journal’s white middle-class readers about the American values in need of defense in the current conflict. In 1943, the OWI picked up Rockwell’s renderings of Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech of 1941 as the cornerstone of its new propaganda effort. His Freedom from Fear, Freedom from Want, Freedom of Speech, and Freedom to Worship were reproduced in poster format. They were also taken on tour, through which they helped to raise 132 million dollars in war bonds.46 Life magazine joined stepped-up efforts to ensure popular support for the war campaign during this period. It exhorted perseverance by drawing attention to those American lives that had already been sacrificed to the cause. In July 1943, the journal ran twenty-three pages with the names of the war dead.47 That September, Life also took the unprecedented and controversial step of publishing a photo released from the War Department’s so-called chamber of horrors.48 Contained in this chamber were documentary images of mutilated and dead American soldiers. The War Department censored these images in the early stages of the conflict as injurious to public morale. Some were now released in the hope of rallying desire to fight on in the interest of avenging the loss of American lives. Life accompanied publication of George Strock’s photo of dead American soldiers on Buna Beach in New Guinea with a lengthy editorial under the caption: “Three Americans. Where These Boys Fell, a Part of Freedom Fell: We Must Resurrect It in Their Name.” The full-page reproduction of the photo shows three dead U.S. soldiers with their bodies scattered like driftwood along the shoreline of a sandy beach (figure 25). A marooned landing craft appears in the middle ground with its gangway lowered and anchor dangling pointlessly overboard. Dampened clothes cling to the soldiers as they lie with limbs half-submerged in the sand beside waters that gently lap on the shore. Their limp bodies form a gentle arc that stretches from the foreground to the middle ground of the image suggesting an infinite regress of yet more dead. Grosz was among the tens of millions who subscribed to Life throughout the war years. Like the rest of the American public, he was subject to the manner in which the illustrated weekly played an unparalleled role in regulating home-front perceptions of the conflict. Life’s capacities in this regard were enhanced by the tacit claim to documentary truth that the journal’s extensive use of photographic illustration and access to previously suppressed War Department materials implied. Life’s function as an arbiter of the war experience was further amplified in late 1943 when Congress voted to slash funding for the War Department’s combat art program. George Biddle was among those working in a war zone abroad when the program was abruptly halted. Life stepped in immediately and commissioned Biddle and others to contribute to the journal, where their images from the front were to assume the status of unvarnished artistic reportage.49 Life also staged exhibits, including one unveiled at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the late summer of 1943. The patriotic display presented audiences with 146 works by its war artists, many of Exile and the One World Order

73

FIGURE 25. George Strock,

Buna Beach, New Guinea, Life, vol. 15, 20 September 1943, 34. © George Strock/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

which had previously been featured as illustrations in Life. Contributors to the show included the acclaimed combat painters Aaron Bohrod, Tom Lea, and Paul Sample.50 In September 1943, Grosz received a letter soliciting his participation in a show designed to counter the view of war on offer in Life magazine and its fall exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum.51 It came from the young artist and gallerist Fernando Puma, whose anti-establishment credentials had recently attracted attention in the New York art scene. In early 1942, Puma staged a protest exhibit featuring artists whose works had been rejected by the Carnegie International the previous year.52 He also opened his Penthouse Gallery at 108 West 57th Street later that year with the goal of circumventing the commercial art market and the demands of mainstream taste. The gallery was devoted first and foremost to the exhibition of Puma’s own “humanitarian” art in which he addressed issues of racism, class injustice, and the “causes, cures and results of war.”53 In his letter to Grosz, Puma wrote about his radio program and how he was using it to condemn the Life show. In a broadcast of 19 November 1943, Puma described as contradictory Life’s 74

Exile and the One World Order

claim to be fostering “art” devoted to the combat experience and the “propaganda” produced for Life by Biddle and others. Art’s task in the current conflict was above all to depart from allegedly objective reportage by capturing what the camera could not. Puma insisted that combat works produced for Life fell far short of true war art in this regard, specifically in their failure to register the subjective dimension of the artists’ psychological or philosophical responses to the events they witnessed. Puma’s radio address also announced his forthcoming protest exhibit titled We Challenge War Art. The show would counter Life’s version of the combat experience by drawing attention to the human cost of war. Whatever critical intentions Puma might have maintained by staging an exhibit critical of war were complicated by the heightened patriotism evinced by the country’s involvement in the struggle against fascism at the time. Puma therefore made plain that We Challenge War Art was in no way intended to oppose the struggle of “our democratic cause of freedom” against the “malignant powers” responsible for the conflict. By focusing on death and tragedy rather than on heroism, his planned exhibit also deviated little from the strategies then being used by the U.S. War Department to bolster the fighting resolve of the American public in the face of mounting casualties. Puma’s paradoxical display of war art in protest of war was not meant to rally support for further conflict, however. Rather, its intent was to forward the task of realizing a better future: “This exhibition strives to bring us face to face with the inhuman tyranny, bestial philosophy, devastating havoc and brute horror of our opposing forces. All great art is not and never will be pro-war, just as no decent and clear thinking human being can ever be. However this is not an anti-war exhibition—​this is an exhibition which is powerfully pro-our democratic cause of freedom, and forcefully anti-the malignant powers that have made this war. In all the art there is an inherent hope for a better world.”54 In his correspondence with Grosz, Puma highlighted the importance of his contribution to We Challenge War Art. Grosz, William Gropper, John Groth, and Puma himself were, in his estimation, among the few artists of the day “truly equipped to function in such a task as the painting of war.”55 In his initial reply to Puma, Grosz questioned the suitability of his pessimistic art for the exhibit. Moreover, critics responded negatively to his current work and found it too obscure. Grosz quipped that patriotic war propagandists like Rockwell (“they can paint the war nicely—​ they deserve their fame”) might be better suited for Puma’s project. Above all, he found it hard to discern a connection between Puma’s liberal humanism (his “ ‘idealistic’ belief in something”) and the skepticism Grosz continued to maintain.56 Despite these reservations, two of Grosz’s works appeared in We Challenge War Art when it opened at Puma’s New York gallery in November 1943. Included among the fifteen works on display were paintings and drawings by Puma, Grosz, Max Weber, William Gropper, Victor Thrall, and John Groth and three sculptures by Seymour Lipton. In his short introductory essay for the We Challenge War Art exhibit flier, Puma once again clarified the patriotic intent of the show despite its anti-war message. The show’s goal was to exhibit the works of artists who gave powerful expression to the “pathos, the martyrdom, the horror” of war absent from the combat art promoted by Life.57 Exile and the One World Order

75

FIGURE 26. Fernando

Puma, They Will Not Conquer, ca. 1943. Oil on canvas.

Puma’s show went virtually unnoticed in the press, save a brief review in Art News that lauded the “terrific impact” of the exhibit and its ability to show the “true nature” of war. It drew special attention to Grosz’s contributions: his 1942 painting of the apocalyptic rider titled I, I Was Always Present and a second work titled Fairy Tale, which the journal described as a portrayal of a “blood-gorged Nazi in the midst of his feasting.”58 The review also carried a reproduction of 76

Exile and the One World Order

FIGURE 27. William

Gropper, Pearl Harbor, ca. 1942. Oil on canvas, 61 × 76 cm. Reproduction courtesy of the Gropper Family.

Puma’s large-scale canvas titled They Will Not Conquer (figure 26). Highlighting war’s ravages on the human body, the semicubist work monumentalizes a mutilated figure with a bandaged forehead, bloody eye socket, and horrifically distorted facial features. Blood drips from the ragged stump of his missing left leg as he points a foreshortened right index finger directly at the viewer. Puma thus transforms the iconic pointing finger familiar from Uncle Sam (“Uncle Sam Wants You”) war recruitment posters into an accusatory gesture that indicts the painting’s viewers in the grotesque tragedy that has caused the figure’s mangled state. Groth’s painting titled Boots, which showed combat boots being removed from the body of a dead soldier, and Gropper’s Pearl Harbor, a work dedicated to the carnage of the Japanese assault that had launched the United States into World War II (figure 27), were among the other unheroic depictions of war featured in We Challenge War Art. In November 1943, Grace McCann Morley of the San Francisco Museum of Art contacted Puma to arrange for We Challenge War Art to travel to the museum, where it opened on 5 January 1944.59 Five works, including Grosz’s I, I Was Always Present, were temporarily missing from the San Francisco display at its opening, however. With Puma’s consent and at the request of Life, they were instead shipped to the magazine’s production studio in Chicago. There they were photographed in preparation for Life’s forthcoming coverage of the exhibition.60 The review appeared the following spring in the form of a derisive rebuttal that defended the work of Life’s eyewitness combat art against the “studio war art” promoted by Puma’s show. The magazine condemned images produced by “stay-at-home” artists as simply incapable of capturing the true experience Exile and the One World Order

77

of war.61 The rebuttal acknowledged Grosz as an exception in We Challenge War Art due to his experience of military service in World War I and foregrounded his contribution to the show with a full-page color reproduction of his I, I Was Always Present. Life coverage of the exhibit also included material from an interview with Grosz in which he confirmed that inspiration for his apocalyptic rider had not arisen from any experience of the current war. Instead it was an example of an intuitive artistic approach he had begun to use in recent years that involved allowing the experience of one thing to remind him of another.62 The end result was a work not of illustration but rather of association, and one tied not to reason but rather to irrational processes. In the case of I, I Was Always Present, Grosz explained that inspiration for the painting came to him one day when he was burning a pile of leaves on his lawn in Long Island. The sun was setting, and the horizon turned red “as if the whole country was on fire.” The wind blew, flames leapt up, and he saw a “huge rider galloping away,” Grosz recalled.63 Life ran Grosz’s description of his “stay-at-home” war art along with a photograph showing him posed in his studio next to his painting Still Life with Mexican Hat and Mask, of 1936. The photo’s caption included Grosz’s statement concerning his tormented war-related images like those included in We Challenge War Art. In terms that further vitiated whatever critical mileage Puma might have wished to gain by including him in his anti-war exhibit, Life reported that Grosz found war-related imagery an unwelcome distraction from the sort of still life painting he now preferred to do.

The Satirist Returns? The deflating cynicism and irony ascribed to Grosz in Life’s critical rejoinder to We Challenge War Art were also much on display in an interview with him that appeared in November and December 1943. Conducted by Richard O. Boyer, the interviews ran as a lengthy, three-part series in the pages of the New Yorker.64 They also served as advanced publicity for Grosz’s autobiography, which he began under contract with the Dial Press in 1941 and worked on assiduously throughout the war years. Boyer’s interviews acknowledged Grosz’s persistent desire to leave his German past behind and to be recognized as an American artist. This past nonetheless formed the central focus of the exposé. Prompted by Boyer, Grosz provided vivid detail about his childhood and art school origins, as well as about his involvement with Dada and experience of Nazism in Germany. During the Weimar years, his politicized images sided with the radical left in its struggle against class exploitation, militarism, and German institutions of authority. For the New Yorker, however, Grosz downplayed the partisan aspect of his earlier satiric illustrations and described these works instead as a documentary chronicle of a corrupt German middle class responsible for Hitler’s rise to power.65 He combined this documentary understanding of his art with details of his personal experiences to provide New Yorker readers with insight into Germany’s troubled past as a means for explaining its tragic present. Departing from the documentary significance Grosz thus ascribed to his Weimar art, Boyer

78

Exile and the One World Order

characterized his recent allegorical paintings and drawings as an art of exile. These works were possessed of an emotional intensity rooted in a traumatic past the artist was incapable of leaving behind. Referring specifically to Grosz’s depictions of wanderers, Boyer wrote, “They often show bomb-gutted buildings or depict Grosz himself plodding through a swamp, while behind him, in flames, is the European world he was forced to leave. Many critics see in these paintings, which they agree show consummate craftsmanship, the essence of a time in which whole peoples have been uprooted and slain.”66 By way of explaining his lack of success in the U.S. art world, Grosz confirmed Boyer’s emphasis on his outsider, exile status. He described himself as the quintessential German: moody, haunted, alienated, and fundamentally unsuited to the upbeat optimism and commercial imperatives of American culture. Norman Rockwell was his artist-hero, whose fame as a cover illustrator for the Saturday Evening Post he professed to idolize: “‘Now, there’s a really great artist. . . . How I envy him his money!’ ” Grosz exclaimed with a mixture of mawkishness and envy.67 With the New Yorker interviews and the Dial Press commission for his autobiography, Grosz found his waning success as an artist inversely matched by growing interest in his life story as an exile from Nazi Germany. Dwindling sales of his art nonetheless continued to exacerbate his precarious financial situation, as he confessed to Bertolt Brecht when the two met in New York in early 1943. Brecht’s first visit to the United States took place in 1935, when he came to oversee the poorly received production of his play The Mother, which was performed by the Theater Union in New York. Grosz’s last contact with his long-time friend had taken place in 1937 over efforts to secure Hermann Borchardt’s release from Dachau. In 1941, Brecht fled Europe for Southern California, where he found himself “exiled in paradise” along with Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, Fritz Lang, Arnold Schoenberg, and other leading figures of the emigration.68 Brecht arrived in New York on 12 February 1943 at the invitation of Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research.69 He came hoping to establish a foothold in New York theater. He also immersed himself in the activities of the organized exile community, which became especially energized at that time by Germany’s recent reversals in the war. The community was also increasingly alarmed by mounting evidence of Nazi efforts to annihilate Europe’s Jews. Ben Hecht, for whom Grosz illustrated the short story collection 1001 Afternoons in New York in 1941, published one of the first articles in a major American journal to address the Final Solution. His account appeared in American Mercury in February 1943 under the title “The Extermination of the Jews” and was released in condensed form by Reader’s Digest shortly thereafter.70 By then, Hecht had gravitated toward the controversial Peter Bergson, whose militancy split the organized Jewish community in the United States as he fulminated against more moderate factions for support of a Jewish army and the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.71 Hecht’s American Mercury essay drew on reports filtering out of Germany, Hungary, France, the Ukraine, and Romania regarding atrocities—​gassings, shootings, hangings, and burnings—​committed against the millions of Jews living in Europe and the USSR. His words imagined the peace to follow in a world slated to be rid of its Jewish populations at the hands of Hitler’s murderous regime:

Exile and the One World Order

79

When the plans for the new world are being threshed out at the peace conference, when the sentences are being passed and the guilt fixed and the plums distributed, there will be nothing for the Jews of Europe to say to the delegates around the judgment table but the faint, sad phrase, “Remember us!” They will have only one political statement to offer and that will be that the manner of their dying must remain one of the measures of the German soul.72 In March 1943, Hecht wrote the script for a star-studded pageant at Madison Square Garden titled “We Will Never Die,” which premiered on the 9th of that month. Brecht’s former theater collaborator Kurt Weill composed music for the performance, which was produced by Billy Rose, directed by Moss Hart, and starred Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson.73 Forty thousand viewers came to the first performance, and overflow crowds prompted a second. It also traveled to Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, and Hollywood. This event and the press attention it managed to draw contributed to a growing perception that Allied inaction concerning the plight the Jews of Europe rendered the United States, Great Britain, and other forces arrayed against Hitler partly guilty for the Jews’ fate.74 Brecht was among those exiles who took part in the “mammoth” anti-war program against Nazi Germany staged the following month, in April 1943. Manfred George and Ernst Josef Aufricht, editors of the New York–​based German Jewish journal Aufbau, organized the event as part of the syndicated radio series We Fight Back, which showcased anti-fascist artistic and intellectual luminaries of the emigration.75 Participants in the event, which took place at Hunter College, included Piscator, Weill, and Lotte Lenya in addition to Brecht and other prominent exiles. Several of Brecht’s anti-war poems were recited.76 Following the program, artworks and manuscripts contributed by Brecht, Ludwig Wronkow, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel, Arnold Schoenberg, Lion Feuchtwanger, and others were sold in order to raise money for U.S. war bonds.77 Brecht’s further interactions with the exile community in New York included his collaboration with another of Grosz’s long-time friends, Wieland Herzfelde. Herzfelde had been in New York since June 1939. An increased Gestapo presence and vandalism of his Malik Verlag in Prague drove him from Czechoslovakia the previous fall.78 He fled first to London and then arrived in New York, bent on immediately reviving his publishing house. A first step in that direction took place in late 1941 when Herzfelde founded the Tribune for Free German Literature and Art in America and opened his Seven Seas bookstore.79 The tribune staged a German-language production of four scenes from Brecht’s semidocumentary anti-fascist play The Private Life of the Master Race, directed by the screenwriter and stage director Berthold Viertel in May 1942.80 Through a series of short scenes, the play covered conditions of brutality and exploitation in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1938. By highlighting class divisions and elements of resistance within the regime, it also aimed to impede the view that all Germans supported Hitler. The following March, Herzfelde’s tribune also sponsored a recital of Brecht’s poetry and plays in the Studio Theater of

80

Exile and the One World Order

the New School for Social Research, which included performances by film stars Peter Lorre and Elizabeth Bergner.81 Grosz and Herzfelde were in regular contact since Herzfelde’s immigration to New York in 1939; with Brecht’s arrival in 1943, Grosz was able to renew yet another long-standing friendship with a member of his radicalized artistic circle of the Weimar years. Brecht was in time to visit Grosz’s solo exhibition at the Associated American Artists Gallery, in which he was able to view the range of Grosz’s recent production, including his nudes and landscapes and works devoted to scenes of war and destruction.82 Grosz wrote Borchardt at this time about his undiminished appreciation for Brecht’s creative talent, satiric wit, and independent Marxist views, despite his enduring faith in an eventual communist triumph.83 His uncompromised feelings of friendship and respect for Brecht also appear to have been reciprocated. After Grosz confided in his old friend about his lack of sales and worsening financial outlook, Brecht kindly arranged for an exhibit of Grosz’s work in San Francisco.84 He also attempted to rekindle Grosz’s political engagement by having him illustrate a published version of his Private Life of the Master Race. His negotiations with Grosz eventually fell through, however. Though the specific reasons for his withdrawal from the project are unknown, Grosz more than likely found the gulf between Brecht’s political outlook and his own skepticism difficult to negotiate. Their connection was hindered not only by Brecht’s Marxism but also by his firm belief that an improved Germany receptive to Brecht’s progressive theater would survive the war.85 The Private Life of the Master Race finally appeared in late 1944 without Grosz’s contribution.86 Like Brecht, Herzfelde too remained committed not only to communism but also to the possibility of bringing Grosz back into the leftist fold. He managed to do so, if only in an oblique fashion, through an essay he penned about his early creative collaboration with Grosz. Herzfelde presented it as a gift to Grosz on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday in July 1943; he also published it in the pages of Harper’s Magazine that November.87 Grosz’s New Yorker interviews had emphasized his identity as a German exile and downplayed his radical past. By pointed contrast, Herzfelde’s contribution to Harper’s foregrounded Grosz’s role as a dissident artist by recalling his Dada years and his place in an internationalized avant-garde during World War I.88 Titled “The Curious Merchant from Holland,” the essay reminisced about the origins of their friendship, which dated back to World War I when Herzfelde first encountered Grosz through the expressionist painter Ludwig Meidner. Meidner’s Berlin studio became a haven for Herzfelde and other dissidents soon after World War I began. Herzfelde recounted how Grosz presented himself to the bohemian assembly of anti-war artists and writers gathered there as a well-groomed, impeccably dressed businessman from Holland. He also recalled the shock and incredulity of the group as Grosz regaled them with a profit-making venture using the war wounded. His intent was to capitalize on the market for combat memorabilia: “Now, listen. I let the stuff be collected, sorted, and packed. Then, my cripples will neatly and carefully paint them by hand, with the Iron Cross framed in ivy—​oh pardon, in oak leaves—​and with some motto, something like ‘Of Great Times’ or ‘Every Shot Hit the Spot.’ For more pious people maybe something like ‘Our God Who Planted Iron’ or ‘God Gave Us and God Saved Us.’ You get what I mean.” Exile and the One World Order

81

Soon after this (perhaps apocryphal) incident, Herzfelde and Grosz began their notorious collaboration on the journal Neue Jugend (New Youth). Herzfelde organized the publication in 1916 for the purpose of disseminating Grosz’s caustic and politically dissident illustrations as part of the growing anti-war movement at that time. His reminiscence about “the merchant from Holland” and his early Dadaist performance clearly delighted Grosz in its emphasis on his long-standing penchant for irony and role playing. Assuming one of his old alter egos (Georges Leboeuf ), Grosz reciprocated Herzfelde’s gift by inscribing on a copy of Neue Jugend: “to my only genuine friend who has understood me ‘from the beginning’—​as a small token from the merchant from Holland—​Georges Leboeuf.”89 Herzfelde’s essay served at the same time to remind Grosz and his American audience of Grosz’s radical past. It also suggested that his intractable personality might still be given progressive critical purpose. In this instance at least, Herzfelde’s recollection of Grosz’s satire on war profiteering indeed served as a timely commentary on the war profiteering and exploitation that were as much in evidence in the current war as they had been during World War I. The publication of “The Curious Merchant of Holland” coincided in time with controversies spawned by the decision of the U.S. Congress to end wartime strikes with the passage of the anti-labor Smith-Connally Act in mid-1943. Until war’s end, critics on the left railed against the soaring corporate profits that resulted from this legislation. Meanwhile workers were asked to make ever-greater sacrifice in patriotic support of America’s ongoing role in the conflict.

One World In the end, Brecht and Herzfelde failed to rally Grosz and his art for the exiled left at this time. However, a project at the end of 1943 brought Grosz back to the sort of satiric illustration work for which they had first come to know him. He received a contract at that time from Sydney Baron, a New York political publicist, journalist, and management consultant. Baron had recently completed a satire that lampooned the exploits of Roosevelt’s one-time presidential rival Wendell Willkie, and he wanted Grosz to illustrate it.90 Willkie’s name had recently catapulted to the forefront of political discussion in the United States. Fearing resurgent isolationism, Roosevelt enthusiastically endorsed his former rival’s plan to undertake a world tour premised on the internationalist platform Willkie had used in his unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1940.91 This tour was also undertaken in response to growing calls within the U.S. government for an international security arrangement against future world war. Willkie departed in August 1942 and over the course of forty-nine days flew to Allied fronts in China, the Middle East, and the Soviet Union. Newsreels covered his travels; on his return, he also delivered radio addresses about his experiences. Most important, Willkie published his observations in his resulting book, titled One World, which appeared on 8 April 1943 and immediately broke sales records.92 By June 1943, it had sold over one million copies, and 20th-Century Fox Studios soon optioned the book for a film.93 It was also serialized in popular journals, translated into foreign languages, and distributed to the American armed forces.94 82

Exile and the One World Order

FIGURE 28. Designer Herbert Bayer, curator Monroe Wheeler, “Global Strategy” section, Airways to

Peace, Museum of Modern Art, 2 July to 31 October 1943. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Digital image © 2011 MoMA, NY.

One World argued that Hitler’s propagandistic success was predicated on his intention to eliminate national borders in Europe and to streamline the continent for the free flow of commerce. Willkie’s plan countered the Third Reich by envisioning a one-world order in which individual nations would remain as political, but not military or economic, entities. He endorsed the United Nations as the facilitator of worldwide economic cooperation in which the unfettered activity of markets would lift people out of poverty and eliminate ignorance. Willkie argued further that the United States could dominate this new world order economically. He reasoned that the country’s exemplary reputation in business would also allow it to do so without exercising political or military control. In July 1943, the Museum of Modern Art contributed to the media barrage surrounding Willkie’s One World with a widely acclaimed exhibit titled Airways to Peace: An Exhibition for Geography of the Future. Monroe Wheeler curated the show, and the exiled Bauhaus designer Herbert Bayer developed its installation. The display gave physical form to Willkie’s circumnavigation of the globe and the commanding, sovereign view of a world remade in the image of American capitalism that his text implied.95 Airways to Peace featured maps, spheres, models, photos, drawings, paintings, and photomurals arranged in sequence so visitors could see how human knowledge of geography had developed and been recorded (figure 28).96 Other rooms of the exhibit showed the evolution of the airplane and sites of American military engagement, including places where the Exile and the One World Order

83

FIGURE 29. Herbert Bayer and assistants installing the “outside-in” globe, Airways to

Peace, 1943. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Digital image © 2013 MoMA, NY.

FIGURE 30. “Outside-in” globe, Airways to Peace, 1943. © Artists Rights Society (ARS),

New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Digital image © 2013 MoMA, NY.

84

FIGURE 31. Entrance,

Airways to Peace, 1943. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG BildKunst, Bonn. Digital image © 2003 MoMA, NY.

United States was currently deploying its superior air power in the militarily questionable project of laying waste to German cities.97 The show also featured President Roosevelt’s fifty-inch, five hundred pound globe given to him by the War Department as a Christmas gift in 1942.98 Airways to Peace argued that conquest of the air had yielded superior military might and advanced scientific understanding of world geography. Displays underscored the inadequacy of the flat Mercator maps of the past and presented spherical globes instead as the only means by which to understand accurately the relationships and distances between places and continents. Photos used in publicity for the exhibit show Bayer atop a ladder in the process of constructing his fifteen-foot high, “outside-in” globe (figure 29). The globe allowed visitors to experience a cartographic consciousness superior to the mapping systems of the past by inviting them to adopt an unobstructed, commanding view of the world. Other photos capture Bayer’s inverted globe suspended serenely from the ceiling in a central room of the exhibit (figure 30). Its exterior lattice of bracings mimicked the lines of longitude and latitude used in global cartography. The ocean waters of the globe’s Southern Hemisphere were cut away in order to allow visitors to enter the sphere’s interior. The inside afforded them a sweeping view of the Northern Hemisphere and the relations between the most populated regions of the earth, including North America, Europe, the Soviet Union, and East Asia. Willkie supplied commentary for the photographs, maps, and globes of this show, which was planned to tour the United States. Visitors encountered his summation of the exhibit’s propagandistic value as they entered the display (figure 31). Sidestepping the carnage that air power had enabled, he described the conquest of the air as instead enabling a changed and better underExile and the One World Order

85

standing of the world: “There are no distant places any longer: the world is small and the world is one. The American people must grasp these new realities if they are to play their essential part in winning the war and building a world of peace and freedom. This exhibition tells the story of airways to peace.” Willkie’s One World unleashed an avalanche of books and pamphlets that galvanized widely publicized debate in the American Congress concerning whether and how the United States would establish itself as an international power at the end of the war. Walter Lippmann, whose ideas on an international security arrangement Grosz had responded to favorably in 1940, departed from the idealism of Willkie’s vision.99 Rejecting any notion of a peaceable spread of American-style capitalism, Lippmann called instead for a postwar “nuclear alliance” among the Allied powers of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union. His book U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic appeared in July 1943. Within a few short months, it sold five hundred thousand copies; by August it was second to One World on the New York Times best-seller list and for a time became number one.100 Largely lost amid these competing publications was the Century of the Common Man, which was also released in 1943. Penned by Vice President Henry Wallace, the volume argued for the construction of a postwar order free of nationalism and devoted instead to a worldwide New Deal of democratic egalitarianism, economic justice, and cultural exchange.101 Wallace’s conservative, corporate, and hawkish liberal detractors were quick to dismiss his vision of a world devoted to the common man as communist-inspired “globaloney.”102 Sydney Baron contacted Grosz in November 1943 in the midst of this frenzy of one worldism inspired by the publication of Willkie’s acclaimed book. He had penned his own response to this thinking and now sought out Grosz to supply the illustrations. Baron’s anarchic narrative emphasized the interminable debates in the U.S. Senate that watered down and procrastinated on legislation designed to plan for a postwar order. It also lampooned the media frenzy and tabloid coverage that accompanied those debates. Above all, One Whirl’s target was the dubious relationship between one-world order visions such as Willkie’s and a world populated by less-than-democratic leaders of other states.103 According to the volume’s dust jacket, the idealism of Willkie’s vision had resulted in little more than posing a danger to democracy by inspiring thoughts of “appeasement” within the U.S. State Department.104 Grosz’s cover illustration for One Whirl underscored Baron’s lampoon of Willkie’s idealism (figure 32). His image also departed altogether from the message conveyed about Willkie’s thesis in MoMA’s Airways to Peace exhibition, of the summer before. There, Bayer’s “outside-in” globe hovered in MoMA’s gallery space as a majestic symbol of a world made accessible to the sovereign gaze of the American Century. Grosz’s globe for One Whirl is instead propped up by crude wooden supports as the cracking and sagging sphere tilts on its axis. Reminiscent of publicity photos showing Bayer at work on the MoMA installation, Grosz also depicts workers furiously scrambling up a rickety ladder in their efforts to tack together Africa, Europe, and the Soviet Union into a makeshift contraption held together by battens, nails, glue, and bailing wire. Grosz produced an additional twenty-six illustrations for Baron’s satire that complemented the narrative setting for One Whirl. The satire unfolds at the end of the war. Hitler has blown his 86

Exile and the One World Order

FIGURE 32. George Grosz,

frontispiece for Sydney S. Baron, One Whirl (New York: Lowell Publishing Company, 1944).

brains out, which Grosz depicts as a bit of tabloid journalism next to the sex and scandal page (figure 33), and Tojo has finally surrendered (figure 34). Following these events in Baron’s satire, the “Temporary Commission for the Organization of a Permanent World League of Cooperating Sovereign Nations Dedicated to the Preservation of International Peace, Prosperity, and Happiness” (with the absurd acronym TCOPWLCSNDPIPPH) calls for a world peace conference. A new world war nearly breaks out over the fight to determine where it will be held. Following Roosevelt’s suggestion, the conference convenes aboard a ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. In attendance are a host of “would-be” democrats, including Franco, Molotov, Chiang Kai-Shek, Marshall Pétain, and Rudolf Hess as an observer (figure 35). The situation is finally “resolved” in Baron’s satire when exhaustion over bigotry, oppression, and the loss of life gives way by default to a desire for democracy and liberty. Mortimer Hays provided an introduction for Baron’s One Whirl that ascribed an earnest purpose to his “irreverent” satire.105 For him, it captured something of the “rough and tumble” Exile and the One World Order

87

FIGURE 33. George Grosz, Hitler’s suicide

FIGURE 34. George Grosz, Tojo surrenders in Sydney S.

in Sydney S. Baron, One Whirl (New York:

Baron, One Whirl (New York: Lowell Publishing Company,

Lowell Publishing Company, 1944), 103.

1944), 119.

complexity and negotiation that were to be expected of a democratic process moving toward a democratic resolution to the current world crisis. As chairman of the Committee for a Democratic Foreign Policy, Hays had weighed in months before on the unilateralism that vexed dealings between the United States and the Soviet Union in planning for peace in a postwar order.106 In a letter to the New York Times of September 1943, Hays’s committee advanced a six-point program intended to reverse this alarming trend of antagonism between the two powers. Included in those points was a plea to recognize the Soviet Union as an equal ally and to commit to tripartite discussion and agreement among the United States, the USSR, and Britain in the handling of Europe and the building of a postwar democratic order. Central to these discussions was Germany’s future. In its six-point program, Hays’s committee called specifically for cessation of inflammatory provocations between the USSR and the Allies regarding preparations for a post-Nazi order in Germany. These provocations included the founding in Moscow of the National Committee of Free Germany (Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland, NKFD) in July 1943. Composed of exiled German Communist Party members and German pris88

Exile and the One World Order

FIGURE 35. George Grosz,

world peace conference delegates in Sydney S. Baron, One Whirl (New York: Lowell Publishing Company, 1944), 85.

oners of war, the NKFD sought to convert other German prisoners of war to their cause, infiltrate the German Wehrmacht, and distribute propaganda to the German population in an effort to turn them against the Hitler regime.107 Looming behind the NKFD and its efforts were the larger geopolitical struggles that had already preoccupied Allied thinking about the postwar order.108 At the Casablanca conference of January 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt met to press their demand for unconditional surrender by the Axis powers over and against Stalin’s more lenient view, which included a commitment to preserving Germany and its military after Hitler’s defeat. The NKFD also endorsed leniency as a more viable way than the threat of punishing surrender to foster resistance within the Reich. From the perspective of American and British strategists, Stalin’s approach to Germany’s postwar fate signaled little more than Moscow’s design for European hegemony. The Moscow-sponsored NKFD’s quick instigation of other Free Germany organizations in England, France, Sweden, Switzerland, and Latin America only added to these suspicions. In the United States, a meeting to found an American affiliate of the NKFD took place at the home of Berthold Viertel in Los Angeles on 1 August 1943. It resulted in little more than blistering acrimony between Brecht and Thomas Mann after Mann first endorsed, then retracted, his support for the organization.109 Like others Exile and the One World Order

89

inside and outside the emigration, Mann came to view the NKFD as a front for the manipulation of the anti-Hitler exiles in the interest of Soviet foreign policy aims.110 In November 1943, the communist left journal New Masses circulated a rumor that the U.S. State Department sought to use Mann in its effort to counter this Soviet influence. It reported that the plan included selecting Mann to head up a Free Germany committee of exiled politicians aligned with U.S. interests, who would be placed in positions of power in Germany after the war. Factions in the exile community were indeed actively working at this time to found such a committee, with Mann as its leader. Contrary to the conclusions reached in the New Masses, however, the State Department worked in concert with the Foreign Nationalities Branch of the Office of Strategic Services, not to realize, but rather to scuttle, any such organization.111 Such an appointment for Mann was in any event highly unlikely given his recent address before the Library of Congress, in which he reiterated his belief in a future world order grounded in social democracy.112 In a letter to the editor of the New York Times, Mann dismissed the New Masses rumors concerning his interactions with the State Department as false. He also argued that the moment was inopportune for the formation of any such organization.113 Like members of the NKFD, Mann opposed any plan for a harsh treatment of Germany at war’s end. But he also maintained that the exiles were in no position to give anyone advice on how to handle a defeated Germany following the long and difficult war it had imposed on the world.114 Grosz’s One Whirl contract thus unfolded against this backdrop of heightened and increasingly vitriolic debate over an imagined one world postwar order that captivated international relations, the U.S. government, and the exile community. Countering Soviet visions of future international communism as a guarantor of peace were the ideas of Willkie in the United States for human betterment through the spread of American-style capitalism following Hitler’s defeat. On the other hand, Luce and Lippmann envisioned a more robust, if not bellicose, arrangement predicated on America’s defense of it interests worldwide. For the German exiles, the flashpoint of debate pitted communists like Brecht and Herzfelde against Mann and other social democrats in contrasting visions of Germany’s place in this future world order.

Germany after Hitler If Grosz’s work for Baron’s One Whirl satire can be taken as an indication of his own thoughts on the matter, he evidently continued to maintain a jaundiced view of any future world order whatsoever. Regardless, this commission contributed to a brief period of improved financial circumstances for him at the beginning of 1944.115 His diary entries for that year also show his attention to the rapidly changing crisis in Europe. Notations for January and March indicate that Grosz spent evenings with Felix Weil, Max Horkheimer, Ernst Bloch, and others of the exile community during a period in time when efforts were under way to form an organization inspired by the Free Germany movement begun in Moscow the year before.116 Called the Council for a Democratic Germany, the organization was established in March 1944 by the liberal Protestant theologian Paul Tillich. 90

Exile and the One World Order

In contrast to Free Germany, the council was intended from the outset to be ecumenical in its political outlook. The New York Times announced its formation and intent to represent all political interests within the emigration, from adherents of the Catholic Center, a centrist political party dissolved by the Nazi government in 1933, to parties of the far left.117 While disclaiming any role as a government-in-exile, the council nonetheless set about laying the groundwork for political democracy, reeducation polices, and measures to achieve unity among all anti-Nazi elements in Germany after the war. Its declaration also made plain that it opposed any attempt to divide Germany or to impose either an eastern or a western orientation for its democratic future. The Times report noted the council’s insistence that an abiding peace could be won only through international cooperation and the development of a “new organization of Europe in which all nations can find health and security.” John Dewey, Alvin Johnson of the New School for Social Research, the journalist Dorothy Thompson, and thirteen other leading figures in the areas of education, law, labor, journalism, and the church were listed among the council’s American sponsors. German signatories included Tillich, Brecht, Piscator, Elisabeth Bergner, Peter Lorre, Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, and twenty-four other refugee government ministers, trade union leaders, professors, artists, and intellectuals. The council’s efforts were closely scrutinized from the start by U.S. intelligence agencies concerned about its aims and possible impact on U.S. foreign policy.118 Internally, Tillich’s organization proved itself incapable in the end of avoiding political conflicts, in particular those between social democrats and communists over what orientation a postwar Germany should have to the USSR.119 The council also ran aground in its efforts to urge a lenient peace for Germany following Hitler’s defeat. Tillich was among those who wanted to avoid a repeat of the national humiliation that had followed the Treaty of Versailles, particularly as details of the Morgenthau plan were leaked to the public in September 1944.120 The plan called for reducing Germany to its preindustrial past by dismantling its technological capabilities and restricting its economic basis to agriculture. Tillich’s council sought to avoid any postwar settlement that might engender a culture of national resentment and extremism similar to the one that had plagued the Weimar Republic in its waning years. It therefore downplayed evidence of Nazi genocide in a tactic to remove questions of German guilt from ongoing deliberations regarding the country’s future.121 The World Jewish Congress was among the organizations that condemned the council for attempting to whitewash Germany’s heinous crimes. Meanwhile, the editor of Aufbau urged Jewish members of the emigration to withhold their support.122 Their opprobrium was all the more sharpened as news of the grim fate of Jews subject to the Nazi puppet regime in Hungary made its way into press headlines at this time.123 Tillich’s organization also came under attack from without the exile community by the Society for the Prevention of World War III. The society began publishing its short-lived journal in May 1944. Its first issue declared its goal to expose German guilt, secure a harsh peace for the country, and crush any vestiges of lingering pan-Germanism. The society’s president, detective novelist Rex Stout, assailed the Council for a Democratic Germany explicitly by asking, “We have been fooled once by a so-called German ‘democracy.’ Must we be fooled again?”124 The organization’s twenty-seven member advisory council included Clifton FadiExile and the One World Order

91

man, William Shirer, and Mark Van Doren, in addition to Grosz’s friends George Biddle and the anti-modernist art critic Thomas Craven. Under the circumstances, the implications of Biddle’s and Craven’s long-standing promotion of American figurative art over and against a corrosive European modernism now assumed a more threateningly xenophobic political relevance. In an exchange of letters with Richard Huelsenbeck about Craven at this time, Grosz confessed that he had come to regard the critic’s “Heimatprogramm” as too “narrow and nationalistic,” despite their years of friendship and Craven’s active support of Grosz’s art.125

Cain Though Grosz appears to have had no involvement with the Council for a Democratic Germany, his interactions with members of the emigration no doubt alerted him to the debates on German guilt the council’s actions spawned during this period. In the spring of 1944, Ben Hecht extended Grosz something of a personal reprieve from these questions of German responsibility for the Hitler phenomenon. In a letter of May 1944, Grosz wrote to his friend thanking him for a copy of his recently published semiautobiographical book, Guide for the Bedevilled.126 Hecht’s Guide was an unbridled attack on anti-Semitism that elicited not only support for the author’s rage over Nazi atrocity against the Jews but also criticism for his racist argument that denounced the German people as a “race” predisposed to murder.127 For Hecht exceptions to this deplorable racial rule were the “orphan” Grosz and members of his Dadaist circle whom he had met in Berlin after World War I. Exempt too were their descendants, “the German underground of today” engaged in mortal struggle against the Hitler regime. Furthermore, Guide also described in lengthy detail Hecht’s presence at a “Dada Concert of the Arts” presided over by Grosz, “the founder” of Dada’s “cult of laughter,” which highlighted Dada’s hatred for German militarism and conformity following the calamity of World War I. As for the present-day Grosz, Hecht concluded: “The German orphan long ago gave up his brief revolution through laughter. Ridicule, he discovered, is never a match for the ridiculous. But he still exists, in and out of Germany. And his is a pariah more pathetic than his friend, the Jew. He must roam the strange streets of the world—​the German freak who is not German; the two per cent of humanity trapped under German hair cuts and behind German wing collars.”128 In his letter to Hecht, Grosz praised his friend’s book as “fabulous” and confessed to being “moved” by Hecht’s characterization of him as “the orphan of mother Germany.” Guide, Grosz wrote, “is full of bitterness and rips open all the old wounds that most of us try to hide from.” Furthermore, its discussion of anti-Semitism managed to put before the public eye the dissemination of the “infectious sickness from old Europe” in the United States. Although he admired Hecht’s fighting spirit, Grosz nonetheless found any sense of idealism elusive and overshadowed by nihilism and suicidal thoughts. He wrote, “The more forward I move in my work, the more it changes, and suddenly all is fire, ruins, and mud and overall dreadful rubbish—​as though someone, who knows more and is thoroughly destructive—​drives me on—​I don’t know how—​strange and depressing.”129 92

Exile and the One World Order

FIGURE 36. George Grosz, Cain, or Hitler in Hell, 1945. Oil on canvas, 99 × 124.5 cm.

Grosz’s apocalyptic outlook spilled over into his diary notations for this period that marked the landing of Allied forces in France in June 1944 and Colonel von Stauffenberg’s failed attempt on Hitler’s life in July. He was also no doubt aware of news accounts that began to detail the horrors at Auschwitz beginning in June.130 On 7 November 1944, Grosz cast his ballot for Roosevelt’s fourth term as president. Diary entries from June through December of that year record a period of intensive work on Cain, or Hitler in Hell (figure 36).131 As discussed in the opening pages of this chapter, he turned his attention to the project shortly after U.S. entry into the war. In a letter to Erich Cohn of early 1942, Grosz described how he planned to adapt the painting from the So Cain Killed Abel lithograph included in his Interregnum portfolio of 1936. He also informed his patron that his work on Cain was part of the echt Deutsch direction that dominated his production at this time.132 Grosz’s handling of the Cain and Abel theme in Interregnum had taken its place within a range of responses to Hitler that circulated within and outside the exile community in the first years of the Nazi regime. Brecht’s “Housepainter Anthems” satirized Hitler as an artistic and political incompetent. Grosz’s rejoinder in So Cain Killed Abel played on the Nazi leader’s lowrank military status during World War I by caricaturing Hitler as a beleaguered corporal seated on a drum beside his dead brother Abel. The work also served at this early date to allegorize the Exile and the One World Order

93

situation in Germany as a pointless act of familial murder that exiled the nation, like Cain, from normative society. As we encountered in chapter 1, Thomas Mann elaborated further on the theme of kinship and dualism contained in the Cain and Abel story for his essay “Brother Hitler,” of 1939. Mann’s controversial text explored Hitler’s identity as a fellow German and a fellow artist. It also enjoined the “other Germany” of the exile community to reflect on its role in the country and culture that had given rise to Nazism. Building on psychoanalytic analyses that described Hitler as a “split personality,” Mann and other commentators inside and beyond the exile community soon came to see Hitler’s troubled identity mirrored in the German nation itself. Books by Peter Viereck, Klaus Mann, Erika Mann, and others also reinforced a perception of Germany’s history as burdened with a long and divided legacy of enlightened achievement and tragic reaction. The conditions of exile caused Grosz to understand himself and his art as evermore tied to this troubled national legacy. Indeed, as we have seen, dualistic notions of a split or divided identity emerged as an overt dimension of Grosz’s “Germanic” and “torn in two” artistic posture by the early 1940s. The following pages trace the evolution of Grosz’s work on Cain as a startlingly painful summation of his personal historical experience on the eve of Hitler’s demise. We shall also explore the manner in which the work registers Grosz’s darkly unredemptive response to the discussions concerning Hitler, German culture, and the country’s history and role in a new world order that dominated exile debates as the war neared its end. A studio photograph taken sometime in 1943 or 1944 shows Grosz in the process of transforming his 1936 lithograph into a large-scale oil version of Cain (Figure 37). The artist’s posture mirrors that of Hitler as he sits before the canvas and cradles his painter’s palette in the crook of his left arm. At this stage, Grosz’s rendering of Cain conforms closely to the 1936 precedent. The figure of Hitler appears once again dressed in a corporal’s uniform, crouching on a drum, and mopping his perspiring brow. Also similar to the 1936 image are the rifle that rests against Hitler’s left shoulder and the wilted flowers he grasps in his left hand, which Grosz described elsewhere as emblems of Hitler’s “uprooted dreams—​dreams that were once beautiful, but now gone, strangled by his fingers.”133 The barbed wire fence and patrolling guard depicted in the lithograph have been removed at this stage in Grosz’s reworking of the image, however. A gallows with hanging skeletons replaces these elements in the upper right-hand corner of the composition in a direct reference to the presence of this motif in Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Triptych of Death, of 1566.134 Grosz periodically updated his dealer, Reeves Lewenthal, concerning his progress on the canvas. In one note, he drew a connection between Cain and Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children (1819–​23), the Spanish master’s allegory of the collapse of Enlightenment values in the wake of Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. Goya’s work depicts Saturn, king of the gods, as the monstrous embodiment of unreason and entrenched authoritarianism who devours his offspring out of fear of being deposed. For Cain, Grosz wrote, he had portrayed Hitler as a “giant eating [his] own children,” similar to Goya’s nightmare vision. Different from Saturn, however, the children in Cain return from the grave to plague their vengeful father: as “victims of fascism” they appear as “licelike skeletons” that “rise up to devour their creator,” he explained.135 94

Exile and the One World Order

FIGURE 37. Photo of George Grosz painting Cain in his studio, Douglaston, Long Island, 1943.

These allusions to Brueghel and Goya link Cain in its transitional state to a long tradition of Germanic and romantic era artistic precedents that had informed the artist’s turn to tradition since the mid-1930s. In its final version of 1945, Grosz’s Cain brings the legacy of this artistic past into identification with a war-torn present that Grosz regarded as similarly irrational and subject to human destructiveness. The work does so specifically through its subtle evocation of one of the most inflammatory and widely discussed images to appear since America’s entry into the conflict, namely, George Strock’s photograph of dead American soldiers at Buna Beach. The earth, mud, and rock that appeared in Grosz’s earlier handling of the Cain and Abel theme are recast in the 1945 canvas as a landscape that is both more abstract and closer in character to the beach captured in Strock’s arresting photo. The painting transforms the site of Hitler’s atrocity into a space defined by painterly dashes of white, silver, and tan pigment. These whorls of color suggest rippling pools of water, collect like eddies of shifting sand, and disperse in a fiery red pictorial field. As if to heighten this allusion to a beach-like setting, Grosz renders the figure of Abel with the tattered pants of a castaway whose body has been washed up on the painting’s semiabstract shoreline. Meanwhile, light falls on the left side of Abel’s prone body, illuminating the bloody lacerations that mark his naked upper torso. In its relative simplicity and figural arrangement, Cain also more closely echoes the spareness and broad compositional arc of the Buna Beach image. There, the trail of American dead leads the eye from the prone soldier in the left foreground toward the lifeless body of his fellow marine Exile and the One World Order

95

shown in the middle ground to the right. The arc then returns to the left in the background, where yet another soldier lies dead along the receding shoreline. In Grosz’s Cain, Hitler’s skeletal victims and the body of Abel instead define the painting’s compositional sweep, where they serve to equate those dead and dying at the hands of Nazi atrocity with the ravages of a world at war captured in Strock’s photo. Meanwhile, the explosions of light and fire that appear on the far horizon in Cain complete the arc and replace the white curls of churning water that lap up onshore in the Buna Beach image. Bodies portrayed in both works appear partly submerged in the ground. Grosz further amplifies the horror implicit in Strock’s photo, however. Abel’s lacerated figure and tattered clothing meld into their surrounding environment in a manner that suggests not only death but also bodily putrefaction and decay. Strock’s Buna Beach photograph (figure 25) and its indictment of the human cost of war thus makes its appearance in Cain in an altered and displaced form consonant with the “associative” processes that Grosz adopted in his art at this time. This Life image likely struck a chord not only with Grosz’s pessimistic outlook but also with his disdain for the affirmative patriotism that had dictated the character of most exhibits, films, and illustrated media of the time. These elements of death and destruction encircle the figure of Hitler, whose monumental form fills the left hand side of Cain. Like his more abstract handling of the landscape, Grosz’s rendering of the Nazi leader also departs significantly from his 1936 lithograph. Specifically, the painting dispenses with Hitler’s corporal’s uniform, hat, and rifle. These omissions make the work less specific and more allegorical; the absence of these elements also brings more sharply into view the connection of this image to Grosz’s self-portrait of 1937, titled Remembering (figure 10), in which the artist had used a similar composition and palette. Viewed together, Remembering and Cain assert the doppelgänger relationship between himself and Hitler that Grosz had playfully described for CBS Radio audiences in 1942. The depiction of Hitler in Cain indeed mirrors that of Grosz in Remembering through the similar portrayal of posture, tousled hair, the down-turned mouth, and eyes cast in shadow. Most startling, however, is the element of anguished self-reflection that informs the depiction of both figures. In the case of Remembering, this self-reflection was grounded in Grosz’s troubled memory of the Germany he had left behind but could not escape. In Cain, self-reflection suggests acknowledgment—​if not remorse—​as Hitler casts his eyes toward his brother Abel and the evidence of his heinous act. The result is a disturbingly empathic portrayal of Hitler at a time when such an understanding of the Nazi leader was all but unthinkable. Arnott White of the Associated American Artists gallery addressed this aspect of Cain when Grosz’s work on the canvas was underway. He detected in Grosz’s Hitler not the blind, unthinking monster he was reputed to be. Rather, what he saw in Cain was instead a surprising glimmer of humanity: “a seeing hate” and a “torturer being tortured,” who yet had the ability to “escape to truth.” In Grosz’s Cain, “the enemy is not unhuman, inhuman yes, but not unhuman,” White provocatively concluded.136 White’s distinction between the unhuman and the inhuman in Grosz’s Cain recalls, once again, the essay “Brother Hitler,” in which Thomas Mann had insisted that Hitler could not be dismissed as an “inhuman” aberration. He was instead part of the self-same culture as the “other” 96

Exile and the One World Order

Germany that many in the exile community understood themselves to represent. Mann had therefore exhorted the exiles to critical self-reflection. For him, the way forward lay in the willingness and capacity of Germans to confront their kinship with Hitler and to acknowledge their responsibility for the country and culture that had enabled his rise to power. In his self-projection as Hitler in Cain, Grosz went beyond Mann’s appeal to this kinship and critical self-reflection, however. His work posits instead a direct identification unrelieved by any redemptive distinction between himself and the Nazi leader. To Mann’s claim “my brother is Hitler,” Grosz’s Cain thus responds: “I am Hitler.” Grosz completed Cain in February 1945. His diary notations at that time record newsreels of the Yalta Conference of 7 February, at which Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin (who looked “rather like stuffed dummies,” according to Grosz) planned the final defeat, occupation, and administration of Germany.137 In February 1945, Felix Weil attempted to recruit Grosz for a project then under way at the Institute for Social Research, which he had endowed that spring with a hundred thousand dollars to continue its wide-ranging study on anti-Semitism.138 Though the nature of Weil’s specific request to Grosz remains unknown, it may well have involved his contribution to postwar reconstruction and reeducation efforts in Germany. Grosz declined Weil’s request, as he had those of Brecht, Herzfelde, and others who had attempted to rally him to their causes in the past. He was unsuited for “propaganda work” and the broad intelligibility such work demanded, he insisted. Some might construe his recent paintings such as Cain showing Hitler as a fascist monster or an apocalyptic beast “consumed by his own thoughts and children” as “pure propaganda.” Contrary to such views, however, Grosz described his art as, above all, deeply personal, artistically ambitious, and “more sublime” than any work directed at the masses.139 Writing to Horkheimer concerning Weil’s request in April 1945, Grosz recommended George Schreiber of the Associated American Artists as an artist whose experience with war propaganda and contract work might better suit the institute’s needs.140

Götterdämmerung in the Mud In April 1945, President Roosevelt died, and the United Nations convened as a formal organization in San Francisco while the war ground to its end. On 7 May 1945, Grosz recorded Germany’s defeat in his diary. Hitler committed suicide, the Battle of Berlin reduced the capital to rubble, and the German army leadership signed the terms of surrender. Harry Truman, who assumed the U.S. presidency after Roosevelt’s sudden death, announced the end of the war in Europe on 8 May. By then, Allied forces had completed the grisly process of liberating Nazi concentration and death camps. The horror they revealed soon became incorporated into propaganda efforts. The American occupying army invited journalists, Congress people, and Hollywood personalities to view the places of genocide. They also compelled German civilians to do the same as part of the army’s psychological warfare campaign aimed at enforcing notions of collective guilt among the remaining German population.141 Photos of recently liberated camps also flooded Life, Time, Newsweek, and other illustrated Exile and the One World Order

97

news journals in the United States. This grisly evidence exposed to the world the crimes of the German people and their leadership. Mann’s address to Germany, which was transmitted by the Office of War Information, reflected on these revelations: The thick-walled torture chamber that Hitlerism had made of Germany is broken open, and our disgrace is bared to the eyes of the world. Foreign commissions who have been shown these incredible scenes report home that the horrors they have seen exceed anything that men could imagine. It is our disgrace, German readers and listeners, for every German—​everyone who speaks German, writes German, has lived as a German—​is affected by this shameful exposure. It is not a small clique of criminals who are involved; hundreds of thousands of a so-called German elite—​men, youths, and brutish women—​ committed these misdeeds in morbid lust under the influence of the insane doctrines of National Socialism. Call it the dark potentialities of human nature in general that are revealed here, but remember that it was Germans, hundreds of thousands of them, who revealed those potentialities. The world shudders at the sight of Germany. No German was free of guilt in Mann’s view, even those like himself who “escaped in ample time” from the horrors that were to unfold.142 Mann’s anguished address before the Library of Congress in May 1945 further amplified these observations.143 Other leaders in the German exile community still clung to their identity as the “other Germany.” They also continued to downplay German guilt in their efforts to ensure the restoration of Germany after Hitler’s defeat. Facing incontrovertible evidence of Nazi crimes, Mann, in his statements to the Library of Congress, confessed that any belief in an “other Germany” had lost all validity for him. There were not “two Germanys,” Mann insisted. And any attempt to absolve German guilt should only elicit revulsion. His views thus came to reflect a crushing historical consciousness proximate to that evident in Grosz’s Cain, in which the distinctions between innocence and guilt, self and other, enlightenment and barbarism, had all but collapsed. In early August 1945, Walter von Molo published an open letter to Mann in the Hessische Post and the Münchner Zeitung. The former president of the Prussian Academy of Arts implored him to return to Germany in order to aid in the country’s reconstruction efforts. Mann refused by stating his willingness to endure the profound pain and dislocation of exile over and above return to what had become for him a “foreign” and “frightening” country. “I confess that I am afraid of German ruins—​not only the rubble but also the people,” Mann wrote, declaring his intention to remain in the United States.144 For his part, Grosz was not to visit Germany until 1951, even though when war came to an end his dealer, Reeves Lewenthal, was among those who urged him to do so in order to revive his role as a penetrating observer of his country of origin. The only serious thought Grosz appears to have given such a return at this time is recorded in a letter to Hecht of June 1945. He confessed to his friend that he had so far resisted the entreaties of Lewenthal and others but that he was now interested in finding a way for Hecht to travel to Europe with him so that they might create their own chronicle of a defeated and occupied Germany.145 For Grosz, making the trip with a “good 98

Exile and the One World Order

FIGURE 38. George Grosz,

The Survivor, 1944. Oil on canvas mounted on Masonite, 80.6 × 100 cm.

friend and a good writer” like Hecht was important. They would be a “good team,” he concluded, with Hecht using his accomplished skills as a journalist of the “hardnosed Chicago school” and with Grosz supplying the drawings. Nothing ever came of this overture, however, even though the two men remained in contact after the war.146 Grosz turned instead to committing his views on Germany’s collapse to a canvas titled The Survivor, which won second prize (seven hundred dollars) at the Pittsburgh Carnegie Museum’s Painting in the United States exhibit in late 1945 (figure 38).147 The Survivor depicts a lone, aging warrior creeping through a landscape of mud, brambles, splintered wood, and broken tree trunks. The warrior’s splayed legs and torso help to complete the spokes of the Nazi swastika symbol evoked by the painting’s overall composition, which, true to his “associative” approach, Grosz claimed to have arrived at wholly unconsciously.148 In his description of the painting for Reeves Lewenthal, Grosz distinguished his manner of rendering war from that of Picasso, whose work in that regard he found “too abstract.” The Survivor instead relies on realism and palpable texture to capture the twilight of a senseless fighting spirit: “It is as if the mud itself came to life[;] it symbolizes the complete spiritless carrying on the never surrender, devoid is this creature of all reasons, the very essence of Naziphilosophie . . . the Gotterdammerung in the mud,” Grosz explained.149 Indeed, the survivor fights on, though no one is left to fight. The warrior’s figure and the swastika symbol thus combine into a concentrated image of an irrational and decaying paranoid fanaticism. In an interview with John Baur in 1954, Grosz claimed further that his image of the crazed warrior was based on his brother-in-law Otto Schmalhausen, who had been taken into the German army “despite his [advanced] age.”150 What Grosz did not disclose to Baur was his falling out with Schmalhausen in 1937 after he began to Exile and the One World Order

99

express pro-Nazi views in his letters to Grosz.151 His private evocation of Schmalhausen in Survivor thus served to underscore the deeply personal nature of the tragedy that consumed him and other members of the exile community at this time. American reviewers, by contrast, seized on the more general, allegorical character of the work and praised Grosz’s award-winning canvas as a “definitive” commentary on the war.152 By August 1945, America’s nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had brought the war in the Pacific to an end. Old conflicts gave way to new ones the following spring when Winston Churchill delivered his Iron Curtain speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. The advent of the Cold War prompted U.S. officials to abandon the principle of collective guilt that had emboldened hard-line plans for visiting a punishing peace on the defeated Germans. With communism replacing Nazism as the main threat to American interests, U.S. policy makers set about reconstructing Germany as a bulwark against the USSR. Henry Luce helped shape public opinion accordingly by using his media empire of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines to decry “overemphasis on denazification” efforts and to push instead for the country’s rapid rehabilitation.153 In the waning years of the war, however, mounting evidence of German atrocity, coupled with the concerted efforts of Hecht, Bergson, the World Jewish Congress, and other advocates for Europe’s Jews, had raised the question of guilt, not only of Germans, but also of all those who failed to act against the Nazis’ extermination campaign in advance of Allied military victory. As we have explored, Grosz addressed this question of guilt in startling terms by invoking his painful identification with Hitler in Cain, his allegorical self-portrait as the Nazi leader. For him, what the world came to know about Germany by war’s end only served to confirm his darkest speculations about his country of origin and the horror unleashed by the Germanic culture his art so unflinchingly explored from the mid-1930s onward. As he once confided to Hecht, this period was filled for him with an inescapable feeling of nihilism and thoughts of suicide that drove him to continue painting, even though these efforts seemed inevitably to end in “fire, ruins, and mud and overall dreadful rubbish.”154 This devastating self-scrutiny and reflection took a different form for Thomas Mann when he delivered his speech “Germany and the Germans” at the Library of Congress in May 1945. There, Mann referred to his country of origin as a combination of progress and reaction, of “efficient modernness on the one hand and dreams of the past on the other.”155 He thereby suggested that Germany’s tragedy was not extrinsic but rather integral to that of modernity, both its potentials and its crimes. In Mann’s hands Germany’s dream and nightmare of totality thus became a cautionary tale. That tale carried a warning not only for modern Western civilization but also, and more immediately, for the American Century and its dreams of a one-world order whose emergence Mann and Grosz witnessed at this time. After 1945, the chill of the Cold War swept that warning aside as the lessons of the German tragedy became eclipsed by looming confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. Indeed, in this new era, dreams of one world confronted the reality of a postwar world divided treacherously into two.

100

Exile and the One World Order

3

EXILE IN THE AGE OF ANXIETY Only a painter who has gone through the whole modern hell can create a new center. George Grosz, 1950

IN LATE 1946, Fortune magazine published Ralston Craw­ ford’s painterly abstractions in a pictorial exposé on atomic testing at Bikini Atoll.1 The brief essay made clear that photographs, charts, and cartographies, which had once served to orient Fortune’s readers in an expanding global consciousness, were no longer adequate to the task of grasping a reality now subsumed under the awesome forces unleashed by nuclear physics. Crawford’s ren­ derings of broken and dissolved forms provided readers with an effort to “represent the unrep­ resentable and to illustrate the unthinkable” in a world in which past solutions and repositories of meaning appeared to have evaporated in the gas chambers and irradiated fallout of the atom bomb.2 This age of anxiety saw the emergence of existentialism as a powerful philosophical ten­ dency that captured both the catastrophic and liberatory sense of a profoundly changed world. Existentialists heralded the erosion of political, religious, social, and other preordained structures and systems conventionally invoked to give human life meaning. In the words of Jean-Paul Sar­ tre, man was “alone” and “condemned to be free.” This age of la condition humaine confronted man with responsibility for forever making his own existence without recourse to some sense of “essence” or any external guide to action.3 Existence precedes essence, and “man is nothing other than what he makes of himself. This is the first principle of existentialism,” Sartre intoned.4 101

The art critic Harold Rosenberg announced abstract expressionism as the art most capable of fulfilling this existentialist imperative. His landmark “American Action Painters” essay of 1952 described a new generation of artists whose nonobjective works had managed to wrest authentic expression from the crushing weight of the past and a degraded contemporary condition.5 They had done so by jettisoning all received artistic convention and successfully transforming the canvas from “a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyse or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined,” into “an arena in which to act.”6 Like other figurative artists during this period, Grosz found his work eclipsed not only by the “triumph” of these abstract expressionists but also by a Cold War cultural divide in which figuration became increasingly associated with political reaction. This chapter considers Grosz’s varied responses to and engagements with existentialism after World War II. Most important in this regard is his Stick Men series of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Grosz’s last major body of work before his death in 1959. These paintings and watercolors explore the fate of the figurative tradition to which Grosz subscribed at a time when the rational, centered human subject on which that tradition was based appeared to have lost all validity. Indeed, the concept of exile, understood as the experience of displacement and political persecution, now came to describe for Grosz the fate of a human existence evermore isolated, alienated, and threatened by an increasingly administered world. During the Cold War, notions of one world also became for him the terrifying specter of an inhumane totality composed not only of Soviet dictatorship but also of the American commodification of everyday life. We shall examine Grosz’s Stick Men images as symptomatic of this dark vision of the new postwar world order. The following pages will also attend to the ways in which the gray, dehumanized beings depicted in his troubling Stick Men works configure what Grosz called a “new humanity” amid a contemporary art scene marked by these imperiled humanist values.7 At the conclusion of this chapter, I discuss a semicommercial contract Grosz undertook in 1952 that required him to produce a series of paintings and watercolors commemorating the city of Dallas. Grosz’s dealer, Reeves Lewenthal, arranged the commission at the behest of the Dallas department store owner Leon Harris. Harris was interested at the time in establishing himself as an art patron and cultural arbiter of Dallas’s modernizing profile and emergence as a financial center of the American Southwest. At first glance, the Dallas contract might seem to bear little in common with the serious exploration of existentialist themes that preoccupied Grosz’s artistic imagination during this period. Grosz himself certainly saw it that way and complained bitterly about having to forgo his artistic integrity in order to “sell himself” for the project out of a desperate need for income. However, this commission too enabled Grosz to explore themes inspired by existentialism. As described by George Cotkin in his book Existential America, existentialism was not simply a philosophical tendency but also a phenomenon with a deep and transformative cultural impact in the United States at this time.8 For instance, Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex) of 1949 helped spark the feminist movement with its existentialist challenge to notions of female “essence” that subtended patriarchy and its oppression of women. Also important for

102

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

Cotkin is the manner in which the writings of de Beauvoir, Sartre, and others provided philosophical underpinnings for the assaults on racism that fed into the civil rights movement of the 1950s and beyond. Grosz arrived in Dallas in time to witness the incendiary beginnings of this movement. His paintings of Dallas in 1952 traced yet another dimension of the challenges that faced one-world universalism at this time. In this case the challenge emerged not from Cold War geopolitical rivalry but rather from the accelerating forces of democratizing social change and the alternative visions of the world to which that change fitfully gave rise.

A Piece of My World The bleak tenor that marked much of Grosz’s existentialist art was no doubt shaped by what he learned as lines of communication, disrupted in the war, became reconnected. Immediately after Germany’s surrender, letters began to reach him from friends and family members who were still in Europe and desperately appealing for money and supplies. They also recounted in vivid detail the fate of the starving and displaced. Grosz and his wife, Eva, responded generously with care packages, financial assistance, and efforts to send news and reassurance through intermediaries and contacts in Europe. In October 1945, Grosz learned that his mother and his aunt had died in one of the bombing raids that reduced Berlin to rubble in the final stages of the conflict. In a letter to his long-time friend Mark Neven DuMont in Britain, he communicated his catastrophic sense of the war. It had claimed not only his mother’s life but also anything to remember her by: “God, there is really no European who has’nt [sic] lost some of his people, relatives, or nearest friends. . . . My mother disappeared in on[e] of those late strong bombassaults [sic] on Berlin . . . disappeared, not a trace left . . . only an enormous bombcrater.”9 Grosz’s letters continued to express a personal sense of tragedy as he put names and faces to the dislocation and trauma that unfolded in the months and years following the war. He told Neven DuMont of the fate of Eva’s younger sister, Anneliese, who had fled with her children from her home in Finow, near Berlin, as Russian soldiers approached. Grosz had news of her through John Dos Passos, who was then in Germany working with Life magazine. He also learned that Anneliese’s husband was in an American prison in Italy. Eva’s other sister, Lotte, and her husband, Otto Schmalhausen, had fled from their home on Savignyplatz in Berlin to Finow in order to escape the bombing. Facing starvation there, they returned to Berlin to find their family residence reduced to a ruin with no windows and heating. Grosz also confided to Neven DuMont that Lotte had been raped by Russian soldiers and that she and Schmalhausen were having to beg for food.10 Grosz commemorated this heart-rending news with an image inspired by his mother’s death.11 Titled Peace I, the painting takes its place in a series of works dating from the late 1930s and early 1940s in which Grosz returned time and again to themes of displacement, dislocation, and wandering (figure 39). In Remembering of 1937, he had depicted himself as a traumatized refugee reduced to the clothes on his back and waiting for rescue as the life he knew lay in ruins

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

103

FIGURE 39. George

Grosz, Peace I, 1945. Oil on canvas, 66 × 51 cm.

around him. In his many portrayals of wanderers from this period, lone figures served as allegories of a lost humanity searching for a way “home” as they plied their way through forbidding landscapes with the aid of walking sticks and lantern lights (figure 40). Peace I introduces a new type into this repertoire of images, namely, that of the vagabond.12 Unlike Grosz’s refugees and wanderers, this figure wears a heavy coat and scarf and carries its worldly possessions in a bag strapped across its shoulder. Its shriveled facial features lend it an indeterminate gender resonant with the many images of displaced persons, rubble women, and others similarly deprived, desexualized, and made desperate by the unfolding tragedy in Europe.13 The figure emerges from a crater-like space and into a scene where low-standing walls, scraps of splintered wood, and pieces of twisted metal are all that remain of what once was. In a sadly wishful gesture occasioned by the death of Grosz’s mother, the vagabond in Peace I passes through a shattered world, enduring what his mother could not. It carries on self-sufficiently with its meager possessions in a homeless world, no longer tied to or looking for a home to which to return. Peace I was unveiled to the public as part of a major retrospective of Grosz’s art that took place 104

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

FIGURE 40. George Grosz, No

Let-Up, in Interregnum, 1936. Lithograph, 28.8 × 21.7 cm.

in October 1946 at the Associated American Artists gallery in New York.14 Titled A Piece of My World in a World without Peace, the show featured seventy-one works dating between 1916 and 1946. It included none of the landscapes, nudes, and New York City images that Grosz had produced since his emigration in 1933. Pegeen Sullivan, AAA director and organizer of the exhibit, restricted her selections instead to those works from Grosz’s long career that assailed militarism, Nazism, and war. Echoing the premise of Fernando Puma’s We Challenge War Art exhibit of 1943, Sullivan insisted that people now needed Grosz’s “particular kind of intuitive understanding of war.” That understanding, she wrote, probed tragedy far more deeply than those artists who “went across” to render the war and its effects firsthand.15 A Piece of My World featured plates from ­Grosz’s earlier graphic portfolios, including his image of Christ on the cross wearing combat boots and a gas mask, from Hintergrund (1928), and several drawings from Interregnum (1936). Remembering (1937), The Last Battalion (1938), I, I Was Always Present (1942), The Survivor (1944), and Cain (1945) were among the oil paintings also put on view. In addition, several works that the AAA catalogue described as “destroyed by Nazis” were Exile in the Age of Anxiety

105

hung alongside Grosz’s paintings and drawings in the form of photostatic reproductions. This gesture played up once again the manner in which he and his art had served as exemplars of persecuted modernism in the wake of the Degenerate Art show of 1937.16 However, Grosz’s introductory essay for the catalogue distinguished his work not only from photography and newsreels but also from current tendencies of abstraction and, more pointedly, from expressionism, which had been fully incorporated into a depoliticized, modernist, Weimar in Exile culture during the war years. His art bore nothing in common with expressionist interiority, Grosz insisted. He described his images instead as emphatically, even painfully, directed outward: “[In] contrast to the ‘expressionists’ I try to recreate my world as realistically as possible. . . . Over and over again I say to myself: Be more exact . . . more exact . . . because the more of a nightmare it is, the more I must recreate it in an understandable way.”17 Grosz further acknowledged that the detailed draftsmanship of his art put his paintings and drawings more in touch with the work of medieval masters than with that of his modernist contemporaries. But such detail, he insisted, was in keeping with the allegorizing mode that had characterized his art for some time. Closer to Aristotle’s notion of “the pleasure of recognition” than to Plato’s “abstract speculations,” his images remained intelligible yet nonetheless open, like a parable or a fairy tale, to multiple definitions and meanings. They spoke to ongoing events while also expressing what Grosz characterized as his “gloomy and haunted” commentary on the seemingly inescapable human propensity for violence and atrocity. As we have seen, Grosz’s pessimistic art found little acceptance within the culture of patriotism that dominated the American art world during the war years. Friends and critics had attempted at various times to recruit and reshape Grosz and his art to suit the aims of war propaganda, anti-war protest, pro-communist agendas, and the purposes of postwar reeducation efforts—​all to little or no avail. In the wake of World War II, however, it appeared to many of his friends and supporters that history had finally caught up with Grosz’s caustic outlook. In her biography of Grosz, Kay Flavell describes the AAA exhibit as a resounding critical success, though it did little in the end to bolster flagging sales of Grosz’s art. However, responses to the show did indeed for the first time acknowledge in positive terms the tragic vision and expressive power of his post-1933 work.18 Ben Hecht, whose collaboration Grosz had solicited the year before for a chronicle of postwar Germany, was among those who underscored the timely importance of Grosz’s art in a short commentary for the Piece of My World catalogue. There, Hecht described his images of war and brutality as nothing less than a “storm of derision and protest” that bore unflinching witness to an irredeemable era and “the great phenomenon of our century—​the collapse of human reason.”19 Herzfelde also contributed an essay to the catalogue that told once again of his first encounter with Grosz during World War I. Grosz’s art was for him a “Cassandra’s voice,” both prophetic and misunderstood in its own time, that had helped to radicalize Herzfelde during their early days together in Berlin. Since Grosz’s arrival in the United States, his art had remained infused with the tragic, despite claims from some quarters that he had become merely a “romantic painter of dunes, woods, and nudes” after 1933. On the contrary, Herzfelde insisted, Grosz had continued to produce denunciatory drawings and paintings about the spread of fascism and war in Europe. 106

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

However, such works were “rarely exhibited,” unlike the nudes, still lifes, and landscapes that his American production also comprised. For Herzfelde, this revealed the fundamental lack of freedom that Grosz had encountered in a U.S. art world unwilling to entertain the uncomfortable and critical character of his recent art. Moreover, America at war had frustrated the artist’s desire to find refuge there from the conflict that had driven him from Europe in 1933. For Herzfelde, Grosz’s work remained an unceasing clarion call for peace and hope for a better world left bereft by recent atrocities: “War is and always was the center of the artist’s cosmos. His whole work is fundamentally a curse against war. He sensed it coming in Europe, and went to America longing for freedom and peace. And he found war again, in a world from which no escape exists, since it is, though in shambles and pieces, one world, for better or worse.”20 Within Grosz’s intellectual and artistic circle the response of others to his AAA show was also overwhelmingly positive. Brecht and the actor Charles Laughton were among those who attended the “fully packed” opening.21 The two were in the midst of reworking Brecht’s Galileo into an indictment of atomic warfare and the murderous use of science following the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.22 Others sent letters of praise to Grosz, including the gallery dealer Curt Valentin and his friends Ulrich Becher, Berthold Viertel, Walter Mehring, John Dos Passos, and Edmund Wilson of the New Yorker, among others. Wilson especially urged Grosz to return to Germany to record the terrible and continuing tragedy there. His command of German tradition and its troubled history ideally positioned him to record his nation’s current crisis: “I wish that you would revisit Germany and do a series on the whole mess there: Germans, Americans, British, French and Russians. You are the historian of tragic modern Germany as well as the carrier-on of the noblest German tradition, and you ought to complete the record.”23 Pegeen Sullivan worked with the Dial Press on publicity and window displays in order to coordinate the timing of A Piece of My World in a World without Peace with the publication of Grosz’s illustrated autobiography, A Little Yes and a Big No.24 Grosz began work on the manuscript in 1941 and previewed its contents in the series of interviews that were published by the New Yorker in 1943. Like those interviews, the completed volume focused mainly on Grosz’s years in Germany. It also recounted his arrival in the United States, his efforts to establish himself as an American artist, and his interactions with the German exile community. A chapter devoted to Ernst Toller described the writer’s suicide in 1939 as due to the grinding demands of an American culture industry that Grosz, too, had found difficult to master. In another chapter, Grosz recounted his meeting with Thomas Mann in New York in the early 1930s, their vigorous disagreement over Mann’s idealistic faith in the German people, and their divergent views at that time on the question of how long the Nazi regime would last. True to the autobiography’s sardonic title, A Little Yes and a Big No, these sensitive and idealist portrayals of Toller and Mann serve first and foremost to highlight by contrast the inveterate cynicism and misanthropy Grosz reveled in ascribing to himself throughout the autobiography’s pages. Most egregious from the point of view of critical commentators was Grosz’s disavowal of his early politically directed art and his posturing as an American sell-out who now preferred to use his art not as a weapon but rather as a means to make money. In a letter of November 1946, the Exile in the Age of Anxiety

107

New Masses illustrator Kyle Crichton (who went under the pen name Robert Forsythe) summarized what he saw as a fundamental contradiction between Grosz’s autobiography and his Piece of My World exhibit. For him, the irony and professed hatred of the masses contained in Grosz’s autobiography was belied by the sympathy for the masses and the disdain for exploitation evident in works on view at the AAA. Unlike those ivory tower artists who sought escape from life in art, Grosz was incapable of doing so: “You may think you’re doing it but you’re fooling yourself. Even those Martha’s Vineyard landscapes—​Good Lord! You can’t do a tree or a patch of barren beach without expressing the terror and tragedy of life. When a human figure wanders into those landscapes, he walks with a despairing tread that can be heard in Hell. You may despise the masses but when you draw them it is always with pity; the villains are your wealthy and powerful with their thick necks and blowsy women, the military with their cruelty and stupidity.” The one least capable of analyzing Grosz was Grosz, Crichton concluded: “Anyone who saw your recent show at the gallery will know that your ivory tower had hourly elevator service to reality.” His recent art revealed instead an artist who had progressed from satire to a “tragedy and profundity” that allowed his work to bear better witness “than millions of clever words in books” to the calamity of the age.25 More damning were the conclusions of the German-born art historian John Rewald, who lamented Grosz’s autobiography for abdicating too soon the political importance of his art to a history of Nazi criminality, which had not yet been laid to rest. Given his own history of persecution, Rewald felt all the more keenly the implications of Grosz’s apparent unwillingness to recognize the power of his earlier art. Rewald left Germany for study at the Sorbonne in 1932. Fearing persecution as a Jew, he had remained in Paris after 1933 only to face internment as an enemy alien when France declared war on Germany in 1939.26 Two years later, Rewald immigrated to the United States, where he established his outstanding reputation as a scholar of French art with the publication of his History of Impressionism in 1946. His review of Grosz’s autobiography recalled the personal importance for him of Grosz’s “acid drawings” of the 1920s, which the artist now chose to disparage in his autobiography. His Face of the Ruling Class portfolio of 1921 had been especially powerful for its indictment of those responsible for the crimes Grosz’s art had foreshadowed: You helped us realize how odious and perfidious it was, and thus prepared us for the ever more dreadful things to come. To you goes the glory which every judicial expert of Nuremberg might envy you, that of having judged the German fascists even before their most sinister crimes were committed, and to have condemned them not on the basis of carloads of bloodstained documents but on the evidence of their ugly faces alone. Nor did the tribunal of your pencil hand out any acquittals to those slick gentlemen who managed to do evil all their lives without breaking the law.27 For H. W. Janson, Grosz’s autobiography revealed little more than the artist’s “mounting despair with the modern world and his own work.”28 Since the early 1940s, Janson had published essays in which he drew invidious comparisons between the anti-modernist, nationalistic ten108

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

dencies in American regionalism and those found in Nazi painting.29 Janson noted that Grosz’s autobiography provided little serious discussion of his involvement with Dada and the artistic avant-garde. Similarly “passed over in silence” was his engagement with Neue Sachlichkeit in the later 1920s, which foreshadowed the “conservatism of his present work.” Instead, Grosz had chosen simply to dismiss the modern movement in toto as a reflection of “decadent bourgeois society.” For Janson, this disavowal of his earlier vanguard art was a thinly disguised and ultimately failed attempt to recuperate his “conservative” American production from its irrelevance to the contemporary art world. Since the late 1930s, critics had frequently consigned Grosz to the status of an old master. Now the relative traditionalism of his art, combined with the flippant and ironic character of his autobiography, contributed to a growing perception that Grosz had not only abandoned his political leftism of the past but had also turned decisively against it.

The Cold War Settles In This association between Grosz’s work and conservative forces was given further definition when Cold War cultural conflicts that beset the American art world began to emerge. An early volley in these conflicts came with the staging of the government-sponsored Advancing American Art exhibit. The show opened at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in October 1946, the same month that Grosz’s Piece of My World in a World without Peace was unveiled at the AAA. Advancing American Art presented seventy-nine works purchased by the Department of State with funds from its Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs. In line with the universalist vision of Henry Luce’s American Century and Wendell Willkie’s ideal of a one-world order under the sway of U.S. economic hegemony, the show aimed to project abroad an image of America as possessed of a vital, forward-looking culture dedicated to pluralism and internationalism.30 With the exception of Marsden Hartley, who died in 1943, the show featured only living artists and included a range of contemporary art trends in the United States, some inspired by Native American and American folk arts and others by the lessons of European modernism. And while Advancing American Art excluded the more vanguard art of the abstract expressionists, it also privileged its commitment to internationalism by omitting examples of regionalism and American scene work. The show divided into two traveling exhibits after its presentation at the Metropolitan Museum. One of these toured Latin America, and the other, which opened first in Paris then traveled to elsewhere in Europe, was augmented by seventy-three watercolors also purchased by the Department of State. Among these later additions was Grosz’s watercolor Street Fight, one of several images he produced in the mid-1930s inspired by the Spanish Civil War.31 Organizers hoped Advancing American Art would dispel perceptions abroad about the provincialism of American culture. The show also constituted an early attempt on the part of the U.S. government to enlist the arts as part of its arsenal against the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Foregrounding the internationalist diversity of trends in American art, the exhibit promoted the universal validity of U.S. culture abroad. At home, however, Advancing American Art succeeded first and foremost in touching off controversy over modernism, tradition, and the question of Exile in the Age of Anxiety

109

which art best represents America’s national patrimony. Conservative Republican congressmen, some of them eager to assail Truman’s presidency, denounced the display as an extension of New Deal radicalism, a communist conspiracy, and a misuse of taxpayer funds. Look magazine, under the confrontational title “Your Money Bought These Paintings,” reported on the seventy-nine works that had recently been “bought by public funds” for Advancing American Art. The journal noted that government-sponsored touring exhibits had been done before but with art appropriately of the “conservative type which is popular in the U.S.”32 Look reproduced several of the pieces shown in Advancing American Art, including Ben Shahn’s Hunger, O. Louis Gugliemi’s Tenements, Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Circus Girl Resting, and Robert Gwathmey’s Work Song. It also passed judgment on these works’ restrained gestures toward expressionist, surrealist, and cubist figuration as out of step with majority taste in the United States and therefore as unrepresentative of the country’s recent artistic achievement. The State Department canceled the traveling exhibit in spring 1947 and sold the works as war surplus out of fear that controversy would jeopardize other information programs. And though detractors in the United States had denounced many of Advancing American Art’s works as communist, Communist Party critics of the show in Prague were also quick to register their displeasure. Such works were deemed unwelcome in Czechoslovakia and other countries then in the throes of instituting socialist realism as the state style of the Soviet Union and its satellites. In response to the showing of Advancing American Art in Prague, the USSR quickly assembled a socialist realist display for exhibit in the city as a pointed rejoinder.33 Within the United States, the Advancing American Art controversy was perhaps most notable for launching the career of George Dondero, an arch-conservative Republican senator from Michigan. Dondero subsequently made it his mission to root out communist influence in the arts.34 Not to be outdone by the uncomfortable fact that Soviet socialist realism bore much in common with the traditional figuration he championed, Dondero developed his two-track theory of Soviet cultural policy. On the one hand, he argued, the Soviets used figurative art within their sphere of influence as propaganda to sway the masses. On the other, Stalin’s regime exported the various -isms—​cubism, futurism, Dadaism, abstractionism, surrealism, which, according to Dondero, were spawned by the Russian Revolution of 1917—​in order to undermine the cultural integrity of the United States with foreign and destructive artistic tendencies.35 As history was to demonstrate, Dondero’s formulations had little effect on thwarting the U.S. government’s use of modernist abstraction in exhibitions abroad as an instrument in the Cold War. However, his thunderings did contribute to the perception that figurative art of the sort practiced by Grosz was not only traditional but also reactionary. Others within the exile community reacted with alarm over an increasingly intolerant American political climate signaled by Dondero’s ascendancy. For them, these changes were part of an endangerment to democracy and a turn toward repression not unlike that which had driven them to the United States in the first place. This endangerment touched the exile community directly when the House Un-American Activities Committee began its investigation into the alleged communist infiltration of Hollywood. More than forty people attached to the film industry were sum110

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

moned to appear before the committee in Washington in the fall of 1947. Brecht and the composer Hanns Eisler, who was at the time collaborating with Brecht and Laughton on Galileo, were among the exiles summoned before HUAC at this time. Both were ultimately spared the fate of the “Hollywood Ten,” who were condemned to one year in jail for their refusal to cooperate with the investigating committee proceedings. Brecht, who had been under FBI surveillance since his arrival in America, asserted truthfully in response to HUAC interrogation that he was not a member of the Communist Party, despite his commitment to Marxism. In this regard he declined to join other defendants in challenging HUAC’s witch hunt and government infringement of civil rights by refusing to declare whether he belonged to the Communist Party or not.36 Brecht also hedged his bets against any further encounters with American authorities by departing the United States the day after his appearance before the committee. He went first to Zurich and then eventually resettled in the Soviet zone of Berlin, where he worked to reestablish his experimental theater. Brecht contacted Grosz shortly before his departure from the United States about illustrating one of his recently completed political poems. The work had been occasioned by the Nuremberg Trials and denazification proceedings then underway. He told Grosz of his intention to have it printed by Herzfelde in the United States and sent “as a greeting” to Germany. Brecht envisioned the project as a cautionary tale about the persistence there of institutions and modes of thought that had given rise to fascism in the first place.37 Titled “Der anachronistische Zug” (The Anachronistic Procession), the poem adopts imagery reminiscent of Grosz’s earlier canvases, including his Last Battalion of 1938. It describes a bedraggled band of Germany’s “old ghosts”: its priests, judges, artists, writers, and civilians who once supported the Nazi regime. They march through the rubble of their defeated land behind tattered banners on which the words freedom and democracy have simply been superimposed over the swastikas that were once there. “Six shades” of oppression, plague, fraud, stupidity, murder, and robbery lead this pathetic funeral dirge of German society as giant rats emerge from the ruins to join the procession.38

Grosz’s Existentialist Art In 1943, Grosz had failed to follow through with illustrations for Brecht’s anti-fascist play, The Private Lives of the Master Race. Now, he flat out refused to honor his friend’s request to illustrate his latest political poem, and he also explained why in explicit terms. He had worked “gratis” some “2 000 000” times in Germany, but no more, Grosz grumbled.39 He continued to struggle to make it in the United States and remained beholden to a commercialized rat race that forced him to follow the “strict law of the land, that is nothing for free.” With mocking humor he told his friend of his plan to create a dictograph machine instead. The apparatus would save him time and effort by automatically churning out the sort of political caricature Brecht and others kept asking him to do. More important, Grosz indicated to Brecht that he was currently taking his art in a different direction, which he believed would have little to offer Brecht’s Marxist idealism. In homage Exile in the Age of Anxiety

111

to the existentialist thought of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, he had recently begun a series titled The Wanderers in nothingness (Die Wanderer ins nichts). He intended the series to include a group of works titled The Painter of the Hole, The Musician of the Hole, and The Poet of the Hole, which were to explore existentialism’s implications for art and the artist. Grosz described his renderings of these “wanderers in nothingness” in more detail: They consist of thin, but firmly realized strokes, but they cast no shadow, and they are also completely gray; their field banner (as the Romans called it) is a really tattered canvas with a hole. . . . The painter [in The Painter of the Hole] has around him 100 models with holes in them (he is—​he remembers very dimly, but nonetheless exactly—​also interested in “beauty”: for example the very finest of the fine shading of gray—​everything is of course gray there). The rats, yes, . . . and already a rat runs [around] in the corner.40 Grosz completed an oil version of this Painter of the Hole theme in 1948. The work presents the painter as a human abstraction whose body is little more than a hollowed out carapace (figure 41). True to Grosz’s bitterly satiric works of the past, the image proffers a lacerating judgment on the whole history of painting as a hallmark of enlightened cultivation. It does so by rendering the painter not as a figure of human creativity and development but rather more like Gregor Samsa in Franz Kafka’s Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis, 1915), who devolves into a roach. Meanwhile the painter’s studio space has similarly devolved into a primordial ruin with one wall of crumbling masonry and another that appears more like a stalagmite of a prehistoric cave. Grosz’s portrayal of the painter’s activity is equally despairing. The figure stares intently at his canvas with fixed and unblinking eyes. A book open on the floor and a small study tacked to the top of the painter’s easel depict models of holes, which the painter of the hole reproduces on the canvas before him. The holes he paints are not invaded by surrounding space, as are the openings in the painter’s body, but instead present a featureless void. Meanwhile, the ground is littered with the false starts and shattered picture frames of the painter’s earlier attempts. Indicative of Grosz’s hostility to the commercialized art world and its current modes of nonobjective art, he depicts the painter wearing a buckled collar around his neck, like that of an animal. In Grosz’s earlier images, such as The Mighty One on a Little Outing Surprised by Two Poets, of 1942, he depicted artists in various gestures of slavish obeisance to figures of authority. In The Painter of the Hole, the authority is art itself, or more precisely abstract art, to which the painter willfully enslaves himself. In existentialist terms made familiar by Albert Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus, Grosz thus renders the painter of the hole tethered to a pointless, formulaic, and ultimately absurd endeavor of painting an abstract “nothingness” without meaning.41 A tattered standard attached to the crumbling studio wall flaps above him like a plague flag. Meanwhile, one rat chews away on the painter’s shredded canvas as others creep up the easel frame and rummage around in the cast-off canvases and frames scattered on the ground. This bleak vision of the artist’s existence has caused many commentators to interpret The Painter of the Hole in autobiographical terms.42 Indeed, Grosz’s personal losses, continuing financial difficulties, and mounting problems with alcohol and depression at this time support such 112

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

FIGURE 41. George Grosz,

Painter of the Hole I, 1948. Oil on canvas, 76 × 56 cm.

a conclusion. At the same time, however, works in his Wanderers in nothingness series point to a serious engagement with both popular and theoretical understandings of existentialism, particularly in relation to the growing reputation of Sartre. Sartre’s celebrity status rested partly on his role in the French Resistance and his work during the occupation for Combat, the opposition journal founded by Camus in Algeria in 1943. His debut in the United States took place in January 1945, when he and other French journalists came to New York at the invitation of the U.S. State Department.43 Mann, Brecht, Herbert Marcuse, and other European émigrés were among those who officially greeted them upon their arrival. The press also followed the journalists to the White House, where they met with Roosevelt shortly before the president’s death. In addition, the surrealist journal View sponsored a lecture by Sartre at Carnegie Hall, which was filled to capacity, with many in the audience hailing from the New York art world. Exile in the Age of Anxiety

113

In early 1948, Sartre’s specific existentialist reflections on art were made known to this new American audience with the publication of his essay “The Search for the Absolute.” It appeared in an exhibition catalogue for a display of thirty-four works by Alberto Giacometti, held that January and February at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York.44 Sartre’s words credited the Swiss artist with inaugurating a “Copernican revolution” in sculpture by rejecting classical form in favor of the fragile and attenuated renderings of the human body captured in his standing figures.45 Made of ductile plaster instead of “dead” stone, Giacometti’s works are “moving outlines, always halfway between nothingness and being.”46 They thus withhold the certainty of essence in favor of the vertiginous uncertainty of existence, while their deliberate primordialism also posits a return to origins free of notions of beauty, ugliness, and “Progress” in art.47 For Sartre, Giacometti’s unsettling sculptures thus rendered man not in his “being” but in his “situated appearance,” not as what he is but rather as what he does and how he perceives and is perceived. The sculptor’s restless “search for the absolute” represents a paradoxical quest to give stable form to this perpetual metamorphosis of human existence and consciousness. Photographs of Giacometti’s ramshackle studio accompany Sartre’s essay in the Pierre Matisse catalogue (figure 42, figure 43). They show Giacometti’s tremulous figures standing amid painted and drawn studies and picture frames propped up against the walls. Mounds of plaster and figures reduced to broken fragments, also captured in these photographs, attest to Giacometti’s commitment to process over product and to beginnings over ends. Like Grosz’s painter of the hole, who surrounded himself in his primordial studio with the broken frames and tattered canvases of his earlier attempts to render nothingness, Giacometti repeatedly destroyed his works in order to commence anew the effort to attain his elusive ideal. For Sartre, this destruction and beginning again epitomized the gesture toward human freedom that lay at the core of Giacometti’s existentialist art.48 In The Painter of the Hole, Grosz suggests a wholly different perspective on this Sartrean value of destruction and beginning again. For Grosz’s painter, new creative attempts are nothing more than preordained failures. Moreover, these attempts serve as evidence not of freedom but rather of the artist’s pointless self-enslavement to contemporary art world imperatives of pictorial abstraction. Grosz may or may not have been aware of the Matisse Gallery’s Giacometti exhibition and catalogue of 1948 when he produced his Painter of the Hole I canvas that same year. It is therefore impossible to know if he intended his Wanderers in nothingness series as a pointedly negative construal of Sartre’s thought and Giacometti’s sculpture at this time. In any case, a cynical understanding of existentialism might well have been expected of him, given Grosz’s long-standing penchant for skepticism and misanthropy. But his negative views were also wholly in keeping with general understandings of existentialism as it was first introduced to mainstream American awareness in the immediate postwar years. Indeed, early reckonings in the United States with Sartre’s philosophy did not come through his theoretical writings but rather came through his challenging literary and performance works. His novel Nausea and his play No Exit were available in America immediately following the war, as were Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger. Meanwhile, popular audiences were first introduced to existentialist thought and its 114

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

FIGURE 42. Alberto Giacometti, photo of the artist’s

FIGURE 43. Alberto Giacometti, photo of the artist’s

studio, Plaster Study for the “Man Walking,” 1947, in

studio, Studies for the “Tall Figure” and “The Burglar,”

Alberto Giacometti, Alberto Giacometti: Sculptures,

1947, in Alberto Giacometti, Alberto Giacometti:

Paintings Drawings (New York: Pierre Matisse Gallery,

Sculptures, Paintings Drawings (New York: Pierre

1948), 17. Art © Alberto Giacometti Estate/Licensed by

Matisse Gallery, 1948), 15. Art © Alberto Giacometti

VAGA and ARS, New York, NY.

Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY.

“lofty sounding words . . . ‘anguish,’ ‘abandonment,’ and ‘despair,’ ” through magazines such as Life, Time, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar.49 These venues promoted existentialism more as a matter of the latest French fashion and style following the heyday of surrealism than as a philosophical system.50 Serious reckoning with existentialism and Sartre’s philosophy in particular would wait until later in the 1950s, when some of his key theoretical texts first began to appear in English translation.51 Much to the consternation of the American intelligentsia, this reckoning revealed Sartre’s continuing allegiance to Marxism. His writings sought to establish Marxism’s continuing relevance by recovering the philosophical subject from the determinist understandings of Marx, which emphasize the role of objective social forces in history over that of the individual.52 Coupled with his open support for the Communist Party, Sartre’s existentialist Marxism gained little traction within U.S. intellectual circles, which became evermore anti-Stalinist as the Cold War deepExile in the Age of Anxiety

115

ened. Meanwhile, mainstream America continued to sidestep these nuances of Sartre’s thought in favor of an understanding that reduced existentialism to little more than “a French philosophy of bleak despair” in a world without meaning.53 In contrast to Sartre, Heidegger was little known in the United States, though his name was nonetheless linked to that of Sartre, Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Genet, and other existentialists. Grosz, who indicated to Brecht in 1947 that his Wanderers in nothingness series was inspired by both Heidegger and Sartre, may have supplemented this limited awareness of Heidegger through his ongoing correspondence with friends in Germany. The German philosopher came to broader public attention there when he was removed from his teaching post in 1945 for his pro-Nazi activities under the Third Reich. Since that time, Heidegger’s philosophical questioning of humanist ideals of progress and perfectibility exercised considerable influence on artists in Germany, including Grosz’s friend, the painter Otto Dix. Unlike Grosz, Dix had remained in Germany, where he was branded a “degenerate artist” under the Hitler regime. He was conscripted into the German army at the end of the war, captured, and interned for nearly a year in a French prisoner of war camp. Dix returned to his home in Hemmenhofen in 1946 and, like other German artists at this time, infused his postwar self-portraits and other works with the sense of trauma and existential doubt inspired by Heidegger’s writings.54 In the United States, Heidegger’s theoretical texts, like those of Sartre, remained little known throughout the 1950s. Until Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927) was translated in 1962, his role as a leading existentialist thinker was largely limited to the analyses of William Barrett, a professor of philosophy at New York University and an editor of Partisan Review. Barrett wrote an influential series on existentialism for Partisan Review, which appeared in 1947.55 His essays sought to make the “Gothic heaviness” of Heidegger’s writings intelligible to the journal’s readership. He also endeavored to explore the German philosopher’s impact on Sartre and other exponents of existentialism in France.56 Above all, Barrett hoped to counter the bleakness of popular understandings of existentialism by stressing the philosophy’s essential character as a “doctrine of human freedom.”57 Accordingly, Barrett delved into existentialism’s use of the terms freedom and authenticity, as well as its notion of “anxiety” as a description of the human condition independent of any purposeful system in which to situate and give meaning to man’s existence. Barrett’s discussion of Heidegger’s concept of “freedom-toward-death” marks the gap between negative understandings of this purposelessness and its positive role in existentialist doctrine: Suspended over death . . . moving at every moment within this perpetual possibility of nothingness, which is the authenticity of death, we are also released into an authentic human freedom. The chain has slipped away, and whatever movement, whatever project, we launch against the background of this void, has nothing to rest upon but ourselves, and just in this do we know ourselves to be free. But this authentic freedom, which is disclosed to us as we confront death, represents only the completion, the full realization, of the freedom which in fact lies at the very source of existence.58

116

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

Though the language of Heidegger’s existentialism was thus negative (in its invocation of death, the void, and nothingness), his philosophical doctrine was in no sense to be understood as nihilistic. Barrett’s explication of Heidegger stressed instead his concept of death’s persistent possibility as a means for pointing beyond the banalities of a day-to-day world and its preordained structures of meaning. According to Heidegger, these banalities and preordinations stand between man and “the void” of an authentic freedom that lies beyond meaning as such. In Grosz’s Painter of the Hole, this lack of meaning appears to condemn the painter not to freedom but rather to an interminable and pointless attempt to render the nothingness that is, in Heidegger’s terms, his existence. According to Barrett, the first inklings of Heidegger’s “freedom-toward-death” were first registered in art and only later captured in philosophy. Accordingly, modern art had become increasingly “morbid” and divorced from the ordered world and centered human subject of Renaissance classicism from early nineteenth-century romanticism onward. Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Beethoven’s last quartets, and the paintings of Picasso joined the writings of Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, and Kafka in constituting an art that struggled with the experience of a modern world in which “all the stable forms of society are seen to be perched over the chaos of the irrational, the arbitrary, and the contingent in man himself.”59 For Barrett, this dissolution of given tradition traced in artistic terms the slipping away of “the chain.” It also pointed toward the possibility of the authentic human freedom announced by current existentialist thought. Barrett’s necrotic yet nonetheless liberatory history of modern art found its reactionary counterpart in a more polemical perspective on modern art’s history advanced by the Spanish existentialist philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in his volume La dehumanización del arte (The Dehumanization of Art), which first appeared in 1925. Princeton University Press published an English translation of the work in 1948.60 In early 1950, Grosz enthusiastically recommended Ortega y Gasset’s volume to Otto Schmalhausen as a “first class” analysis of the “endgame of painting.”61 The professed intention in The Dehumanization of Art was not to render judgment on current artistic trends but rather to elucidate the historical necessity of their character. However, Ortega y Gasset’s explorations of the “antipopularity” of modern art since the romantic era left little doubt concerning his negative assessment regarding the anti-humanist implications of prevailing trends toward abstraction. For him, modernism was an elitist art of “ideas” that foreclosed intelligibility and spurned the empathic response of the masses, who in turn greeted such work with hostility. Its various modes of abstraction were self-referential, playful, ironic, disdainful of history and tradition, and devoid of higher meaning. By contrast, figurative art since the Renaissance opened itself out onto the world, engaged history and tradition, and was capable of addressing profound themes. Elitist disdain concerning an art connected to life could be found in the example of aristocratic hostility to the “melodrama” of Madame Tussaud’s wax museum and the popularity of the museum’s attractions among the masses: “Madame Tussaud’s comes to mind and the peculiar uneasiness aroused by dummies. The origin of this uneasiness lies in the provoking ambiguity with which wax figures defeat any attempt at adopting a clear and consistent attitude toward them. Treat them as living beings, and they will sniggeringly reveal their waxen secret. Take them for Exile in the Age of Anxiety

117

dolls, and they seem to breathe in irritated protest. They will not be reduced to mere objects. Looking at them we suddenly feel a misgiving: should it not be they who are looking at us?” As “melodrama at its purest,” Tussaud’s wax figures courted elitist disdain by virtue of their insistent merging of art and the life-like. Behind this disdain lay a “disgust for the human sphere as such, for reality, for life,” Ortega y Gasset surmised.62 This antipathy toward the popular and the melodramatic merging of art and the life-like had become even more profound in contemporary artists. The Spanish philosopher concluded The Dehumanization of Art by professing agreement with those who believed the new art had yet to produce anything of merit. But there was no “turning back,” and the task was now to find “another way for art different from dehumanization and yet not coincident with the beaten and worn-out paths” of the past.63

Wanderers in Nothingness Grosz’s own efforts at finding this other way were exhibited for the first time at the Associated American Artists gallery in April 1948. The show featured twenty-two watercolors related to the Wanderers in nothingness series he had described to Brecht the previous year. Calling them The Stick Men, the exhibit announcement defined Grosz’s shadowless, dehumanized figures as “men who are called by numbers and not by names—​men who wear slave collars—​grey men in a grey world following empty, meaningless banners.” In the gallery notes for the exhibit, Grosz explained further: “In another period I might have painted men as heroic figures—​great soldiers storming great walls; the kind of pictures I used to see in the German homes of my childhood. But instead through a sieve that is the history of my period these heroic figures have been reduced to robot ‘stick men’ and I can see only this regimentation—​this world without meaning—​this emptiness and frustration—​this totalitarian gray world with its worship of order and destruction of all individuality.”64 Works in this series reprise themes from Grosz’s earlier production, including his wanderer images of the 1930s and 1940s.65 In this case, however, single figures are replaced by groups of stick people holding aloft tattered banners and moving through ruined and featureless landscapes (figure 44). In Last Battalion (1938), Grosz depicted a rag-tag group of aging warriors whose only purpose had become their search for food. In these Stick Men works, the search takes a savage, cannibalistic turn as skinny figures attack fat ones like hordes of insatiable insects (figure 45). The desperation, directionless wanderings, and depleted forms of the Stick Men evoked the brutality of the displacements and sorting out of peoples that continued to mark European reality years after the end of the war. In this regard, Grosz’s imagination matched in kind but exceeded in ferocity the eyewitness observations of those like the journalist William L. Shirer, who described Germany’s ruined cities after 1945 as populated by “broken, dazed, shivering, hungry human beings without will or purpose or direction.”66 Grosz’s friend Richard Huelsenbeck was moved by the “basically existentialist” character of the Stick Men and planned to write an essay on them for Partisan Review.67

118

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

FIGURE 44. George Grosz, The Invasion, 1948. Watercolor, 45.7 × 61 cm.

FIGURE 45. George Grosz, Attacked by the Stick Men, 1947. Watercolor, 45.8 × 58.4 cm.

119

The Dance of Totalitarianism Grosz had hoped to issue his Stick Men images as a portfolio.68 This would have been his first such compendium since the publication of Interregnum of 1936. Indeed, the Stick Men show’s subtitle, George Grosz Attacks Regimented Humanity and Collapse of Man’s Spirit, announced his return to the subject of “regimented” totalitarianism that he first confronted in Interregnum. Several of Interregnum’s images attested to Grosz’s allegiance to an anti-communist perspective of the mid1930s that equated Nazism with communism, especially in the wake of the Moscow show trials. From that perspective emerged the politically instrumental Cold War thesis of totalitarianism that condemned the Stalin regime as another iteration of dictatorship indistinguishable from Nazism. By the time Grosz commenced work on his Stick Men series, this totalitarian thesis had become a fixture of Western policy justifications aimed at thwarting Soviet influence in Europe. In March 1947, the U.S. government announced the first plank in its Cold War containment strategy with the institution of the Truman Doctrine, which sought to keep Greece and Turkey out of Soviet hands and within the Western alliance through infusions of economic and military aid. Other events that happened shortly after Grosz’s AAA exhibit appeared to confirm for him the legitimacy of Western actions taken in light of the totalitarian threat. Most notably, a Communist Party coup in Czechoslovakia brought the country under Soviet control in February 1948. The beginning of the Berlin Blockade in late June heightened fears of a similar outcome in Germany. And by 1949, Moscow’s conversion of Nazi concentration camps into detention camps and erection of political prisons in the Soviet Occupation Zone had become a matter of international alarm.69 In this regard, Grosz noted in a letter to Walter Mehring the controversy generated by the African American singer and left-wing activist Paul Robeson’s defense of Soviet camps and prisons in early 1949.70 At the same time, Grosz became increasingly outraged by reports emanating from Germany in the wake of denazification proceedings and the Nuremberg Trials. In a letter to his wife Eva’s aunt, Elizabeth Lindner, he reacted with moral opprobrium to reports that those who had remained in Germany under Hitler now continued to disavow knowledge of the regime’s crimes. He urged her to read Ernst Wiechert’s Totenwald (Forest of Death), which was released in 1946 and recounted the author’s experiences in Buchenwald. There she would “see what Germans did with Germans, how no one had known about all the horror, although prisoners were publicly dragged from train to train and platform to platform, and how the swinish mob had still found it amusing.”71 “We alone” were responsible for the crimes of the regime, Grosz concluded, not the Russians, not Hitler, and not his traitorous generals. Grosz professed his complete sense of alienation from Germany, observing that little room appeared to be left there between communists on the one hand and a persistent Nazi legacy on the other. Totalitarianism and fears of a Soviet reprise of Nazism also captivated popular understandings of the Cold War threat as evidenced by the classic status accorded George Orwell’s satire 1984 soon after it appeared in the summer of 1949. Orwell wrote his work as a warning against the media’s capacity to distort reality through “Newspeak” and the formation of any all-powerful 120

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

state, whether fascist, communist, or democratic capitalist. However, many critics interpreted his dystopic reflections as an indictment directed first and foremost at the Soviet Union.72 Grosz, too, subscribed to this popular understanding of 1984, as evident in his letter to Otto Schmalhausen of June 1949, in which he described Wieland Herzfelde as a victim of Orwellian Newspeak.73 His long-time friend and publisher returned to Leipzig in early 1949 to assume a professorship in literature and to lend his support to reconstruction efforts there. Grosz’s letter expressed his continued affection for Herzfelde but bemoaned his idealist susceptibility to Stalinism and its Newspeak of “War is Peace—​Freedom is Slavery—​Ignorance is Strength.”74 In Grosz’s view, the Soviet experiment then underway in the eastern part of Germany was engaged in Orwellian twistings of the truth by rewriting history to legitimate its own “sinister totalitarian laws of a gray present.” As Grosz may well have recognized, these rewritings included downplaying the World War II history of the USSR’s anti-fascist alliance with the West against Hitler. This distorted memory transformed past alliances into present antagonisms, which became central to the postwar construction of a state ideology in East Germany. That ideology claimed East Germans as “victims of fascism” engaged in a continuing struggle against Western capitalism, which, according to Soviet Marxist theory, was but a continuation of Nazism.75 Grosz revisited his Orwellian vision of a totalitarian world in the last major oil painting of his Stick Men series. Titled The Gray Man Dances, the work developed from a watercolor he had completed in 1948 (figure 46). There, a nameless stick figure, identified only by a numbered sash across his chest, flees toward the picture plane. The figure rushes away from a brick smokestack and guard tower in the background and through a courtyard framed by coils of barbed wire and featureless structures with barred windows. Neither skeletal nor corporeal, Grosz’s watercolor Gray Man evokes the emaciated bodies of what Hannah Arendt poignantly termed the “living dead” in her remarkable essay on the concentration camps of 1948.76 The camps served as microcosms of an administered world whose technocratic logic neither originated in nor ended with the defeat of Nazism, she warned.77 That logic is instead a fundamental feature of modern mass society and remains capable of transforming individuals into masses and rendering human being itself “absolutely superfluous.”78 In 1949, Grosz reworked his watercolor Gray Man image into an oil painting that was less tied to the memory of the Nazi camps and more inflected by dystopic visions of the Cold War advanced by Arendt, Orwell, and others (figure 47). Here, the pounding of the Gray Man’s dance of death sends cracks rippling along the ground beneath his feet and snaking up the masonry and brick walls of the structures behind him. Unlike his Painter of the Hole series and Stick Men watercolors of 1948, Grosz’s dancing Gray Man strikes a more compassionate chord. His plight is neither that of the self-inflicted slavishness of artists that Grosz assailed in his Painter of the Hole nor that of the brutish struggle for food and survival that he configured in his Stick Men works. Grosz renders the Gray Man instead with eyes that are both vacant and beseeching. His mouth has been stitched shut, his ears battened closed, and his head split open to reveal a gelatinous mass of useless tissue. The figure’s riveted and deformed torso, derived from Grosz’s macabre mannequin study of 1936, discussed in chapter 1, cracks in two. Like one of Madame Tussaud’s unsettling wax figures, the Exile in the Age of Anxiety

121

FIGURE 46. George

Grosz, The Gray Man Dances, 1948. Watercolor, brush, and pen and ink on paper, 63.5 × 47.6 cm.

Gray Man dissolves the boundary between the animate and the inanimate and the living and the dead. Blurring distinctions between a still life and a human life, between a drafting exercise and a portrait painting, the work also recasts Grosz’s private studio ruminations into a public nightmare.79 The numbered sash in Grosz’s earlier watercolor of the Gray Man refers to the numerical efficiency of Nazi genocide. In the oil version, faint numbers appear instead on the Gray Man’s slave collar, which not only serves as an atavistic symbol of dehumanization but also allegorizes his grim fate beyond the specificity of recent atrocity. Though the chain of the Gray Man’s collar has “slipped away,” Grosz’s vision is far removed from that of Heidegger’s “freedom-toward-death.” The iron circlet of his enslavement remains around the neck of the Gray Man, making his medi-

122

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

FIGURE 47. George

Grosz, The Gray Man Dances, 1949. Oil on Masonite, 76 × 55.6 cm.

eval dance a reminder not only of death’s inevitability but also of the persistent legacy of man’s inhumanity to man. In this final major work of his Stick Men series, Grosz departs from the bitter indictment of human behavior present in his other images of Wanderers in nothingness and Stick Men who abandon their humanity in acts of self-enslavement and brutality. By contrast, the Gray Man stares out from the canvas with imploring eyes. Those eyes invite our empathic identification with his suffering by suggesting the presence of a human consciousness and the figure’s lingering awareness of an alternative to his miserable fate. The death for which the Gray Man dances is his own. But through the painful identification with him that Grosz’s rendering invites, the Gray Man’s dance of death also becomes ours and that of the human existence to which his depleted form still barely clings.

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

123

The Best Painters in the United States The seriousness with which Grosz probed existentialist themes in his Gray Man and Stick Men depictions suggests his continuing desire to rebuild his stature in the American art world on the basis of his most ambitious series of works since the end of the war. His efforts promised to be rewarded shortly before the opening of his Stick Men exhibit in April 1948, when Look magazine named him one of the ten best painters in the United States on the basis of a survey of sixty-eight museum directors, curators, and art critics.80 Those surveyed ranked him eighth after John Marin, Max Weber, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Stuart Davis, Ben Shahn, Edward Hopper, and Charles Burchfield. Ninth place went to Franklin Watkins, and Lyonel Feininger and Jack Levine tied at number ten.81 A photo of Grosz seated on Fifth Avenue in New York also appeared in the pages of Look that June (figure 48). Wittily showing Grosz “parked” on a chair next to a No Parking sign, the photo illustrated an essay commemorating New York as a “world art center.” Look insisted that the city had surpassed Paris in that regard thanks to the presence of many European émigré artists, like Grosz, who had chosen to remain in New York after the war for “freedom and stimulation.”82 Just months before, Clement Greenberg had similarly announced the triumphal emergence of American art from the vestiges of this European legacy in the pages of Partisan Review: If artists as great as Picasso, Braque and Léger have declined so grievously, it can only be because the general social premises that used to guarantee their functioning have disappeared in Europe. And when one sees, on the other hand, how much the level of American art has risen in the last five years, with the emergence of new talents so full of energy and content as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, David Smith . . . then the conclusion forces itself, much to our own surprise, that the main premises of Western art have at last migrated to the United States, along with the center of gravity of industrial production and political power.83 In October 1948, Life magazine published an article fully illustrated with the new painting that publicized a recent symposium held in the penthouse of the Museum of Modern Art. Discussants included Columbia University professor Meyer Schapiro (who had served on MoMA’s acquisitions committee since 1943); Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the British art critic Raymond Mortimer; H. W. Janson, professor of art at Washington University, in St. Louis; Alfred Frankfurter, editor and publisher of Art News; James Johnson Sweeney, who was associated with MoMA and served as an advisory editor of Partisan Review; James Thrall Soby, curator of paintings at MoMA; and Clement Greenberg.84 The symposium focused on the works by Pollock, de Kooning, Gottlieb, and Baziotes that had recently been acquired by MoMA. By 1948, the Museum of Modern Art in New York had indeed established an exhibition and purchasing record that strongly promoted this new energetic painting. A firestorm of controversy erupted in February when MoMA’s affiliate, the Institute of Modern Art in Boston, changed its name to the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). The institute’s renaming drew attention to a hardening of positions between MoMA’s promotion of modern art with nonobjective, interna124

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

FIGURE 48. Photo of George Grosz on Fifth Avenue in New York, Look, 8 June 1948, 54.

tionally oriented tendencies and museums like the ICA, which sought to end the “cult of bewilderment” that attended the more experimental, abstract, and nonobjective variants of current art championed by MoMA.85 Alfred Barr’s curatorial practices at MoMA had increasingly come under critical attack beginning already during World War II. In 1944, Emily Genauer of Harper’s was among those who accused Barr of trendiness over taste for assembling a lopsided collection Exile in the Age of Anxiety

125

slanted toward the School of Paris and the latest in surrealism and abstraction. As evidence, she cited MoMA’s possession of eighteen works by Max Ernst but only one by Grosz.86 By adopting the banner of the “contemporary,” Boston’s ICA sought to recast modernism as a bygone European (especially French) tradition that had been brought to a close by the outbreak of war in 1939. Instead, the Boston museum aimed to foster a forward-looking contemporary art that avoided modernist extremism as well as the “extremism of the die-hard conservative kind.” Art’s role was instead to provide “spiritual leadership.”87 In its public announcement of the museum’s new name, the ICA further declared its intention to support those artists attuned to the urgent necessity of creating a humanist art capable of reaching the public: “Nature and mankind remain an inexhaustible source of inspiration. World chaos and social unrest, which prompted many of the excesses of modern art, are still with us, but the artist should not take refuge in private cynicism. If he is to help build a culture able to counteract the trend toward world dissolution, he must come forward with a strong, clear affirmation of truth for humanity.”88 Whatever middle ground the ICA might have hoped to claim in the brewing cultural Cold War, it soon found itself embraced by the right-wing extreme it had hoped to avoid and denounced by liberals and the left for caving in to pressure from George Dondero–​inspired ideologues, who assailed abstract art as obscurantist and unpatriotic. In 1949, Life magazine continued this debate with its influential exposé titled “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter?” The piece helped further Pollock’s meteoric rise as the most controversial, celebrated, and talked-about artist of the day.89 Grosz reported on Life’s paean to America’s latest “great painter” in a letter to Rudolf Schlichter shortly after the essay appeared.90 He explained in detail Pollock’s “Rorschachtest-Rembrandt” splatter technique. He also observed how his unprecedented art had decisively relegated work like Grosz’s, including his recent existentialist paintings and watercolors, to the ash heap of convention. “We who still unfortunately have certain traditions and god knows here and there also the remains of some ‘laws’ in us, immediately sink to the level of petty-bourgeois painters,” he complained. The hoped-for boost in recognition Grosz might have anticipated after Look magazine named him one of America’s ten best painters failed to materialize. Poor sales of his “petty-bourgeois” art compelled him to return to teaching at the Art Students League in 1949 after a hiatus of five years. There he confronted on a regular basis the enthusiasm of his young students for the work of Pollock, Picasso, and other American and European modernists. As he told Schlichter, he had learned to adapt himself to his students’ interests accordingly: “As you already know, I am no moralist, no pedant, and defend no sort of principles, so with the Picassoists, I am Picasso, with the Miroists, Miro, and with the primitivists, primitive. OK.”91 Though Grosz found himself and his art more and more frequently ranked on the conservative side of the Cold War cultural divide, he nonetheless took pains to distance his views from those of Dondero and his right-wing adherents. He was also beginning to realize the full extent of Soviet control of East Germany’s art world and its imposition there of an affirmative socialist realism designed to promote socialist reconstruction. Grosz informed Schlichter that he fully 126

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

subscribed to the ideology of freedom that increasingly came to be attached to American Abstract Expressionism at this time, his own reservations about abstraction aside. “You see, here the ‘wildest’ and ‘most daring’ young artists are supported, not oppressed; furthermore no one demands morality from them, or that they serve the people; they get more of a chance here than elsewhere,” he insisted.92

Loss of the Center Through Schlichter, Grosz also came to know of similarly rancorous debates over the place of modernist abstraction in the West German art world. That art world was struggling to reestablish itself in the shadow of its Nazi past and among a German populace still largely unreceptive to modernism, despite the legacy of modernism’s persecution under Hitler. Schlichter remained open to modernist tendencies, in particular surrealism, which he began to incorporate more overtly into his own art after 1945. But his views nonetheless shared much in common with the Spenglerian catastrophism that permeated much of Germany’s postwar art world in the months and years immediately following the war.93 In late 1948, Grosz wrote to Schlichter that he was anxiously awaiting the imminent release of Schlichter’s book Das Abenteuer der Kunst (The Adventure of Art).94 The book detailed his friend’s despondent history of modern art as symptomatic of a Western civilization marked by materialism, secularism, and decline.95 Schlichter’s volume was one of several released during this period that similarly weighed in on the question of modernism and its import for contemporary German society. However, all were overshadowed by the publication of Hans Sedlmayr’s considerably more extreme, more controversial, and more widely read history of modern art titled Verlust der Mitte (Loss of the Center), which appeared in December 1948.96 Part of the attention to Sedlmayr’s text had to do with his notorious biography as a member of the New Vienna School of art history who was dismissed from his post at the University of Vienna in 1945 because of his Nazi Party membership.97 Sedlmayr’s screed against modern art acknowledged its debt to Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1919) and to Ortega y Gasset’s Dehumanization of Art (1925). However, it escalated the pessimistic findings of these texts by wedding the noxious language of “sickness” (Krankheit) and “disease” (Leiden), made familiar by Nazi proscriptions on degenerate art, to the reactionary, anti-liberal, Catholic conservative movement that also counted Schlichter in its orbit at this time.98 This Catholic conservatism elevated Konrad Adenauer and the Christian Democratic Union (ChristlichDemokratische Union) Party to the leadership of West Germany beginning in 1949. The movement also effectively forestalled West German reckoning with the Nazi past in the late 1940s and 1950s. It did so by transforming the country’s recent history from a national tragedy into a civilizational struggle between the materialist secularism of Marxism and Nazism on the one hand and the spiritualism of Christianity on the other.99 Sedlmayr’s analysis of modern art in Verlust der Mitte was wholly true to this conservative Catholicism. According to him, Bosch, Brueghel, and Grünewald had introduced “the horrible and the infernal” into art. And following his anti-democratic leanings, Sedlmayr nominated the Exile in the Age of Anxiety

127

French Revolution in particular as a watershed moment in the civilizational decline inaugurated by the art of the Northern Renaissance. It was then that the processes of modernization and secularism had been unleashed. These processes were in turn evidenced by the precipitous rise of modern art, its ever-increasing tendency toward abstraction, and its testimony to man’s dehumanization. In the wake of the French Revolution, Western society had devolved into “extreme individualism” on the one hand and “extreme collectivism” on the other. These two extremes threatened personality and community by limiting man’s existence to an odious choice between “ ‘uniformity’ and anarchy.”100 For Sedlmayr, man in the image of God constituted the “lost center” of this reduced world. As evidence, Sedlmayr’s text presented a wide-ranging survey of changes in architecture, landscape design, and monuments. These changes were symptoms of disintegration in which the organic interrelation of the arts had given way to the triumph of specialization, godlessness, and the machine. In the realm of the visual arts, this necrotic development could be traced through the art of Goya, Friedrich, Cézanne, and Seurat in the nineteenth century. It could be observed as well in the writings and statements of more recent artists, including Franz Marc (“I felt already quite early that man was hideous”) and Ernst Barlach (“Man is a failed experiment of nature”).101 Sedlmayr also made use of Grosz’s statement, “Man is a beast,” as further proof of this negative development. The statement comes from an essay penned by Grosz and titled “Man is not good—​ but rather a beast!,” which appeared in a catalogue for an exhibit of Grosz’s work in 1922. There, the essay asserted the political radicalism of his art as an assault on the bestiality and injustice of class exploitation.102 In Sedlmayr’s hands, by contrast, Grosz’s words became nothing more than one among many vivid traces of Western culture’s growing hostility to man in general. At the same time, Grosz’s art represented for Sedlmayr the most extreme among recent exponents of the West’s civilizational decline. As evidence, Verlust der Mitte included an illustration of one of Grosz’s macabre mannequin studies from the 1930s, which culminated this process of decline in a “living picture of death” (figure 49). Indeed, with Grosz’s work, modern art had entered its most nihilistic, most anti-human phase. Moreover, the technical virtuosity of his art made the cynicism of his works’ content all the more “diabolic.”103 To summarize the significance of Grosz’s art, Sedlmayr made use of lines from Otto Mauer’s Kunst und Christentum (Art and Christendom), published in Vienna in 1946, including Mauer’s unabashed use of Nazi terminology to denounce Grosz’s “degenerate” art. For Mauer, there was something “harrowing . . . and also profoundly degenerate in the cold cynicism of Grosz’s lithographs, pictures which not only pass merciless judgment on a decadent age, and on the living lie that it is, but seem to gleam with a perverse delight in mere decay—​pictures in which the sparkle of malignant eyes seems somehow like an invitation to suicide.”104 Sedlmayr explained further that artists since the nineteenth century had followed a “narrow ridge” between novelty and the seductions of mere beauty. Only “powerful spirits” could travel this “razor’s edge” without succumbing to either of these alternatives: “That is why in the nineteenth century genius takes on a meaning quite different from that of previous centuries. Genius alone can bear the ever-increasing weight of the image of man through the dangers of the time.” 128

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

FIGURE 49. Reproduction

of George Grosz’s Drapery Study, 1936, in Hans Sedlmayr’s Verlust der Mitte, 1948.

Grosz acquired a copy of Verlust der Mitte soon after its publication. His favorable reading of it is evident in a letter of March 1950, in which he strongly recommended the book to his friend the art collector Marc Sandler. Sedlmayr’s bleak analysis understood the current crisis in which artists pursued their work. But Grosz observed that Sedlmayr’s comments on him and his art appeared to be based on Grosz’s earlier “bitterness,” not on his current work and his attempts to express a “new humanity” in his art. As we have seen, he explored this “new humanity” in his recent images, which ranged from his damning view of man’s willful surrender of humanity in The Painter of the Hole and his Stick Men watercolors of 1948 to a changed sensibility suggested by the Gray Man Dances of 1949. There, Grosz’s empathic depiction of the Gray Man and his condition of enslavement left behind the specificity of the contemporary art world as addressed in The Painter of the Hole and Europe’s postwar trauma as evoked in his Stick Men works. More allegorical in its character, The Gray Man Dances drew attention instead to the nameless and faceExile in the Age of Anxiety

129

less forces that account for the Gray Man’s debased condition. The work also foregrounded the fragile humanity to which the Gray Man still clings in the face of those forces. With renderings such as these, Grosz clearly understood himself to be one of those artists who had endured, in Sedlmayr’s words, the “dangers of the time.” His recent figurative paintings and watercolors deliberately eschewed novelty and beauty. They also continued the effort deemed urgent by Sedlmayr to hold in view the humanist “center” eclipsed by the calamities of the age: Dear Marc,  . . . I received an excellent book, written by an Austrian (rather philosophical, but crystal clear, no nonsense phrases): Hans Sedlmayr, The Lost Center. Art of the 19th and 20th Centuries as a Symbol of the Time . . . He touches on all the problems we’ve talked about—​the great chaos, and “from the liberation of art to the negation of art.” He has included a full-page reproduction of one of my drawings (from the Bittner book): George Grosz, Drapery Study. . . . You should most certainly order the book. . . . It contains genuine knowledge and deep thoughts concerning the burning problems of modern art and its dehumanization (as he calls it). Some of the chapter titles read: 3. The Isolation of the Arts, 5. Chaos Unleashed, 6. The Significance of the Fragment, 11. The Three Artistic Revolutions of the 18th Century, 12. From the ‘Liberation’ of Art to the Negation of Art. On down to the inorganic tendency: “Away from Man.” Naturally the author cites my writings, but he considers only my earlier bitterness. Perhaps he has not yet seen my later oil paintings and doesn’t know of my attempt to find again a “new humanity.” . . . Naturally he says: only a painter who has gone through the whole modern hell can create a new center (as he calls it).105 Grosz subsequently wrote directly to Sedlmayr about his “excellent” analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting as a “symbol of the time.” He furthermore insisted that such a book would be important in the United States and urged Sedlmayr to have the work translated into English.106 The date of Grosz’s letter to Sedlmayr, 15 July 1950, coincided with the opening of the Darmstadt exhibition Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit (The Image of Man in Our Time). This widely discussed show featured the figurative and semifigurative work of ninety artists, among them Erich Heckel, Karl Hofer, Johannes Itten, Gabriele Münter, and Rudolf Schlichter; it also included the Darmstadt Secession members Willi Baumeister and Max Beckmann. The event is best known today for the colloquy that was held in connection with the exhibit, which included presentations on the show’s theme by Sedlmayr, Johannes Itten, and Willi Baumeister, in addition to contributions by historians, theologians, sociologists, biologists, scientists, and philosophers. Dominating the colloquy’s proceedings was Sedlmayr’s provocative thesis, which he defended over the course of three days devoted to lectures and debates.107 Willi Baumeister was foremost in defending the humanist character of abstraction against Sedlmayr’s negative judgments. He did so not by looking to abstraction’s divergence from the image of man but rather

130

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

on the grounds of its redemptive transcendentalism, which, in Baumeister’s formulation, was not altogether removed from the religious justifications that underlay Sedlmayr’s diametrically opposed, anti-modernist views.108 Theodor Adorno (whose contributions to the colloquy were evidently “completely unfathomable” to observers) rejected both the restorative nostalgia implicit in Sedlmayr’s perspective and the attempt of Baumeister and others to reconcile the critical challenge of abstract tendencies to humanist tradition.109 Adorno asserted instead abstract art’s dialectical role in expressing and negating the “lacerated and unreconciled” reality of man’s contemporary plight.110 This negation of a negative reality could provide in turn the necessary ground for an enlightened critical autonomy. That autonomy would be needed, following Adorno and Horkheimer’s conclusions in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), for overcoming what had otherwise become a thoroughly administered world. In his letter to Marc Sandler of early 1950, Grosz too had recognized an undialectical negativity in Sedlmayr’s views on modernism, particularly as those views pertained to Grosz’s own work. The art historian had evidently failed to perceive the dimension of critique present in Grosz’s recent images of a “new humanity” that both condemned and protested the diminished human condition of the contemporary moment. Grosz and Sedlmayr nonetheless maintained a friendly correspondence over the coming years, beginning with the art historian’s response to Grosz shortly after the Darmstadt colloquy. His letter expressed “the greatest pleasure and satisfaction” over Grosz’s words of praise for his Verlust der Mitte.111 Sedlmayr also returned the compliment by telling Grosz that he had come to see Grosz’s American drawings as among “the masterpieces of our time.” He also considered him now foremost among those who had suffered and perhaps still suffered the “dehumanization of the human” that was continuing to unfold. He closed by thanking Grosz for the suggestion that a translated version of the book might find a receptive audience in the United States. When the translation of Verlust der Mitte did appear in 1958, the New York Times art editor Howard Devree was one of the few critics to take note of the volume. He dismissed it as a reactionary tract derived from Sedlmayr’s lectures in the mid-1930s, “when the Nazis so closely supervised academic expression.”112 Had The Lost Center appeared in 1950, however, its shrillness would indeed, as Grosz surmised, have been as much at home in the U.S. art world as it was in the vituperative debates concerning “the image of man” taking place in Germany at that time. By then, George Dondero had just completed his series of speeches from the floor of Congress that assailed modern art and the organizations, institutions, critics, and artists that supported it as part of an un-American communist conspiracy.113 This Cold War hysteria escalated the following year with the emergence of Senator Joseph McCarthy on the political scene, the specter of a growing Soviet nuclear arsenal, and the threat of yet another world war announced by events on the Korean peninsula.

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

131

Art with a Humanist Core In 1948, the Institute of Contemporary Art, in Boston, faced charges of pandering to Dondero’s cultural right-wing when it changed its name and mission statement to distinguish its curatorial orientation from MoMA’s promotion of vanguard abstraction. In March 1950, the ICA joined forces with MoMA and the Whitney Museum in its effort to counter such impressions. Taking their cue from Arthur Schlesinger’s Vital Center (1949), which argued for an aggressive liberalism in the face of reaction, the three institutions banded together. They now sought to defend modernist abstraction against charges of subversion and anti-humanism despite their earlier differences on the matter: We believe in the humanistic value of modern art even though it may not adhere to academic humanism with its insistence on the human figure as the central element of art. Art which explores newly discovered levels of consciousness, new concepts of science and new technological methods is contributing to humanism in the deepest sense, by helping humanity to come to terms with the modern world, not by retreating from it, but by facing and mastering it. We recognize the humanistic value of abstract art, as an expression of thought and emotion and the basic human aspirations toward freedom and order. In these ways modern art contributes to the dignity of man.114 While these powerful institutions thus formed a united front against political reaction, the perception on the part of figurative artists was of a consolidating art world orthodoxy exclusive of their work. For the liberals among them, this orthodoxy was a violation of MoMA’s stated policy to promote freedom of expression as fundamental to democratic society. For leftists who remained committed to socially engaged art, modernist abstraction was part and parcel of an emergent American chauvinism and Cold War retreat from the progressive values of the New Deal.115 These art world battle lines between left-liberalism and reaction continued to sort themselves out over the next several years. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Museum in New York found itself in the midst of controversy when eighteen prominent artists, including the portraitist John Carroll and the abstractionists Byron Browne, John Sennhauser, and John von Wicht, refused to participate in its exhibit American Painting Today—​1950, scheduled for that December. Grosz was one of seventy-five artists who signed a petition that refuted the claims of the eighteen and defended the Met as not “notoriously hostile to advanced art.” Joining Grosz were figurative artists of both liberal and leftist pedigrees, including Milton Avery, Adolf Dehn, Philip Evergood, John Groth, Jack Levine, Reginald Marsh, and Sol Wilson.116 In March 1950, Raphael Soyer, Joseph Hirsch, Philip Evergood, Eugene Speicher, Leonard Leone, Leon Kroll, Sol Wilson, Henry Poor, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Ben Shahn met at Del Pezzo Restaurant, on West 47th Street. They sought to develop an exhibit for MoMA that would defend the value of their figurative art. In late 1951, Joseph Hirsh and Raphael Soyer invited Grosz to participate in their group and solicited his thoughts on “art with a humanist core.”117 Hirsch wrote

132

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

that a similar invitation was to be extended to other prominent figurative artists, including Edward Hopper, Robert Gwathmey, Sydney Kaufmann, Charles Sheeler, Julian Levi, and Franklin Watkins.118 The group eventually founded Reality: A Journal of Artists’ Opinions, which appeared three times between 1953 and 1955.119 In its first editorial statement, the journal described the commitment of the group to “the depiction of man and his world,” despite the diversity represented by their individual approaches to style and content. Above all, Reality announced its intention to counter the vogue for “textural novelty” in current art and its “dogmatic” promotion by an elitist art world. That art world’s adherence to abstraction demonstrated in turn little more than the extent to which it had grown out of touch with “the taste and intelligence of the public.”120 By the time it ceased publication, Reality had come under attack in the pages of Art Digest and Art News as “the voice of reaction.” The editors defended their position by claiming that Reality tolerated all forms of art and would rise to the defense of any artist. They nonetheless insisted on the validity of their “faith in certain concepts which we believe are permanent,” namely, the necessity of art to remain connected to the public in ways nonfigurative art appeared incapable of achieving.121 Grosz expressed interest in the aims of the Reality group and responded favorably to Hirsch and Soyer’s invitation to join.122 Other commitments intervened, however. A scheduled trip to Europe in May 1951 made it impossible for Grosz to attend the group meeting that spring. After his return from Europe, Grosz received yet another letter of invitation to a meeting, which arrived too late for him to attend. In a brief response he noted the late arrival of the letter and expressed his continued interest in the group.123 Another draft of his response, which remained unsent, explained more fully his interest: Dear Mr. Soyer: I thank you for your letter, unfortunately it arrived this very morning, hence I could’nt [sic] make it. Of course I am very much interested in the discussions of your group about the lost of the middleground see: Hans Sedlmayr: Verlust der Mitte. The Nothingness, “die Vertotung,” and the complete Anarchie, yes all of us feel slightly uneasy about it. The destruction on a grand scale I daresay. Nothing left as just a questionable symbol, a footprint or a drip from a can of molasses. I should know (an old Dadaist speaking). Came back recently from a trip abroad. In France: as they say: la fatigue de la civilization. In Germany after Hitlerman: they try to catch up, that is: the abstract experiments or the Dalis, yes, nothing new besides a few of the everlasting old Munich schools (uninteresting though). And the eastern Victorians???? Munkacshy or Weretschagin???124 Can one put the clock back so much? In NY I am always Tuesday and Wednesday . . . one Tuesday evening would be fine, but I can come to NY on the other days too. Extend my greetings to your group. Sincerely yours, George Grosz125

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

133

One can only speculate as to why Grosz declined to send this version of the letter to Soyer. It does, however, indicate his acute awareness of the current state of the arts in a divided Germany. It also spells out his recognition that similar divisions currently beset an American art world in which the humanist “middle ground” represented by his art and that of the Reality group appeared more and more besieged.

Impressions of Dallas Grosz’s plan to join the Reality group was also forestalled by the demands of a major contract that he received at this time. It came from the Jewish department store magnate Leon Harris Jr., who commissioned Grosz to produce a suite of watercolors and paintings commemorating the city of Dallas. The works were also intended to celebrate the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Harris department store, founded by Leon Harris’s grandfather Adolf Harris in 1886.126 The commission came at a time when Grosz’s career was at an all-time low, and the pressure to submit to the commercial demands of the art market had become for him inescapable. A letter preserved in the Grosz archive captures the poignancy of this moment in his career, albeit in humorous terms. It came from the proprietor John Hall of the Largest Assortment of Quality Canes and Crutches Company. Hall requested a photo of Grosz sporting a walking stick for an upcoming advertising campaign. He also wanted to use a reproduction of one of Grosz’s Stick Men paintings, showing a Stick Man carrying a cane (“Uncle Sam—​the American walking stick No. 1”) in its left hand.127 Hall’s deflating commercial interest in Grosz’s Stick Men threw into high relief the negligible art world attention that his existentialist works as a whole managed to attract. Indeed, following the poor sales results of his Stick Men exhibit in spring 1948, the executive director of the Associated American Artists gallery, Robert Parsons, encouraged Grosz to drop this troubling imagery and get over his aversion to “selling wares to Mr. and Mrs. Average Man.” Parsons’s suggestion of more accessible themes, like paintings of skyscrapers, drew an angry response from Grosz.128 Concerned about Grosz’s floundering sales record, Reeves Lewenthal of the AAA had repeatedly pressed Grosz to accept commercial contracts, but to no avail.129 The only success on this front was Grosz’s agreement to allow the AAA to use reproductions of his works in product endorsement ads, as it had for other artists the gallery represented. At least two such ads appeared in American Artist magazine, one for Strathmore Artist Papers and Boards and the other for the Delta Brush Manufacturing Corporation.130 Grosz’s resistance to commercial work became even more untenable after Pegeen Sullivan’s resignation from the AAA in 1951. Beginning with her first major show of his work in 1943, Sullivan had championed Grosz’s independent artistic vision. Her presentations of his art, the Piece of My World exhibit in 1946 and the Stick Men display in 1948, had also sought to promote his work as important exemplars of European tradition and urgently relevant social commentary. These efforts, in the end, proved to be incapable of reversing the downward slide of Grosz’s sales. More-

134

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

over, his professed cynicism did little to remedy this situation as the cultural battle lines between liberalism and reaction became all the more entrenched in the New York art world. With Sullivan’s departure from the AAA, Grosz finally and with great reluctance agreed to take on the Dallas project, the first semicommercial project of his career. Reeves Lewenthal put Grosz in contact with Leon Harris, who invited him to come to Dallas, tour the city, and begin work on the commission. Grosz temporarily left behind a New York art world inclined to look on him as an artistic has-been and on his art as part of a trend toward cultural reaction. Ironically, he found this assessment dramatically reversed in the more provincial environs of the Dallas art world. There, he confronted resistance not to his traditionalism but rather to his status as a modern artist. At the same time, factions of the Dallas cultural scene took exception not to Grosz’s traditionalist views but rather to his reputation as a subversive Communist Party artist of the past. In his essay for Grosz’s Piece of My World in a World without Peace exhibit catalogue of 1946, Herzfelde recalled Grosz’s early fantasies regarding America’s “wild west” and his desire to one day see this part of the world for himself.131 Grosz’s imaginings were part of the powerful “Amerikanismus” that captivated the German avant-garde during World War I. He, Schlichter, Dix, and other vanguard artists styled themselves as gunslingers and urban Apaches at that time as part of their dissident avant-garde posture and desire for liberation from tradition-bound Wilhelmine society.132 In 1952, nearly twenty years after his immigration to the United States, Grosz was given the opportunity to measure his early vanguard fantasies against the reality of the American “frontier” for the first time. Harris asked the famous exile from Hitler’s Germany to visit Dallas in May of that year in order to produce a series of images of the city. Titled Impressions of Dallas, the fifteen-thousand-dollar commission brought Grosz face to face with “a Texas he had dreamed of for 41 years, but had never actually seen.”133 Dallas of the 1950s was a far cry from the Wild West that had so captivated Grosz’s youthful imagination, however. While (urban) cowboys could still be seen wandering the city’s streets, African Americans now replaced Indians as the “other” in Dallas’s racial economy. Meanwhile, the city’s forest of skyscrapers had long since crowded out the Texas prairie. Instead, tall, gleaming buildings testified to Dallas’s growing stature as a modern urban center. Dallas was indeed no longer a frontier town. But the city was nonetheless culturally mired in a frontier ethic whose real-life brutality and lawlessness exposed the benign escapism of Grosz’s early fantasies. Fictional shoot-outs between cowboys and Indians held scant resemblance to the wave of violence between the city’s white majority and African American populations that gripped Dallas in the early 1950s. These clashes became all the more acute as Dallas experienced the first stirrings of the civil rights movement and the erosion of unquestioned white majority rule it presaged. Grosz arrived with Lewenthal in Dallas to begin work on the series on 13 May 1952. Local press reports noted his infamy as a degenerate artist as well as his long-standing desire to visit the Southwest. Newspapers featured his arrival and travels around the city alongside headlines about the Korean War, the Soviet Union’s strengthening control in East Germany, and the upcoming November presidential election battle between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson.

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

135

Though this period marked Dallas’s age of anxiety in existentialist terms, the works Grosz produced for the commission bore no resemblance to his recent existentialist art. Indeed, the majority of his Impressions of Dallas images were precisely the sort of accessible skyscraper painting he had angrily refused to take up after the disappointing results of his Stick Men exhibit in 1948. As part of the series’ commemorative purpose, several of Grosz’s watercolors dutifully recorded the city’s changing profile. This included renderings of its proliferating glass-box skyscrapers, which marked Dallas’s ascendancy as a modern, forward-looking center of the American Southwest. Watercolors, including Old and New, Shopping Center, Right out of the Plains, and The Growing City, captured the city’s evolving urban core in a grid of crisscrossing linear washes. In other watercolors such as Dallas Broadway, A Dallas Night, and Streetcorner at Night, Grosz experimented with a semiabstract style using kaleidoscopic splashes of color in order to capture the frenetic pulse of the city’s fast-paced modernity. The commission also involved the production of four large-scale oil paintings. The largest of these, Dallas Skyline, rendered the city’s skyscraper profile emerging from the broad expanse of the Texas prairie. The three remaining oils celebrated the triumvirate of historical Dallas resources—​ cotton, oil, and cattle. They also involved Grosz in rendering motifs he had never before attempted. He struggled particularly with the canvas devoted to the cattle industry, which featured a cowboy on horseback herding Texas Longhorns through a paddock. In one of his many despairing letters written while he was at work on the Dallas series, Grosz shared with Otto Schmalhausen his humiliation at being reduced to painting cows. The only saving grace, he grumbled, was that they were not to be “life-size, like those of dear old Rosa Bonheur.”134 In other works, Grosz resorted to the gentle caricature and portrayal of human types that had populated his earliest watercolors and drawings of New York after his emigration in 1933. For example, In Front of the Hotel captures the panoply of types that might have crowded the street on any given day in front of the Adolphus Hotel, where Grosz stayed during his Dallas visit (figure 50). The work depicts a woman and a young black newspaper seller who function as a pair of mobile bookends that frame a stationary cluster of four men idling on the city sidewalk. Ringed by the other figures in the composition is an urban cowboy who crouches in rolled up dungarees, boots, and a string tie while balancing a cigarette with urban sophistication between the fingers of his left hand. The four men appear to be variously admiring and kibitzing about the woman, who wears the cinched-waste skirt and cut-away jacket that were then the height of fashion. Grosz portrays her primly striding past the men on the city street like a model lifted directly from the pages of Harris’s department store advertising. Grosz’s talent for rendering urban types thus folded seamlessly into the city boosterism that was intended to characterize the Impressions of Dallas series as a whole. But In Front of the Hotel also underscores the hierarchies and exclusions on which Dallas’s self-congratulatory image was based. Specifically, the privileged moment of idleness enjoyed by the white men in the watercolor contrasts not only with the white woman but also with the black newspaper boy who balances a stack of papers on the top of his head as he moves away down the city sidewalk. Gender and race combine in this and other works in the Impressions of Dallas series in ways that touch, however 136

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

FIGURE 50. George

Grosz, In Front of the Hotel, 1952. Watercolor on paper, 50.2 × 39.4 cm.

obliquely, on the central problem of ethnic relations residing at the violent core of the modernizing city whose profile Grosz’s works were intended to depict. Indeed, the city’s robust modern architecture captured in many of Grosz’s images of Dallas contrasted with the backdrop of the miserable black slums that choked the Trinity River basin, Mill Creek, and other areas that ringed the city center. As the trend toward urbanization began to be felt in the black community during and after World War II, a vicious “housing shortage” conveniently cropped up under a set of jerry-rigged interpretations of the law that kept the city’s blacks from purchasing homes in white neighborhoods. Violence against blacks increased in the 1940s as more edged their way into the middle class, thereby threatening to blur the increasingly permeable divide that kept the city segregated along race and class lines. In the early years of the century, Dallas had been a national epicenter of Ku Klux Klan violence; in the late 1940s it became that once again.135 Leon Harris’s uncle Arthur Kramer Sr. led the Dallas oligarchy in efforts to rally support for cleaning up the city’s slums.136 Harris appears to have shared his uncle’s liberalism. His sympathy Exile in the Age of Anxiety

137

for progressive causes was also no doubt shaped by some of his own experiences as a prosperous Jewish retailer in a city riddled with ethnic hatred. In the 1950s and ’60s, painted swastikas appeared from time to time on Jewish-owned stores. Harris, like other Jewish entrepreneurs, also endured the predictable round of exclusions from the city’s country clubs and other bastions of privilege and influence.137 In 1977, Harris published Merchant Princes, in which he told the story of the great department store dynasties of the Filenes, the Strauses, the Gimbels, the Marcus family, and the Harrises. He focused his attention on how many Jewish department store owners worked to redeem their own family histories of hardship and discrimination by assuming a leading role in promoting social reform.138 Harris’s “otherness” thus likely attuned him to broader issues of discrimination in the city he asked Grosz to commemorate; he may also have identified in Grosz someone whose own experience of intolerance might render him sympathetic to Harris’s reformist ambitions. After a series of bombings of middle-class black homes in the city, Dallas’s Citizen’s Council of business oligarchs convened a grand jury in 1951 to look into the crimes.139 The inquest revealed that support for the instigators of these acts and the roots of racism burrowed deep into the white middle-class community, including its religious and civic leadership. The Citizen’s Council took no decisive action on the basis of its findings, however. As Jim Schutze describes in his study of Dallas’s race politics during this period, the city oligarchy made a show of its opprobrium in an effort to keep Klan violence at bay but not to eliminate it altogether. No effort was expended to push for appropriate legislation and enforcement of justice; neither were demands made to begin integration, economic redress, and the stamping out of racism once and for all. Schutze calls this pernicious and historic compromise between business and Dallas’s majority white culture “the Accommodation.” The grand jury of 1951 nonetheless marks the widening gap that began to emerge between the entrepreneurial elite of the city, whose abhorrence of racial violence was grounded in its negative implications for business, and a white middle-class population still beholden to racism, vigilantism, and intolerance. As blacks became more empowered with the first kindling of the civil rights movement, their protests began to mesh with Cold War paranoia in the minds of a white majority who readily construed black anger as communist conspiracy. Until 1952, Dallas had voted Democratic with the rest of the Dixiecrat South. But in this election year, which pitted Republican Dwight Eisenhower against Democrat Adlai Stevenson (who enjoyed the support not only of Dallas’s black leadership but also of Grosz),140 the city swung decisively to the Republican Party.141 Two other works in Grosz’s Impressions of Dallas series touch on the experience of the African American community at this explosive juncture in Dallas’s race history. In Old Negro Shacks, he responded to the squalid living conditions endured by most of city’s black population (figure 51). However, his rendering deviates far from the reality of the cramped tin shacks, poverty, and sewage-choked streets that characterized Dallas’s ghetto communities in the early 1950s and beyond. The term old in the title of the watercolor refers to the rough-hewn timbers and ramshackle fences Grosz uses to describe the houses depicted in this work. But it also engages the conceit that such conditions were indeed old, a thing of the past, and out of step with the city’s modernizing ten138

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

FIGURE 51. George Grosz, Old Negro Shacks, 1952. Watercolor on paper, 48.3 × 67 cm. University Art

collection, SMU, Dallas. UAC.1961.08.

dencies. Grosz’s rendering of Old Negro Shacks in fact supports this anachronistic view by drawing more on prosaic notions of nineteenth-century rural life than on Dallas’s 1950s urban reality. The work uses puffs of green watercolor to suggest large shade trees that join with broad porch awnings to provide respite from the hot Texas sun. A woman seated in front of one house and a man walking hand-in-hand with a young girl in front of another suggest a community in which the sense of family, despite hardship, remains unbroken. Though uncritical in its content and aestheticizing in its form, Grosz’s Old Negro Shacks nonetheless provided viewers of the Impressions of Dallas with a poignant reminder of how the city’s economic “miracle,” configured in other works of the series, was grounded in the cultural logic of race. That logic pitted skyscrapers against shacks and white affluence against black disenfranchisement. It also chose to see whiteness as the city’s future and blackness as a thing of its past. Grosz also visited Deep Ellum, the commercial and entertainment area of the black ghetto located on the eastern fringe of the downtown theater and shopping district. He rendered this “Harlem of Dallas” in a work titled A Glimpse inside the Negro Section of Dallas (figure 52).142 Vivid, satiny stains of watercolor give form to the black hair, brown cheekbones, and red ribbons, lips, and shirts of the people whose faces crowd Grosz’s composition. Light reflects off the awnings and filters through glass windows that line the street as a full moon hangs over the palm tree in the background of this nighttime scene. A Glimpse inside the Negro Section of Dallas functions as an inverse pendant to Grosz’s other Exile in the Age of Anxiety

139

FIGURE 52. George Grosz, A

Glimpse inside the Negro Section of Dallas, 1952. Watercolor on paper, 66.7 × 48.3 cm.

portrayal of Dallas city life in In Front of the Hotel. There, he presents a self-contained narrative in which the looks and actions of the men idling in front of the hotel are organized around the charms of the woman who passes them by on the city street. In A Glimpse inside the Negro Section of Dallas, narrative structure gives way instead to montage and a more loosely connected group of figures arrayed within the pictorial frame. Grosz gives prominence to the broad features, lush makeup, and beribboned finery of the two women whose faces occupy the central axis of the composition. Meanwhile, the heads of three men appear dispersed around and between them. These men direct their attention away from, rather than toward, the women in their midst. In In Front of the Hotel, the men admire the woman who occupies the foreground of the picture space. By contrast, in A Glimpse inside the Negro Section of Dallas, we the viewers are instead placed in the 140

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

position of the desiring observer as we indulge this illicit nighttime glimpse into an exotic, indeed eroticized, zone of Dallas city life. In Old Negro Shacks, Grosz draws attention to the living conditions of Dallas’s African American population but does so with an aestheticizing, outdated eye. In A Glimpse inside the Negro Section of Dallas, he draws our attention to this enclave of African American life not through the use of bygone imagery but rather through recourse to stereotypes of eroticized and exotic black otherness. In both works, Grosz thus did little to challenge the anachronistic and primitivizing notions that subtended the racism responsible for limiting the lives of the African American community to which his images refer. At the same time, however, the presence of these watercolors within the Impressions of Dallas series as a whole established that blacks were nonetheless part of this majority white city, which had proven itself inclined in certain quarters to erase their presence altogether. Harris earmarked part of the Impressions of Dallas as a gift to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (DMFA, now the Dallas Museum of Art), on whose board of trustees he served at various times throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The DMFA director Jerry Bywaters oversaw the unveiling of Grosz’s works at the museum on the occasion of the annual state fair of Texas in 1952.143 Grosz returned to Dallas on 2 October 1952 for the occasion and for receptions at the Harris department store and the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Old Negro Shacks and A Glimpse inside the Negro Section of Dallas were included among Grosz’s seventeen watercolors and four oil paintings put on view at the fair between 4 October and 9 November.144 Bob Brock, art critic for the Daily Times Herald simply noted the presence of “the world famous artist’s impressions of Dallas” at the DMFA fair exhibit. He otherwise reserved the lion’s share of his coverage for the Texas Art Exhibition featuring some 741 works by 441 Texas artists, which was also hosted by the DMFA at this time.145 Grosz’s work was similarly drowned out in general coverage of the fair. The white mainstream presses focused instead on the festival’s livestock contests, rodeos, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin’s vaudeville review, the unveiling of “Big Tex” (a fifty-foot papier-mâché cowboy), and the Cotton Bowl game. The black press, meanwhile, concerned itself instead with the question of whether blacks were welcome to attend the fair at all.146 Since the 1930s, African Americans had been admitted only on a special day set aside for them. Called “Nigger Day” in the 1940s, it was renamed “Negro Achievement Day” by fair officials in 1950. In 1953, the fair was finally opened to blacks for the duration of the festival. They continued to be banned from the midway and restaurants, however, and could go only on rides “where separate facilities [were] available and no contact [was] involved.” Strategic posting of signs indicated “Negro” areas at various amusement attractions.147 Grosz came away from the Dallas commission with a ten-gallon hat and a pair of cowboy boots—​in addition to a much needed fifteen thousand dollars. But his encounter with the Texas prairie had been a melancholy one, as he confided in a letter to Schlichter. In the end it held for him none of the romance he imagined in his youthful readings of the Wild West.148 Moreover, the Dallas commission was for him “disgusting work, because I ‘sold’ myself (this time out of a pure need for money . . . ),” as he later complained to his friend and patron Felix Weil.149 Exile in the Age of Anxiety

141

The Dallas chapter in Grosz’s career did not come to end in 1952, however. The following year, his life and art became embroiled in the mounting wave of reaction in the city that swept through the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. In 1952, Dondero delivered his speech “Communist Conspiracy in Art Threatens American Museums” before the U.S. House of Representatives. Sensing the McCarthyist chill, the Dallas Museum director Jerry Bywaters called on the board to form a standing committee on art and politics. In March 1955, the Public Affairs Luncheon Club, a political affairs social organization of Dallas women, charged the museum with favoring subversive (that is, modernist) art. More ominously, they claimed the museum was “promoting the work of artists who have known communist affiliations to the neglect of . . . many orthodox artists, some of them Texans, whose patriotism . . . has never been questioned.”150 Their list of the objectionable included Joseph Hirsch, Chaim Gross, George Grosz, Jo Davidson, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, and Max Weber. In the coming months, their charges were joined by those of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, and a host of local arts clubs.151 Stanley Marcus, as president of the Dallas Art Association, worked with Bywaters to diffuse the situation by taking it directly to the Dallas public. Inviting visitors to judge for themselves, they hung inside the museum entrance several abstract pieces along with three works by so-called communist artists: a portrait by Rivera, a scene of workers by Hirsch, and Grosz’s sedate painting of a female nude titled Model Arranging Her Hair.152 Despite this show of bravado, however, the museum took its cue from the city’s policy of political duplicity in race matters and opted instead for an “accommodation” with Dallas’s forces of cultural reaction. Art News championed the cause of artistic freedom and scornfully noted the DMFA board of trustees’ final action in the matter. The journal reported that the board had contradictorily claimed support for open artistic expression, while also instating a policy against the exhibition of known communist or communist-affiliated artists, regardless of the quality or content of their works.153

Grosz and the History of Modern Art Works from Grosz’s Impressions of Dallas commission were shown again in 1954, this time at the Associated American Artists gallery in New York. The exhibit was timed to coincide with a traveling retrospective of his work, which was unveiled in January 1954 at the Whitney Museum.154 Grosz considered it an honor that his exhibit would help inaugurate the museum’s new location behind the Museum of Modern Art in New York.155 As the first summary display of Grosz’s career, the Whitney show featured thirty-three paintings, fifty-one watercolors, and thirty-four drawings ranging in date from 1909 to 1953. According to curator John Baur, the museum’s original intention had been to mount an exhibit devoted solely to Grosz’s American production. His art had become more “Teutonic” since his emigration, however, thus necessitating study of Grosz’s past works for understanding his more recent paintings and drawings. In Baur’s words, the artist’s German origins had filtered into his American art with “a nostalgia for the things that had seemed good in this youth and, more profoundly, by a new sense of kinship with the romantic and mystical strain in the north European mind.” During Grosz’s first years in New York, American com142

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

mentators had located the strength of his work in his politicized artistic commitments of the past. For Baur, by contrast, the power of his paintings and drawings now resided in his experience of exile. Through that experience, Grosz had achieved a fusion of “both the old world and the new” that allowed his art to “rise above nationality to a broader significance.”156 Baur’s attempt to claim a universal validity for Grosz’s exile art was countered by Henry McBride in his review of the Whitney retrospective for Art News. McBride condemned the Whitney exhibit for intemperance and for “waving the war flags again and shouting out our ancient hatreds.” Grosz’s work was outdated, he maintained, not stylistically, but in its resuscitation of issues now better left to the past. For McBride, Grosz’s greatest talent remained in his earlier role as a caricaturist. His American paintings, by contrast, were confused, overwrought, and unwelcome by virtue of their German sobriety and gloom.157 McBride’s negative comments registered the manner in which Grosz’s “Teutonic” American art had become unintelligible, alien, and unwelcome for many in his adopted art world by the mid-1950s. And while Baur attempted to assert a continuing validity for Grosz and his work, the scholarly nature of the catalogue he developed for the Whitney retrospective tacitly acknowledged the extent to which his career had also already passed into the annals of modern art’s history. Baur credited interviews with Grosz and Eva and consultations with Reeves Lewenthal and Pegeen Sullivan of the Associated American Artists gallery, among others, for the detailed account of Grosz’s life and art the Whitney catalogue provided. A chronology of the artist’s life, a comprehensive listing of his writings, and bibliographic references to his art gave readers further means to assess the importance of Grosz’s contribution to the history of modern art in this definitive summary of his career. For his part, however, Grosz viewed his retrospective not as a final curtain but rather as a new beginning. Indeed, he wrote excitedly to Baur in August 1954 while he and Eva were visiting Germany for the second time since the end of the war. Unlike the equivocal reception that greeted his retrospective in New York, he was “impressed,” Grosz wrote, by the “great interest” in his American art and the admiration for Baur’s catalogue that greeted him on his arrival in Berlin.158 The city’s cultural senator and a few museums had asked him to arrange for the Whitney show to travel to Germany. Grosz concluded his letter by imploring Baur to see what he could do. “It would make me very sorry if such a beautiful exhibition like the one you assembled would be disbanded without being shown abroad,” he wrote. Grosz’s hope for a German staging of the Whitney show never came to pass, however. Nonetheless, his perception that the German art world was more interested in his work than its increasingly neglectful American counterpart during this period was not altogether misplaced. We shall explore the reception of Grosz and his art in a divided Germany in the next chapter. As we have seen here, however, his attempts to find a “new center” and engage a “new humanity” in his existentialist works fell victim to the aesthetic polarizations that held sway over U.S. culture in the Cold War. On the one hand, the narrative and figurative aspect of his Stick Men images came to be associated with a culture of right-wing political reaction in a New York art world increasingly dominated Exile in the Age of Anxiety

143

by abstract expressionist tendencies. In Dallas, on the other hand, Grosz’s art courted negative reception on wholly different grounds. There, his politicized past inflected understandings of his work as part of the communist left’s peril to American culture during the height of the red scare. More significant still is the manner in which Grosz’s post–​World War II paintings and watercolors exposed changes in the notions of exile and the one-world order that guide this study. We have traced how the exile as a figure of political persecution and displacement became for him instead a condition of human alienation and loss of individuality in a world all but overrun by the seemingly ineluctable forces of dictatorship and the commodity form. Grosz drew these insights from his encounters with existentialist thought, his attunement to the geopolitical and cultural conflicts of the Cold War, and his seemingly perpetual struggle to make it in what he saw as a thoroughly commercialized American culture hostile to the seriousness of his art. Though his views were thus filtered through his personal experience, they nonetheless bore resemblance to similar assessments more famously expressed by others inside and outside the exile community, including Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment of 1944, Arendt in her meditations on the camps in 1948, and Orwell in his dystopic novel, 1984. Like Grosz, these thinkers looked with growing trepidation beyond the post–​World War II division of the world between communism and capitalism and dictatorship and liberal democracy. Most alarming of all, they saw not division but rather consolidation of a world order far removed from the optimistic ideal of one world that had earlier animated the thinking of Willkie and others. As suggested by Grosz in his Stick Men works, this emergent world was not to be one of peace, prosperity, and human betterment. It threatened instead enslavement in a gray, colorless, and totalizing order designed to rob human kind of all humanity. To the extent that Grosz understood his recent works as an attempt to protest this condition and configure a “new humanity,” his art simultaneously pointed, however weakly, beyond this gray-on-gray world. With grim desperation and at best flickering hope, his Gray Man Dances gestured toward the lingering presence of human possibility under life-extinguishing circumstances. But this work and other images of Grosz’s Stick Men period sided more readily with bleak, rather than liberatory, understandings of current existentialist thought. Ironically, the liberatory aspect of existentialism and an image of a “new humanity” emerged most fully elsewhere in Grosz’s postwar production, namely, in his Impressions of Dallas commission. He regarded the paintings and watercolors he produced for this project as completely outside the bounds of his serious existentialist art. But it was there, and specifically in Grosz’s renderings of the worlds that divided Dallas along racial lines in 1952, that the lineaments of an emergent civil rights movement could be discerned. His renderings of the city also captured a time and a place in which Cold War visions of a totalizing world order began to come undone.

144

Exile in the Age of Anxiety

4

THE EXILE RETURNS Der traurigste Mensch in Europa (The Saddest Man in Europe). George Grosz on the cover of Der Spiegel, 30 June 1954

IN FEBRUARY 1947, Grosz received a letter from Dresden two years to the month after the city and its inhabitants were reduced to scorched remains by British and American bombers.1 Its author, Wolfgang Paul, had led the 18th Panzer division on the Russian front, suffered injury, and subsequently spent time in a Soviet prison. He told Grosz he had also been “reprimanded” for his role in Colonel von Stauffenberg’s failed coup attempt against Hitler on 20 July 1944. Since the end of the war, Paul had been living and working as an independent writer and theater critic. The occasion for his letter was a reproduction of Cain that appeared in Heute. It illustrated a review of Grosz’s Piece of My World in a World without Peace exhibit of 1946 in New York. Paul was clearly struck by the Heute review. It ascribed a moral honesty and courage to Grosz and his art seemingly beyond that of the many Germans who experienced the Nazi menace directly, as the recently concluded Nuremberg Trials revealed. Heute lauded Cain as an unmistakable symbol of the time, despite, or perhaps because of, the distance from atrocity that exile had afforded its creator: “Grosz never set eyes on the model [Hitler], nor did he on the dwarfs, supermen, and sorcerers of his frightful fairy tale world. But in this fairy tale world he saw these monstrous figures more clearly than later millions were capable of, who saw them in flesh and blood, who lived in the vicinity of the horror, and who now proclaim aghast they only heard about all this dreadfulness.”2 145

Grosz’s depiction of Hitler moved Paul to write a radio play called Kains Ende (Cain’s End), which he intended to make into a stage performance and a film. He wrote of his hope that a dramatized version of Grosz’s painting would help people who were currently in the process of working to grapple with the past.3 The next year, Paul fled the Soviet Occupation Zone and settled in West Berlin, where he published on the events of World War II and growing repression in East Germany. His works include the book Mauer der Schande (Wall of Shame), which appeared shortly after the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.4 This wall of shame gave concrete and barbed wire form to the cultural and political antagonisms that defined German history throughout the Cold War. As we shall explore, the reception of Grosz and his art in postwar Germany was decisively shaped by these antagonisms and the founding mythologies, repressions of the recent past, and rewritings of history that characterized cultural politics on both sides of the divide. In East Germany, division from the west entailed sustaining a myth of anti-fascist resistance to the Nazi regime that swept aside all previous complicity of East Germany’s citizens in the horrors of Hitler’s Third Reich. In the west, the Official Military Government of the United States (OMGUS) soon abandoned policies focusing on the Germans’ collective guilt in favor of winning hearts and minds. It led the way among the other Western occupying powers in recasting West Germany instead as a democratic state freed of its Nazi legacy and allied with America against the USSR.5 Both emergent state ideologies worked to obviate the kind of circumspection about the past that Paul recognized in Grosz’s painting and hoped to promote with his production of Kains Ende. Indeed, Grosz’s American production in general—​images that reflected on the German tragedy, such as Cain, his apocalyptic war paintings, and his Stick Men configurations of a “new humanity”—​received limited and equivocal response in Germany after 1945. The lion’s share of attention went instead to his Weimar art as both East and West Germany reconnected in distinct ways to the country’s pre-Nazi past as part of their competing claims to national legitimacy. Dozens of Grosz’s works had been confiscated from German museums and collections under the Hitler regime. After 1945, these paintings and drawings were also some of the most frequently exhibited in the many West German shows that featured artists pilloried under the Third Reich.6 Meanwhile, in East Germany, his stature as a social satirist and Communist Party artist in the 1920s became a matter of rancorous debate, as the East too sought to appropriate Grosz’s Weimar legacy, but on terms distinct from those in the West. This chapter considers Grosz’s reception in postwar Germany between 1946 and 1958, the year in which Grosz and his wife, Eva, returned to Berlin shortly before Grosz’s death. As we shall explore, his German and American production occupied an illuminating role in the cultural worlds of the two Germanys as they became divided, not only between east and west, but also between the country’s recent past and the political imperatives of its Cold War present.

146

The Exile Returns

The Art and Politics of Reconstruction The German art world began to revive from national defeat with surprising speed immediately after the war. Indeed, a flurry of exhibits, publications, and the formation of artists’ groups and institutions led some to speculate that Berlin might soon reclaim its Weimar-era status as an internationally acclaimed cultural capital.7 But the task of salvaging a useable national heritage on which to rebuild proved slower and, as time would tell, a point of growing contention between Germany’s two halves. In the immediate aftermath of the war, most in the German art world concurred with a spirit of cooperation and the need to reconnect with the legacies of artistic modernism that had been pilloried and suppressed after 1933. However, this task had to be carried out over and against the traditional tastes of a postwar populace whose intolerance for vanguard experiment had enjoyed vengeful political legitimacy under the Third Reich. Opinion surveys of exhibit visitors found that young people who had grown up under the Hitler dictatorship were especially uninhibited in expressing their hostility to modern art. They were also disturbingly unself-conscious about recycling Nazi terminology in making their noxious views on “degenerate” art known.8 And though a cooperative ethos guided initial efforts to rebuild the arts in Berlin, Dresden, and elsewhere, the contours of the cultural and political divisions that would increasingly separate Germany’s western and Soviet Occupation Zones soon became evident. The distinctive tone of Western cultural rebuilding strategies was set from the beginning through the circulation of exhibits devoted to “degenerate” art saved from destruction or sale abroad under the Third Reich. Perhaps most important in this regard were displays featuring the collection of the Cologne lawyer Josef Haubrich. Haubrich’s interest in modern art dated from his experience of the landmark Cologne Sonderbund exhibit of German and European avant-garde works in 1912. After World War I, he served on the board of the Köln Kunstverein (Cologne Art Association) and began acquiring works. Most heavily represented in his collection were expressionist pieces as examples of what many regarded as Germany’s first, homegrown contribution to the early twentieth-century international avant-garde. Haubrich’s purchases included paintings and graphics by members of the Brücke and the Blaue Reiter groups, in addition to works by Dix, Beckmann, Grosz, and others. He also managed to continue buying modern art during the Third Reich and was later heralded for “rescuing” some forty-five works in this way.9 As a result of Haubrich’s efforts, his collection constituted the most full-standing repository of degenerate art to survive the war in Germany. In 1946, he donated the collection to the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, in Cologne. Some of the works, including examples of Grosz’s art, toured museums in the western occupation zone cities of Cologne, Mannheim, Stuttgart, Wiesbaden, and Düsseldorf between 1946 and 1949.10 These exhibits formed part of broader efforts during this period to position expressionism as a viable foundation on which the art world might rebuild. In a Die Zeit essay of 1950, Haubrich expressed the hope that displays of his collection would help bridge the “deep cleft” that currently existed in Germany between “artistic tradition and represen-

The Exile Returns

147

tatives of new revolutionary stylistic tendencies” by revealing that vanguard experiment had a long and distinctively German national pedigree.11 Grosz’s works also appeared in the exhibit Moderne deutsche Kunst: Ein Überblick (Modern German Art: An Overview), held in Tübingen in 1947, which similarly featured art by degenerate artists. The exhibit catalogue explained the show’s curatorial aim to allow the works on view to “again speak for themselves” after the historical rupture of the Nazi years and the regime’s propagandistic manipulation of the arts.12 Viewers were thus encouraged to appreciate above all the formal qualities of the art and the individual creativity of those whose works were put on display. This dehistoricized and depoliticized reckoning with modernist works allowed for unburdened aesthetic contemplation that no doubt met the needs of an art public desirous for respite from the persistent trauma of war and its aftermath. But such unburdening also forestalled equally persistent questions about the Nazi past and its place within the legacy of artistic modernism and its practitioners. A now well-documented case in point is Emil Nolde, whose expressionist canvases came to enjoy a veritable “cult” status after 1945, despite his early support for the Nazi Party and attempts to ingratiate himself with the Hitler regime.13 His reproachful past was swept aside and his art seamlessly integrated into a canon of classical modernism that also came to encompass the work of Grosz and other Weimar modernists during this period. At the same time, this unburdened classical modernism also became an important instrument of reeducation strategies in the western occupied zones. By avoiding questions of history and politics, displays of this art emphasized instead values of tolerance, free expression, and a restored national legitimacy. These displays accorded with policy efforts to acculturate Germans to the “ethical and political values of the victor[s]” and secure their positive integration into the Western democratic sphere of influence.14 In the Soviet Occupation Zone, a more immediate and concerted effort was undertaken than in the western zones to establish strong institutional structures for the promotion of postwar cultural renewal. In the summer of 1945, the Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland (SMAD, Soviet Military Administration in Germany) licensed the formation of the Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands (Cultural Union for the Democratic Renewal of Germany). The poet Johannes R. Becher, recently returned from exile in Moscow, served as president. The painter Karl Hofer functioned as vice president of the organization, which held its founding congress in July with some fifteen hundred participants in attendance. The declared aim of the Kulturbund was “to reawaken the great German tradition, the pride of our fatherland, and to establish a new intellectual life.”15 In its early days, the Kulturbund adopted an inclusive approach to this cultural reawakening consonant with the Popular Front policies of the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands; Socialist Unity Party). Founded in April 1946, the SED’s stated aim was to revive the anti-Hitler coalition of communists, social democrats, and bourgeois liberals of the war years for the purpose of postwar anti-fascist work, reconstruction efforts, and the building of a new socialist order in Germany. This Popular Front spirit was reflected in fall 1946 on the occasion of the first major display of German art since the war. The Allgemeine deutsche Kunstausstellung (General German Art 148

The Exile Returns

Exhibition) was unveiled in Dresden under the auspices of the Kulturbund, the Dresden City Council, the Saxon state government, and the cultural division of SMAD, which was headed by the Soviet cultural officer Alexander Dymschitz. The exhibit featured 590 works by 250 German artists from the four sectors of Berlin and the French, American, and Soviet zones of occupation. In this respect, the show represented the first as well as the last concerted effort in the postwar period to mount a comprehensive display of German art from throughout the country.16 As part of this bid to present a genuinely national survey, the General German Art Exhibition also encompassed a wide stylistic range of artistic production, from expressionism to surrealism and abstraction. Absent, of course, were examples of Nazi art, though the exhibit did include works by Richard Scheibe and Georg Kolbe, both of whom had works featured in the state-sponsored Great German Art Exhibitions under the Hitler regime. Rather than address uncomfortable aspects of Nazism’s legacy that the presence of these artists might have raised, organizational efforts were focused first and foremost on recuperating Germany’s useable, not its painful, past. This focus was evidenced by a separate room in the exhibit that gave pride of place to the art of the Brücke as an outstanding exemplar of Germany’s national tradition of modernism. The exhibit also paid special tribute to artists such as Grosz, Ernst Barlach, Willi Baumeister, Max Beckmann, Käthe Kollwitz, and others who had been defamed, driven into exile, and suppressed during the years of Nazi dictatorship.17 The majority of works included in the General German Art Exhibition avoided social and political themes. However, important exceptions included Otto Dix’s War triptych (1929–​32) and the center panel, titled Vision of a Burning City, from Hans Grundig’s 1000-Year Reich triptych (1935–​38). These canvases were hung opposite one another in the exhibition hall, where together they provided a searing reminder of Germany’s recent history of Nazism and war. Within the context of the General German Art Exhibition, Dix and Grundig’s paintings provided important examples of leftist art production suppressed under the Nazi regime. In retrospect, their commanding presence in the exhibit can also be seen as helping to build the myth of anti-fascist resistance that was already taking shape in Germany’s Soviet Occupation Zone at this time. Later elevated to the status of East German state icons, Dix’s and Grundig’s canvases lent pictorial testament not only to the country’s past but also to East Germany’s present and its struggle against the allegedly fascist and war-mongering nature of its West German counterpart. Further attempts to rebuild the German art world entailed the construction and staffing of the country’s decimated educational institutions. In May 1947, Heinrich Ehmsen solicited Grosz, at the urging of faculty and students, to help establish the Hochschule für bildende Kunst (Institute for Visual Art), located in the British Occupation Zone of Berlin-Charlottenburg.18 Ehmsen assured Grosz that he could continue to live abroad as long as he would be willing to return occasionally to teach a master class. He wrote that Schmidt-Rottluff, Pechstein, and the Hochschule’s director, Karl Hofer, were already instructing at the school. In closing, Ehmsen recalled a farewell evening the two had shared before Grosz’s emigration in 1933. Since then, friends had come and gone, he noted wistfully, and the effort now was to carry on and “[re]build our humble world out of spiritual ruins.”19 The Exile Returns

149

The Great Controversy Ehmsen’s appeal reached Grosz at a time when his collapsing career in New York might well have prompted him to entertain the possibility of a return to Germany. He nonetheless declined the opportunity, citing the low salary offer; elsewhere he cynically remarked, “I’d rather be ‘poor’ and a failure [in the United States], than poor and a failure” in Germany.20 His long-standing skepticism regarding Germany and the loss of his mother, his aunt, and other loved ones there no doubt also contributed to Grosz’s reticence. Further disincentive to return was provided by the bitter infighting over the status of the exiles that erupted in the German press in late 1945 and early 1946. The conflict ensued after Thomas Mann’s response to Walter von Molo’s entreaty to the Nobel laureate that he end his period of exile in the United States. Von Molo’s open letter, which was published in early August 1945, had called on Mann as a cultural leader and a towering example of a “better” Germany to return and to help the country in its difficult task of reconstruction and reeducation. Mann refused, citing his inability to identify any longer with a country that had defamed his books, stripped him of his citizenship, forced him into the uncertainties of exile, and revealed itself capable of unspeakable cruelty. Mann’s painful meditations on the German tragedy continued with his Doktor Faustus, which appeared in the United States and Switzerland in 1947 and became widely available and discussed in Germany by 1949. Returning to the theme of his “Brother Hitler” essay of 1939, Mann’s novel told the story of composer Adrian Leverkühn, his pact with the devil, and his quest to attain musical genius at the expense of his humanity. In “Brother Hitler,” Mann posited a kinship between “brothers” that expressed the extent to which the “other” Germany should acknowledge its identification with and responsibility for the fate of the German nation under Nazi rule. But within Mann’s invocation of brotherhood also lay an important distinction between oneself and one’s brother that might allow for the Germans’ ultimate rejection of their fateful kinship with Nazism and the choice instead to move toward enlightened redemption. The critical optimism present in Mann’s “Brother Hitler” essay of 1939 had all but disappeared by the time he put the finishing touches on Doktor Faustus, however. In contrast, the novel’s narrative structure traces the collapse of differences between good and evil, self and other, and the better Germany and its demonic twin. Moreover, this descent into the demonic is not attributed to external forces but is instead freely sought by the novel’s protagonist as Leverkühn surrenders himself to Mephistopheles. Mann’s novel concludes in a despairing judgment concerning German guilt reminiscent of the meditation on guilt advanced in Cain, Grosz’s monumental painting of 1945, in which Grosz envisioned himself in the guise of Hitler. As an allegory of the German catastrophe, Doktor Faustus represented Mann’s most searing indictment to date on the responsibility of all Germans for a national hubris that had legitimated the country’s recent acts of political and cultural barbarism.21 After Leverkühn’s descent into madness, the novel’s fictional narrator and the author’s alter ego, Serenus Zeitblom, gives voice to the pain of Mann’s exile, his crushing sense of guilt, and his “loving fear” of a home to which he could no longer bear to return:

150

The Exile Returns

Germany itself, this unhappy land, is alien to me, utterly alien, precisely because I, certain of its ghastly end, held myself apart from its sins, hid from them in my solitude. Must I not ask if I was right in doing so? And again: Did I actually do so? I have clung to one man, one painfully important man, unto death and have described his life, which never ceased to fill me with loving fear. It is as if this loyalty may well have made up for my having fled in horror from my country’s guilt.22 To many, Mann’s postwar addresses and his novel’s likening of Germany to evil appeared less self-reflective than condemnatory of those who had remained behind and endured the years of Nazi dictatorship in his absence. His embittered exchange with von Molo over his writings and his refusal to return subsequently touched off “the great controversy” that claimed German press attention throughout the immediate postwar years. At issue was the relative suffering and resistance of those who went into exile as opposed to others who remained in Germany in a state of “inner emigration.” Indeed, some outspoken critics came to view Mann and the other exiles at this time as little more than traitors who had deserted the nation in its hour of need.23 Grosz’s exchange of letters with Brecht in early 1947 suggests the exile community’s acute awareness concerning the implications of this controversy for their reception inside Germany at this time. As discussed in chapter 3, Brecht tried unsuccessfully in March of that year to solicit Grosz’s illustrations for his poem “The Anachronistic Procession,” which assailed the inadequacies of Germany’s denazification efforts after World War II. Brecht wrote Grosz about his intention to have the poem and its illustrations made first in a cheap format to be sent to Germany “as a friendly greeting,” to be followed later by a proper edition from Herzfelde’s press. Likely because of the current situation in Germany and the country’s ambivalent, if not hostile, responses to interventions from the exiles, he also suggested they could, if Grosz preferred, choose to publish the volume anonymously.24 The impact of the exile controversy on the German art world can also be calibrated by the remarkable lack of exhibits devoted to the subject of exile art throughout the postwar period. One exception was the display Ausgewanderte Künstler (Exile Artists), unveiled in 1955 at the Museum Morsbroich, in Leverkusen. The exhibit featured works by Max Beckmann, Max Ernst, Otto Freundlich, Hans Hartung, Paul Klee, and Kurt Schwitters, among others. Excluded were those with more “extra-artistic” profiles, such as Grosz and John Heartfield, whose exile from Germany was due not only to the character of their art but also to the nature of their political involvements. Two decades were to pass before another exhibit took up the subject of exiled artists and their work.25

Stalinization Exiled artists nonetheless remained important and ideologically useful symbols of a persecuted Weimar modernism driven from Germany by the dictatorial repression of the Nazi regime. In this regard, their legacy became an instrument in the cultural confrontations over dictatorship and democracy that soon engulfed Germany’s Cold War art world. By late 1946, the relatively The Exile Returns

151

open and pluralistic character of the art world immediately after World War II all but disappeared. Ominous changes were signaled in the New York Times that December. The newspaper reported on a recent meeting in Berlin, where artists protested Soviet demands that they conform their work to the production of “social realist” and volksnähe art (art close to the people).26 Dissenting voices condemned this social realism as too akin to Nazi art in form and too close in its prescriptive contents to the sort of propagandistic manipulation of art that artists had suffered through under the Hitler regime. These voices advocated instead a revival of an independent, professional artists’ organization on the order of the Deutsche Künstlerbund (German Artists Union), which was closed in 1936.27 According to the Times report, the institution had been known for its “many distinguished members, including Paul Klee, Lionel [sic] Feininger, Kaethe Kollwitz, George Grosz, Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Ernst Barlach,” all of whom were artists either exiled or repressed under the Nazi regime. Leading figures who endorsed a revived Künstlerbund included Karl Hofer, Max Pechstein, Renée Sintenis, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Oskar Moll, Paul Strecker, George Kolbe, Richard Scheibe, Ludwig Giess, and the “younger abstractionists” Max Zimmermann, Heinz Troekes, Hans Hartung, and Hans Uhlmann. The Stalinization of the eastern German art world continued apace, despite this demand for the safeguarding of artistic freedom and a restoration of pluralistic artists’ institutions of the Weimar era. In November 1947, the Soviet cultural officer Alexander Dymschitz addressed an audience of prominent Germans, Soviet administrators, and other Allied personnel at Humboldt University, in Berlin. His speech made plain the extent to which the Soviet-controlled German art world was now to be brought into line with recent developments in the USSR.28 This included compliance with the dictates of the so-called Zhdanovshchina, a period of cultural terror named after the Communist Party secretary Andrei Zhdanov, who inaugurated socialist realism as the state style of the USSR at the Soviet Writers Congress of 1934. In his role as first president of the Soviet Academy of Arts, Aleksandr Gerasimov pursued Zhdanov’s line first by presiding over the closure the State Museum of Modern Western Art, in Moscow. He also took the lead in a brutal campaign to purge the Soviet art world of “formalism,” “cosmopolitanism,” and other forms of Western cultural contamination that in some instances led to the arrest and imprisonment of offending artists. Dymschitz’s speech at Humboldt University accordingly extolled the superiority of Soviet socialist realism over and against the “bourgeois” modernism prized by the United States and other Western capitalist countries. He insisted that the figural distortion, abstraction, and subjectivism of cubism, surrealism, and other variants of modern art made such work unintelligible to those outside the cultural elite. By contrast, socialist realism prescribed an aesthetic of easily legible, photonaturalistic realism. Enshrined as the state style of Stalin’s regime in 1934, this art combined accessible imagery with clear, didactic themes readily understood by the masses. An art “of the people,” it had helped secure the triumph of socialism in the Soviet Union. Transferred to German soil, socialist realism would now be enlisted to foster a new socialist society from the rubble of Nazi atrocity and national defeat. The leading art periodical of the eastern occupation zone, 152

The Exile Returns

bildende kunst (Visual Art), dutifully began running essays explaining and extolling the virtues of Soviet socialist realism and its applicability to the German setting.29 This hardening of aesthetic positions took place against the backdrop of Cold War tensions heightened by the institution of the Marshall Plan and Soviet resolve to thwart America’s “dollar imperialism.”30 In addition to the USSR’s anti-formalism campaign, its cultural propaganda efforts took the form of building a peace movement. It aimed thereby to forestall further gains in America’s military capability by invoking international opprobrium over Cold War saber rattling while also deflecting attention from the Soviets’ unchecked development of their own nuclear arsenal. Early indications of this peace offensive strategy surfaced in the Erster Deutscher Schriftstellerkongreß (First German Writers Congress) convened in the Kammerspiel Theater, in Berlin, in October 1947. The Soviet-sponsored Kulturbund and the Schutzverband deutscher Autoren (Association of German Authors) hosted the congress, which brought together writers, critics, publishers, and publicists from all sectors of occupied Germany. Speeches covered topics including German unity, anti-fascist solidarity, literature and freedom of expression, and the writer’s social role in rebuilding European society. In an effort to bridge the divide between inner emigrants and the exiles, the invitation list contained the names of writers who had already returned to Germany. It also named several who still remained abroad and were unable or unwilling to attend the conference proceedings, including Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Lion Feuchtwanger, Oskar Maria Graf, Herzfelde, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, and Walter Mehring.31 The international spotlight fell on the First German Writers Congress as a result of the actions of the Soviet delegation invited by the German organizers. Shortly after the proceedings began, its representatives took the stage to assail Winston Churchill’s declaration of the “Iron Curtain” and the “war-mongering” actions of the United States in Europe. The American journalist Melvin J. Lasky, who began his career as a combat historian and information officer for the U.S. Army during World War II, was also present at the event. He had remained in Berlin after 1945 in order to report on developments in Germany for the New Leader and Partisan Review.32 Lasky rose to defend the United States against the claims voiced by the Soviet delegation at the Writers Congress on the grounds of America’s long traditions of democracy and its commitment to freedom, including the freedom of the press. The fostering of these traditions and freedoms was now essential in preventing Europe from slipping once again into the sort of “totalitarianism” readily on view in the USSR, Lasky railed. Contrary to U.S. writers, who enjoyed liberty, those in the Soviet Union were forced to work under “depressing” conditions, he continued. Such conditions rendered them perpetually subject to censorship, tied to party doctrine, and wracked by fear of being denounced as a “decadent counter-revolutionary tool of reaction.”33 Time magazine coverage of the congress noted the displeasure of the “small, feral, red-eyed lieutenant colonel named Alexander Dymschitz” and “his flock of German communist stooges,” who stamped their feet and booed in response.34 The report also claimed that German writers flocked to Lasky afterward and thanked him for courageously expressing what many of them felt but were too fearful of reprisal to say. Fallout from the congress included the banning of the main sponsor of the event, the Soviet-backed Kulturbund, from the American and British Zones of Occupation in November 1947. The Exile Returns

153

A Movement for World Peace Grosz became aware of the Soviet peace offensive, for which the First German Writers Congress was the opening salvo, through his contact with Max Pechstein. Pechstein joined Picasso and other artists and intellectuals at the official founding of the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace, in Wroclaw, Poland, in August 1948. The congress was by the “Russkis gemanagt,” Grosz wrote to his artist friend Herbert Fiedler that October. Pechstein, with apparent envy, had relayed to him Picasso’s “showmanship and vitality” and the special reverence the World Congress lavished on him as instrumental to the broad international appeal of the movement.35 World Congress meetings also took place the following year in New York, Paris, and Prague. At these meetings, the Popular Front idealism of the past was revived to promote worldwide peace based on principles of anti-capitalist social egalitarianism, for which the Soviet Union was to serve as “the mirror of the global future.”36 The limits of this global future were made evident from the start by the handling of Albert Einstein’s intended address to the delegates at the founding World Congress in Wroclaw, however. After the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Einstein and Thomas Mann had joined the Supreme Court justice Owen Roberts, Senator J. W. Fulbright, Senator Claude Pepper, and twenty other prominent Americans and émigrés in building a movement for drafting the Federal Constitution of the World. This movement merged with a number of other groups in 1947 to form the United World Federalists, which sought to strengthen and transform the United Nations into a world government.37 Einstein’s planned address to the Wroclaw conferees was a lengthy, impassioned statement regarding the peril of nuclear annihilation in an international community fractured by competing sovereign states. The answer to this peril was the establishment of a government with worldwide authority to adjudicate matters of conflict and to ensure the peace. The Polish translation of Einstein’s speech reduced the urgency of his lengthy appeal to a few short lines, however. It also omitted altogether his advocacy of strong world government and instead vaguely exhorted the delegates to help “overcome national egotism and cease thinking in categories of brutal physical strength.”38 Opposition to the world peace and United World Federalists movements also quickly surfaced in the United States, where both were assailed as communist fronts. After the world peace movement convened at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, in New York, in April 1949, Mann, Einstein, Dorothy Parker, Charlie Chaplin, Norman Mailer, and Aaron Copeland were among the fifty artists, intellectuals, scientists, union members, and church leaders attacked as fellow-traveling “dupes” by Life magazine. The publication condemned those in attendance for lending Kremlin interests the “glamour, prestige [and] the respectability of American liberals.”39 In Germany, association with the peace movement also had significant and more dire repercussions. Such was the case for Heinrich Ehmsen, whose attendance at the congress when it met in Paris precipitated his dismissal from Berlin’s Hochschule für bildende Kunst. Ehmsen went on to help found the Deutsche Akademie der Künste (German Academy of the Arts), in East Berlin, the following year. Shortly after his appearance at the New York peace conference, Thomas Mann traveled to 154

The Exile Returns

Germany for the first time since his exile in order to take part in celebrations occasioned by the two hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s birth. The Germany he encountered was in the midst of formal division into eastern and western states with the declaration of the Federal Republic in May under the leadership of Konrad Adenauer. This was followed in October by the founding of the German Democratic Republic under the presidency of Wilhelm Pieck. More dispiriting still for Mann were the larger implications of Germany’s division. It marked the final collapse of the wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the West that had prevailed over Nazism in World War II. Mann worried that it also presaged another world war. He therefore cast his trip to Germany as an attempt to find common ground between the two states on the basis of shared culture and a professed commitment on both sides to humanistic values. Mann maintained that war could yet be avoided if the superpower antagonists standing behind Germany’s division would “meet halfway,” with the United States becoming more socialistic and the USSR more democratic.40 Mann’s idealism drove his decision first to accept the Goethe Prize in Frankfurt and then to travel to Weimar at the invitation of Johannes Becher in order to be honored with the East German version of the award. Grosz reported watching a newsreel of Mann at the Liszt House in Weimar, where his East German hosts also bestowed on him an honorary citizenship.41 While thus celebrated in the East, West German responses to Mann’s actions were swift and loudly condemnatory. Most egregious in the minds of his critics was his failure to use the opportunity in Weimar to denounce Soviet use of the concentration camp at Buchenwald to intern German prisoners of war still in Soviet captivity.42 The furor over this incident caused Mann to retreat thereafter into his writing, spelling the end of his life as a prominent public intellectual. The respect he formerly enjoyed in Germany was not to rebound until 1955, the year of his death.43

Grosz and the East German Art World Mann’s experience threw into high relief the extent to which earlier notions of a unified Germany were all but extinguished in light of the country’s deepening divisions. Under the circumstances, his idealist hopes were unable to escape an environment in which culture itself became a key propaganda instrument on both sides. After his visit to Weimar in 1949, Mann was compelled to defend himself against critics in West Germany who looked on his actions as traitorous. Grosz, too, was called upon to defend himself at this time, not against West German critics as in the case of Mann, but rather against detractors in East Germany, who began to assail Grosz’s art as representative of the “formalism” that was now to be expunged from East German cultural life. Early exhibits in the Soviet Zone of Occupation favorably foregrounded Grosz’s Weimar legacy as a usable past for the construction of a new postwar German socialist art. One of these, 150 Jahre soziale Strömungen in der Kunst (150 Years of Social Currents in Art), held in Berlin in October 1947, placed his work in a long tradition of class-conscious, politically engaged art. It marked the centenary of the 1848 revolution and featured works by Grosz along with those of Goya, Daumier, Menzel, Kollwitz, Dix, Herbert Sandberg, and Horst Strempel.44 By 1948, however, the implications of state-prescribed socialist realism began to make themselves felt. This The Exile Returns

155

included a revised understanding of the proletarian revolutionary tradition of dissident art that Grosz’s work of the 1920s so vividly exemplified. In mid-1948, bildende kunst used one of Grosz’s Weimar era caricatures to illustrate art critic Heinz Lüdecke’s essay titled “Die Entwirklichung der bürgerlichen Kunst” (Bourgeois Art’s Flight from Reality).45 Lüdecke’s was the first in a series of rejoinders to the critic and art historian Adolf Behne, whose plea for a positive assessment of modernist tendencies touched off rancorous debate concerning modernism, realism, and the role of art in building socialism.46 His response to Behne drew heavily on the writings of the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács, particularly his assault on expressionism published in Internationale Literatur in 1934.47 There, Lukács had described expressionism as a reflection of the chaos and decay of the bourgeoisie as a class and its decline into fascism. Lüdecke explained that realism, by contrast, was rooted in the Renaissance and expressed in cultural terms bourgeois triumph over feudalism and the birth of enlightened reason. Since the late nineteenth century, however, the subjectivism of modern art exposed the extent to which the capitalist division of labor and its money economy had rendered bourgeois life more abstract and detached from reality. After an epoch of imperialism and world wars, bourgeois hegemony had entered a crisis phase signaled by abstract art, which he described as the “death shadow of bourgeois realism.” Lüdecke was at pains to defend his negative assessment of modern art from charges that the Soviet-backed anti-formalism campaign merely rehearsed the anti-modernist dictatorial prescriptions of the Nazi past. Charges of decadence lodged against modernism in Soviet criticism were not derogatory or prescriptive, he insisted. They were instead a sociological description of the process of historical decline to which modern art testified. Lüdecke’s anti-formalist criticism thus bore striking resemblance to the assault on modernism waged by Hans Sedlmayr in his Verlust der Mitte, which also appeared in 1948. For Sedlmayr, modern art’s flight from reality was about the loss of spirit and man’s connection to God in a modernizing world. Though Lüdecke’s analysis shared the sociological pretensions and extremity of Sedlmayr’s views, his negative assessment of modernism’s “art for art’s sake” tendency was instead rooted in its alleged abdication of the Western rationalist tradition. With the defeat of modernism and the bourgeois worldview on which it depended, that tradition was now to be inherited by the working class, whose “art of the future will be the art of a new ascendant class and thus realistic, concrete, and humanist,” Lüdecke insisted. The editors of bildende kunst chose to illustrate Lüdecke’s pronouncements with a classic example of Grosz’s politicized art of the 1920s. The caricature depicts a manacled worker surrounded by his judicial, military, and bourgeois capitalist oppressors as he stands in a prison courtyard (figure 53). The caption asks: “Why do we remember George Grosz in this context? His retreat from his own past, as all reports from New York agree, appears to us characteristic for what is here called ‘art’s flight from reality’: the great critical realist loses himself in studio problems and fanciful games. The George Grosz who created the lithograph [illustrating Lüdecke’s essay] stands closer to us.”48 Bildende kunst thus acknowledged the importance of Grosz’s critically realist art. However, by using it to illustrate Lüdecke’s analysis, the journal also recast Grosz’s political caricatures as 156

The Exile Returns

FIGURE 53. Illustration of

untitled Grosz caricature in bildende kunst, 1948.

part of a past not only disavowed by him but also transcended by the realities of East Germany’s historical present. As the German Communist Party’s leading artist of the 1920s, Grosz’s incisive drawings had waged a relentless assault on the irrationalism of capitalist culture. According to the editors of bildende kunst, his art was now to be understood as symptomatic of that culture and the irrationalism that marked its historical period of decline. Indeed, by 1949, the German proletarian revolutionary tradition that Grosz’s 1920s work exemplified was altogether suppressed in East Germany. Cultural functionaries deemed the critical character of this art out of step with the positive realities of the socialist culture now taking root in German soil. The SED regime no doubt also sought to curb the militancy of artists who still identified themselves with a revolutionary class struggle the East German government now claimed to have resolved.49 A letter from Horst Palm in Germany informed Grosz that he was also currently under attack in the pages of yet another East German periodical, in this case Neues Deutschland (New Germany), the central organ of the SED.50 The newspaper accused Grosz of abandoning his politically The Exile Returns

157

incisive work of the past and selling out to capitalist interests after immigrating to the United States in 1933. The report insisted that he now ate from “golden plates,” contented himself with painting landscapes, and pandered to the middlebrow tastes of “Mainstreet.” Palm’s letter informing Grosz of Neues Deutschand’s screed emphasized how important his work remained to those who fought tyranny; Palm also called on him to respond to the charges that were being made against him. Grosz’s heated reply appeared in the pages of Die neue Zeitung in July 1949.51 Founded by OMGUS in 1945, this “American newspaper for the German population” was initially run by German émigrés who dedicated the paper to reeducation. Die neue Zeitung’s function shifted in late 1947, however, after the military governor of the U.S. Occupation Zone, General Lucius D. Clay, declared “Operation Talk Back” as part of a concerted effort to counter Soviet influence in media and cultural affairs. From that point forward, American-backed media moved to censor not only pro-Nazi but also anti-U.S. material and to build a positive image of American influence throughout Germany.52 Grosz’s response in Die neue Zeitung accorded with the paper’s new editorial aim to promote the United States as open to controversial views, especially, as in this case, if they served to highlight American tolerance over and against Soviet repression. Specifically, Grosz accused his East German detractors of overlooking the socially critical dimension of the work that he had also managed to produce in the United States, in addition to the landscape paintings they chose to denigrate. The Neues Deutschland reviewer deliberately refused to mention the indictment of war contained in his Piece of My World in a World without Peace exhibit of 1946, Grosz railed. Nor did the commentary take note of works such as The Mighty One on a Little Outing Surprised by Two Poets, Cain, or the sixty-four socially critical drawings contained in his portfolio Interregnum of 1936. Missing, too, was any mention of his most recent exhibit, The Stick Men, of 1948. He declared the reason for this silence transparent: “[It is] because my social development doesn’t suit the ‘ideology’ of the [reviewer’s] employer. As I eat from ‘golden plates,’ so he eats from the hand of a disguised master. How indeed could the Stickmen appeal to him? I don’t mean the small compliant writer, I mean ‘the powerful big brother.’ ” His bitter depictions of war, authoritarianism, and brutality had offended Neues Deutschland by rejecting the heroizing and affirmative dictates of socialist realism, Grosz concluded. They did so, moreover, by exposing truths about East Germany’s “big brother,” truths whose representation was now “strictly forbidden.”53 Despite or perhaps because of this controversy, four of Grosz’s American works dating from the years 1934 through 1945 appeared in the 2. Deutsche Kunstausstellung (the Second German Art Exhibition), the controversial successor exhibition to the General German Art Exhibition of 1946. Also held in Dresden, the Second German Art Exhibition took place in September and October 1949, on the eve of East Germany’s formation as a state.54 As in the exhibit of 1946, works on display in 1949 represented a range of stylistic tendencies from artists throughout Germany. However, Heckel was among those furious at recently being labeled “decadent” by East German functionaries and refused to lend his art for the show.55 In addition to paintings, graphics, sculptures, and photomontages, the exhibit also featured thirteen murals commissioned by the SED government, which were intended to repudiate bourgeois traditions of artistic individualism and 158

The Exile Returns

FIGURE 54. Illustration of George

Grosz’s Der Einsiedler (The Hermit) (1934), in bildende kunst, 1949.

easel painting. Produced collectively and foregrounding the theme of “man and work,” they were also meant to exemplify the volksnähe socialist realism now demanded of East Germany’s artists.56 As part of its coverage of the exhibit, bildende kunst ran a letter from Hannes König, president of the Schutzverband bildende Künstler (Protective Union of Pictorial Artists) in Munich, who expressed his sympathy for the socialist cause.57 However, König also highlighted the implicit contradiction between attempts to promote socialist realism as an aesthetic with applicability throughout Germany, on the one hand, and the different realities under which German artists continued to live in a divided country, on the other. For those still living under “cultural reaction” in the west, critical art practices like Dada, “the graphics of a Grosz, the work of a Dix, etc., [were] still fully relevant,” König insisted. He continued, “If these assertions cause you to doubt, then consider that you [in the east] have already left behind what here [in the west] still requires difficult struggle, that you have achieved a great deal, that here still remains a dream of the future.”58 Following König’s letter was a reproduction of Grosz’s Der Einsiedler (The Hermit), which appeared in the 1949 Dresden exhibit (figure 54). The work’s theme of ascetic withdrawal from the world The Exile Returns

159

provided bildende kunst’s less than subtle editorial commentary on the relevance it was prepared to accord any of Grosz’s art, Dada or otherwise, to the current demands of socialist construction.

Grosz’s First Postwar Visit to Germany In 1950, Grosz’s friend and former publisher Wieland Herzfelde contacted him in a state of alarm over growing perceptions in East Germany that not only had Grosz “sold out” to Western capitalism but that he also now ranked among the new socialist state’s Cold Warrior opponents. Specifically, he had heard a recent RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) report that Grosz would be traveling to Germany to attend the upcoming Congress for Cultural Freedom. The congress was sponsored by Der Monat, a journal founded by Melvin Lasky in the wake of the controversial First German Writers Congress of October 1947. Authorized by OMGUS, it began publication in October 1948 in a climate of heightened tension caused by the Berlin blockade. Der Monat’s stated aim was to cover international politics and culture and to promote critical and intellectual freedom. George Orwell served as the journal’s London correspondent. Early contributors included Arthur Koestler, Jean-Paul Sartre, Clement Greenberg, Bertrand Russell, Alfred Kazin, and other intellectual luminaries. In its first months, Der Monat enjoyed an editorial independence that soon fell under the control of the CIA.59 The intelligence agency also sponsored the Congress for Cultural Freedom, whose principal aim was to counter the appeal of the Soviet-backed world peace movement. Congress sessions took place at the Titania Palast, in West Berlin, during the last week of June 1950, when they were overshadowed by the outbreak of the Korean War. Over one hundred literati from twenty-two countries were in attendance, including German exiles living in the United States, among them Carl J. Friedrich, Hermann Kesten, Golo Mann, Walter Mehring, Norbert Muhlen, and Franz L. Neumann. In his letter to Grosz, Herzfelde warned that participation in the congress would endorse an anti-communist outlook unwilling to acknowledge what he insisted was East Germany’s commitment to “peaceful development.” He admitted that the RIAS report might have been a mistake and urged Grosz to retract his name immediately.60 Grosz evidently had no involvement with the congress and furthermore had no intention of coming to Germany, especially given his teaching obligations at the Art Students League and his difficult financial situation. He also confided to his brother-in-law Otto Schmalhausen that he had no stomach for the infighting and debates he would no doubt be dragged into if he came to Berlin.61 Grosz changed his mind, however, after the death of his sister Clare in early 1951. She left him a small inheritance that allowed Grosz and Eva to travel to Europe for the first time since the end of the war.62 Their six-month sojourn took them to France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, and the Netherlands. They also visited Eva’s sister Anneliese in Lüdenscheid, near Düsseldorf, and spent time in Berlin with friends and family, including Otto and Lotte Schmalhausen, Herzfelde, and Gertrud and John Heartfield, who had returned to East Berlin from his London exile in August 1950. 160

The Exile Returns

Any contact Grosz may have had with Brecht at this time remains unrecorded, however. A meeting between the two friends may have been rendered impossible because of the scandal that engulfed Brecht concerning the staging of his pacifist play, Das Verhör des Lukullus (The Trial of Lucullus) at the State Opera House in East Berlin. The play dramatized the life of a Roman warlord who dies and is put on trial to determine whether he will be allowed to enter the Elysian Fields or instead be cast into darkness for his violent deeds. His victims testify against him, Lucullus is condemned to eternal darkness, and the court denounces wars and aggression for all time. Though the play was a popular success, Brecht was accused of formalism in Neues Deutschland, and the Trial of Lucullus was suppressed. The New York Times report on the scandal took the opportunity to draw a contrast between Brecht’s handling by the East Germans in this case and his experience before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington in 1947, when, after denying membership in the Communist Party, he was dismissed from the proceedings with “a polite ‘thank you.’ ”63 Though Grosz appears not to have met with Brecht on this trip, he does recount a meeting with his old friend Max Pechstein at this time. Pechstein no doubt filled Grosz in on his own recent conflicts with the SED leadership, which included his recent attempt to defend modern art from party attack. The specific context was Pechstein’s involvement with the Galerie Moritzburg, in Halle, whose director, Georg Händler, made a concerted effort to rebuild the collection’s holdings in expressionism, which had been decimated under the Third Reich. Pechstein delivered a speech inaugurating the opening of the gallery in October 1948, which was promptly assailed by Aleksandr Dymschitz. The SED demanded further that the gallery’s modernist works be segregated and labeled as the products of bourgeois decadence. In response, Händler left for the West in 1949.64 As yet another indicator of growing state repression, the leading art journal bildende kunst shut down in 1949. The open, internationalist line evident in its first years of publication closed amid rancor between journal editors Karl Hofer and Oskar Nerlinger concerning the journal’s increasing Stalinism. These events culminated in the elevation of the anti-formalism campaign to the level of East German state policy shortly before Grosz’s visit to Berlin. This change was announced by the publication of N. Orlow’s inflammatory “Wege und Irrwege der modernen Kunst” (Paths and Wrong Turns in Modern Art), in the Tägliche Rundschau (Daily Review) in January 1951.65 Orlow’s anti-formalist tirade instructed German artists to follow the lead of their Soviet counterparts by reconnecting their art to their own realist traditions of the nineteenth century, including the examples of Adolf Menzel and Anselm Feuerbach. The “wrong turns” to be avoided were not only the expressive exaggerations of modern art but also the socially engaged works of Barlach, Dix, Kollwitz, Grosz, Heartfield, and other leftist artists of the Weimar era. Their images of immiserated proletarians—​as well as the critical thrust of their art—​belonged to a prehistory of the revolutionary workers’ struggle now resolved by the end of capitalist exploitation and the triumph of socialism in the GDR. Horst Strempel, one of the artists attacked by Orlow as a formalist, saw his mural in the Friedrichstraße train station painted over shortly after the appearance of Orlow’s pronouncements. Commemorative exhibitions honoring Kollwitz and Barlach also came under The Exile Returns

161

official attack. In February 1951, the SED Central Committee programmatically adopted a resolution against formalism, linking it directly to the war politics of American imperialism.66 Grosz returned from Germany to his teaching at the Art Students League in November 1951. His descriptions of his visit reflected a sense of total alienation from his former home and its ongoing struggles with its recent past. Grosz confided to one correspondent that not much remained for him anymore in Germany: Except for old memories: friends disappeared, houses gone—​all rather sad, I must say. Yes, I’ve lost contact, everything appeared completely “strange” to me. . . . I have to admit that I was rather happy to return [to New York]. Europe has changed—​or maybe I have changed—​I don’t know. Something has disappeared, and the people in Germany are very busy and try to forget; one always has the feeling that they try, but inside they can’t, and so it appears (to use a psychoanalytic expression) as though they more or less “live in a state of trauma.” (Otherwise I despise psychoanalytic terminology—​but here it fits.)67 In chapter 3, we encountered Grosz’s more specific views on the state of the arts in Germany at this time as described in his unsent letter to Raphael Soyer of 17 December 1951. The letter was prompted by an exchange between Grosz and Soyer regarding efforts to launch the Reality group and its advocacy of “humanist” art in the face of abstraction’s domination of the New York art world. His unsent letter indicated Grosz’s awareness of a startling similarity between the German and American art worlds at that time. Indeed, the first major display featuring the new American painting in West Germany had been unveiled at Berlin’s Rathaus Schöneberg and Schloss Charlottenburg shortly before Grosz’s return to the United States. Titled Amerikanische Malerei: Werden und Gegenwart (American Painting: Past and Present), the show featured ten works dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Twentieth-century artists were represented by fifty-five paintings and sixty-five graphics, including works by Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Phillip Evergood, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.68 In their effort to “catch up” with international developments, West German artists had bought into what Grosz elsewhere derisively called the “German-American line” of abstraction.69 He also later recalled his sense of boredom and emptiness at seeing abstract works hanging in the House of German Art in Munich.70 As for the state of the arts in East Germany, Grosz’s unsent letter to Soyer indicated his sense of not boredom and disappointment but rather shock over draconian efforts underway there “to turn the clock back” to earlier traditions of nineteenth-century realism. Grosz continued intently to follow events in East Germany during this period, as evidenced by his requests to Otto Schmalhausen for East German illustrated journals and newspapers. He desired a less “distorted” view of what was happening there than was possible to glean from the “inflammatory articles” in the American press.71 “Everything here is distorted, exaggerated, twisted, flattened and propagandistically hacked to size,” he complained. In his letter to Schmalhausen of February 1953, Grosz specifically wanted to know the veracity of reports that travel between east and west was now forbidden. American papers indicated further that electrified barbed wire barricades had been set up in Berlin to prevent people from fleeing westward. 162

The Exile Returns

Grosz also sought further information concerning claims of Soviet and East German “anti-Semitism” and “anti-Zionism,” which had recently captured headlines. Despite the “essential difference” between anti-Semitism and the “more imperial and national ‘Zionism,’ ” American newspapers tended to lump them together, Grosz noted as he appealed to Schmalhausen for clarity on the matter. The specific events that prompted his inquiry included the November 1952 show trial of Rudolf Slansky and fourteen other defendants in Prague who were convicted of being agents of American imperialism and Zionism. A “doctor’s plot” was soon thereafter announced in the Soviet Union, claiming that Jewish doctors were responsible for the death of leading members of the government. And, in January 1953, the New York Times reported that “flying squads of communist police hunting ‘Zionist spies’ swooped down on the houses and offices of Jews in East Germany today, seized papers and identity cards, and ordered Jews to stay close to home.” Jewish members of the SED leadership and prominent figures in East Germany’s organized Jewish community promptly fled to the United States as fears concerning a reprise of Germany’s 1938 pogrom mounted.72

The Cold Warrior Grosz responded to these flagrant instances of Stalinist repression with the publication of his autobiographical “Russlandreise” (Russian Journey) in Melvin Lasky’s Der Monat in May 1953. “Russlandreise” made plain his stridently anti-communist views at this time with its damning account of Grosz’s trip to Soviet Russia in 1922. He undertook the trip in support of Willi Münzenberg’s Soviet-backed International Workers’ Aid Organization and its efforts to raise money for those starving in Russia from the severe famine that followed in the wake of the revolution. Joining him was the novelist Martin Andersen-Nexö, and together they traveled for five months through the hardest hit regions. Their intention to produce an illustrated account of their experiences in order to raise funds for famine relief never materialized.73 Combining current convictions with his recollections of the past, Grosz’s “Russlandreise” described the poverty and hunger he and Andersen-Nexö encountered as part of a miserably failed Soviet experiment wracked by melancholy and suspicion and presided over by colorless, petty bureaucrats and their intellectually vapid leadership. Grosz cited the essay and especially its appearance in Lasky’s “strictly anti-communistic magazine” as proof of his Cold Warrior credentials when the FBI questioned him in 1955 concerning his son Peter’s application to work for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. In a letter to the bureau, he acknowledged his work for Communist Party initiatives throughout the early 1920s. But his fated trip to Soviet Russia in 1922 had dissuaded him from any genuine commitment to the party, Grosz maintained. Moreover, he now understood that party commitment had been fundamentally antithetical to his artistic individualism from the start: “I was a free lance artist; I think that I believed somewhat in my work (that is, in my propaganda drawings), but I was by no means a ‘fanatical believer’—​I remember that I had my doubts from the beginning. . . . as a talented artist I couldn’t simply ‘obey’ or submit myself at

The Exile Returns

163

that time to the notorious ‘Proletkult.’ I was already then too much of an individualist and it was impossible for me to commit my art to a deeply inhumane political doctrine.”74 Grosz thus used his “Russlandreise” essay to secure his Cold Warrior status in the eyes of U.S. government officials in 1955. But any response Der Monat may have intended to provoke by publishing his essay in Germany in 1953 was drowned out by events that claimed the attention of the East German art world and the SED leadership that spring. Specifically, the high point of Stalinist control over East German cultural life was proclaimed by the “triumph” of Soviet-inspired socialist realism at the Third German Art Exhibition, unveiled in Dresden in March 1953.75 The exhibit also functioned as a memorial tribute to Stalin, who died just days after the show opened. For Helmut Holtzhauer, East Germany’s state commissioner for art affairs, the Dresden exhibit confirmed formalism’s demise as “a defeat from which it would not recover.”76 Some four hundred artists from East and West Germany submitted nearly six hundred paintings, sculptures, and graphics to this first major display of distinctly Soviet-style socialist realist works produced by German artists. The exhibit’s contrived stylistic homogeneity was achieved by barring formalist works; this homogeneity also served the ideological purpose of forecasting in cultural terms SED aims for Germany’s eventual political reunification under a socialist system aligned with the Soviet Union. A newly revived Bildende Kunst began publication at this time in order to disseminate the lessons of this triumphant socialist realism. Its first issue carried Albrecht Dürer’s Self-Portrait, of 1498, on its front cover. Sidestepping altogether the appropriation of Dürer’s legacy under the Nazi regime, Bildende Kunst invoked him instead to underscore socialist realism’s rootedness in a more useable and distant German past, namely, that of the Northern Renaissance and its tradition of humanist rationalism.77 It also pointedly detached socialist realism’s German genealogy from that other, more irrationalist strain of the Northern Renaissance, namely, the legacy of Bosch and Brueghel, whose example had so strongly informed Grosz’s artistic turn to German tradition from the mid-1930s onward. Articles in the journal extolled Dürer as an enlightened German humanist and an example of the early bourgeois revolutionary tradition that had liberated itself from feudalism. And, as announced by the institution of socialist realism on German soil, that tradition now belonged to the victorious working class.78 This socialist realist triumphalism was quickly swept aside by the workers’ uprising that began at the Stalinallee construction site in East Berlin on 17 June 1953, however. Some twenty thousand workers converged at the site in protest of excessive production norms, cuts in wages and social benefits, and the lack of consumer amenities. These draconian measures were instituted under the SED’s first Five-Year Plan in an effort to overtake West Germany in postwar economic development.79 The Stalinallee uprising that resulted drew international attention as the first serious rebellion against Communist rule in the Soviet satellites. It was also quickly crushed. Some were imprisoned and sentenced to death, and another 120,000 East Germans fled to the West.

164

The Exile Returns

Grosz and the Art of Democracy Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt presented an American rejoinder to these events in his book Art under a Dictatorship, published in 1954. Lehmann-Haupt was an art expert attached to the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section of the U.S. military government in Germany following the war.80 His growing alarm over developments in the German art world began to appear in the American art press in 1947.81 Art under a Dictatorship summarized his view that the worst of Nazi repression in the arts was now being revived and enforced in East Germany.82 The purpose of his study was to help define more clearly “the value of the creative individual and the nature of his freedom in a democratic society.” The book’s stated aim was also to lay out “the cultural opportunities and obligations of the United States in its present position of world leadership” within the context of the ongoing cultural Cold War.83 Most consequential was Lehmann-Haupt’s summary application of current theories of totalitarianism to the realm of the arts. The similarity between Soviet Communism and National Socialism could be divined from more than just their political structures, he argued. Their likeness was also evident in these dictatorships’ shared reliance on classicism as the basis of their officially imposed artistic cultures. Classicism supplied both regimes with a style of art that was clearly legible in form, politically legitimating in its deep connection to Western civilization, and capable of swaying the individual to the interests of the state. Opposing dictatorial culture as it began to emerge in Germany were Grosz, Dix, and other strong individualists of the Weimar era, Lehmann-Haupt observed. While acknowledging the revolutionary political context that gave rise to their vanguard art in the early 1920s, he insisted it would nonetheless be a “mistake” to construe either Grosz’s or Dix’s art as an expression of a “deliberately planned political program.” “They were,” he wrote, “speaking as individuals.” As proof of Grosz’s fundamental inability to toe any political line, Lehmann-Haupt omitted any reference to his Communist Party involvement of the past and pointed instead to the banning of his Ecce homo portfolio in 1924 as an example of the “violent conflict with the established authorities” that repeatedly dogged his artistic career in 1920s Berlin. Art under a Dictatorship turned once again to the example of Grosz’s art in its discussion of Hitler’s impoverished understanding of the creative visual process. Specifically, Lehmann-Haupt recounted Hitler’s speech occasioned by the Degenerate Art show in 1937, in which he ominously discussed the nonmimetic figural and coloristic distortions of modernist art. Hitler pronounced these distortions a product of modern artists’ defective vision and, as such, grounds for persecuting them and taking steps to prevent the spread of their degenerative impact on the healthy German nation. In order to expose the “hopeless limitation” of Hitler’s reductive claims regarding the relationship between seeing and creativity, Lehmann-Haupt referenced John Dos Passos’s introduction to Grosz’s Interregnum portfolio of 1936. Titled “Satire as a Way of Seeing,” the text was a reprint of Dos Passos’s “Grosz Comes to America” celebration of Grosz’s arrival in the United States, which I described in the introduction to this book. Dos Passos’s essay appeared in the pages of Esquire The Exile Returns

165

magazine shortly before Interregnum was released. Describing Grosz as a great satirist, the American writer praised the political incisiveness of Grosz’s Weimar era art, his relentless challenge to the status quo, and the ability of his bitterly satiric art to unsettle habituated perceptions. In reference to Grosz’s work, Dos Passos also described seeing as both an objective and a subjective process. The eyes functioned as a “stereoscopic camera,” he wrote, which registered visual impulses on the brain through processes of “unconscious selection”: “What you see depends to a great extent on subjective distortion and elimination that determines the varied impacts on the nervous system of speed of line, emotions of color, touch values of form.” Contrary to Hitler’s pronouncements, Dos Passos concluded that seeing was not a mere matter of physiology but above all “a process of imagination.”84 Lehmann-Haupt brought Art under a Dictatorship to a close by exhorting a vigorous defense of this imaginative seeing. Part of America’s responsibility now was to defend modern art and its free, creative expression independent of any political direction as “a powerful symbol of anti-totalitarian belief” in the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union.85 Beginning with Dos Passos in 1936 and continuing throughout World War II, American critics and commentators had championed Grosz and his art as exemplars of a creative freedom threatened by Nazi repression. The appearance of Lehmann-Haupt’s Art under a Dictatorship in 1954 marked the extent to which Grosz’s art and life had become inscribed into a new political imperative since Hitler’s defeat. The significance of his career now took its place within America’s Cold War defense of individual expression and democracy against its current foe, namely, Soviet political and cultural dictatorship. Additionally, this new Cold War status appeared to offer Grosz a “kind of comeback as an illustrator,” as he noted with pleasure in his diary.86 The specific occasion for his optimism was a request from Life magazine. The periodical approached Grosz in early 1954 about illustrating a set of essays by Marek Stanislaw Korowicz, the Polish expert in international law and a recent highlevel defector to the United States. Described by Life as “the biggest fish we have ever caught,” Korowicz had fought with the Poles in France during World War II and later joined the underground. He arrived in New York in September 1953 as part of the Polish delegation to the United Nations and asked for asylum the next day. The U.S. government ceremoniously granted Korowicz permanent residency the following year. He also took a post as research professor of international law at the Fletcher School of Law, at Tufts College, in Medford, Massachusetts, and worked for Radio Free Europe producing broadcasts that were beamed back into Poland. Korowicz’s two-part Life exposé opened with portrait photos of Korowicz and Grosz. The caption appended to Grosz’s photo described him as a great social satirist of his time whose experience of German military service in World War I had made him a rebel. Once known for his “anticapitalist sketches,” he had immigrated to the United States in 1932, where he saw a “new beginning” for himself. With a flourish of Cold Warrior rhetoric, Life described Grosz further as having become in America “a citizen and a fighter for freedom.”87 Grosz’s illustrations for Korowicz’s essays hewed closely to the author’s descriptions of life behind the Iron Curtain as it transformed from relative openness to a closed world with legions of 166

The Exile Returns

FIGURE 55. George Grosz,

illustration for Life, 1 March 1954, 103.

military police stationed at the border. “The Iron Curtain countries today are prisons which only the guards may leave,” Korowicz warned. Grosz’s illustration for the first installment of the essay depicts the Russian bear in military uniform as a bellowing colossus blinkered by the visor of his military cap. His imposing form stands before a barbed wire fence, behind which appear ranks of identically dressed guards with their rifles at the ready. Korowicz’s dramatic story of defection also spoke of subterranean dissent against the oppression and regimentation of everyday life behind the Iron Curtain. Grosz’s image obligingly references this dimension of the story and its portent for the anticipated demise of the Soviet system (figure 55). A group of escapees who have burrowed underneath the Iron Curtain appear in the foreground of the image, peeking out from their tunnel hole. Their excavation opens up fissures below the Russian bear’s feet, forecasting his eventual collapse into the ground beneath him. The Exile Returns

167

FIGURE 56. George

Grosz, illustration for Life, 8 March 1954, 128.

In the second installment of his Life essay, Korowicz detailed the suppression of free intellectual inquiry in universities within the Soviet Union and its satellites. Enslavement behind the Iron Curtain was not only of the body but also of the mind, he wrote.88 The people’s only solaces remained religion, which the regime had been unable to repress, and “the oblivion of drunkenness.” The background of Grosz’s illustration for this second installment thus shows huddled parishioners entering a church at left and, at right, a group of inebriated men raucously toppling over one another (figure 56). Before these two vignettes appears the “living death of Poland’s slavery” derived from Grosz’s rendering of the depleted human form in his Gray Man Dances painting, of 1949. Here, the Gray Man’s beseeching eyes have been stitched shut, in addition to his stitched mouth and battened ears. Moreover, the Gray Man’s insect-like torso and animated dancing have 168

The Exile Returns

been replaced in Grosz’s Life illustration by a rectilinear form that conflates the figure’s upper body with an imprisoning stockade. However, as explained in the illustration’s caption, “the hope of liberation” still beats in the breast of the “living death” that Grosz presents to us. The figure’s defiant clenched fist affirms Korowicz’s overall message of hope, as does its open yet caged heart, which harbors a man whose resolute profile communicates an undiminished resolve for freedom.

Grosz and the Return of Weimar Modernism to West Germany Grosz’s Life contract coincided in time with his retrospective exhibit at the Whitney Museum and his award of membership in the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York.89 These recognitions, which occurred in quick succession in 1954, led him to believe that his years of struggle for appreciation and for sales of his art might be coming to an end. Other possibilities also opened up at this time for projects in Europe. One involved producing drawings recalling Berlin of the late 1920s for the British film adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, published in 1945. The film, titled I Am a Camera, was released in 1955. Grosz produced images of nightclub life and Nazi storm troopers carrying anti-Semitic signs, which were used to develop settings, costumes, and minor characters for the film.90 Grosz visited London for this collaboration as part of his second visit to Europe since the end of the war. He and Eva remained abroad between June and December 1954, with most of their time spent in Berlin as Grosz worked on yet other collaborative projects there. In June 1954, he received a note from the senator for education in Berlin, Dr. Jannasch, who wanted to schedule a reception for him in the atelier of the Hotel am Zoo to be attended by Berlin artists, critics, and earlier acquaintances.91 Grosz was so enthused by the prospect of this celebratory reception and his hopes for a revitalized career in Europe that he soon thereafter quit his job at the Art Students League and broke his contract with his dealer Reeves Lewenthal, of the Associated American Artists gallery.92 The main project that drew Grosz back to Berlin at this time was a contract to design costumes and stage decorations for John Latouche’s “dance-opera” Bilderbogen aus Amerika (Picture Postcards from America), a ballet with choral accompaniment that premiered in New York in 1948.93 In its 1948 staging, Bilderbogen (which was then titled Ballet Ballads) consisted of three one-act dance operas. The performance drew critical attention for its departure from the conventions of American musical theater that prevailed at that time. Latouche and his collaborators’ inspiration came instead from Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s work in epic theater and their innovative integration of plot, song, and dance. This inspiration was an outgrowth of Latouche’s contact with Brecht, whom he met for the first time when Brecht visited New York in 1935. In 1941, he also offered to help Brecht by sending a letter to Alvin Johnson’s New School in an effort to secure him a teaching appointment there.94 Latouche’s New York production of Ballet Ballads thus testified to cultural cross-fertilization between German and American vanguard theater. It consisted of three burlesque segments. The first, “Susannah and the Elders,” set the biblical story in the context of a revival meeting in the The Exile Returns

169

FIGURE 57. Performance

photo for Little Red Riding Hood and the Wicked Wolf, from Bilderbogen aus Amerika, with Werner Höllein as the Wolf and Wiet Palar as Little Red Riding Hood, 1954.

American South. The second, “Willi the Weeper,” charted the adventures of Willi, who leaves rural America for the city, where he becomes addicted to marijuana and has drug-induced fantasies of becoming a gangster, a millionaire, and a jazz musician. And the final segment, “The Eccentricities of Davy Crockett,” developed similarly ribald stories of the legendary American frontiersman. The German adaptation of Latouche’s Ballet Ballads in 1954 took place as part of the week-long Berliner Festspiele, which was funded by the Western occupying powers. The annual festival was founded in 1951 in an effort to restore the city to its Weimar era status as a leader of the international vanguard in music, dance, theater, literature, and art. As the Cold War deepened, it was also used to secure the western part of Berlin as an oasis of Western culture in the heart of East Germany.95 Presented at the Berliner Komödie on Kurfürstendamm, Bilderbogen aus Amerika thus fit within West Germany’s larger ideological and economic task of Marshall Plan “Americanization.” Billed as an evening of 1920s nostalgia, Bilderbogen also contributed to the project of staking West Germany’s claim not only to Weimar’s vanguard past but also to Germany’s older, nationalist 170

The Exile Returns

FIGURE 58. George Grosz, design for

the costume of the Wicked Wolf, 1954. Watercolor, 41.8 × 29.5 cm.

traditions of folklore and fairy tale.96 The production recalled Grosz’s extensive role in costume and stage design in the Weimar Republic when he worked with Piscator, Brecht, and others in vanguard theater.97 Bilderbogen brought him together with other Weimar era luminaries, including producer Ernst Josef Aufricht, who had presented the Three-Penny Opera in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, and director Egon Monk, a collaborator of Brecht’s at the Berliner Ensemble. Most popular among West German audiences in 1954 (though less so among theater critics) was the risqué version of the Grimm Brothers’ Red Riding Hood fairy tale that Aufricht substituted for the Davy Crockett piece.98 In the Berlin staging, a wealthy, aging Viennese wolf pursues a vampish, teen-aged Red Riding Hood. Red Riding Hood becomes captivated by her pursuer’s diamond ring and runs home, not to escape the wolf, but rather to throw her grandmother out of bed so she can seduce him. For some critics, Grosz’s designs successfully recalled his earlier work (figures 57 and 58). However, others found them too sedate to live up to his reputation as a leading satirist of Germany’s Golden Twenties era.99 The Exile Returns

171

The Saddest Man in Europe During his work on the production, Grosz also took the opportunity to negotiate the German publication of his 1946 autobiography, A Little Yes and a Big No. The volume was translated and serialized in Die Zeit between January and March 1955 in advance of its release later that year by Rowohlt, in Hamburg. Like the original English text, Rowohlt’s version of the autobiography was dominated by Grosz’s experiences in Germany before his immigration to the United States, in 1933. Integrated into this narrative were Grosz’s negative reflections on his trip to Soviet Russia in 1922, which had appeared for the first time under the title “Russlandreise,” in Der Monat in 1953. Willi Wolfradt, who helped to edit the volume, encouraged Grosz to satisfy more of the German interest in things American by including material about his adventures in Texas. (“That could indeed by very appealing,” Wolfradt wrote.) He also suggested adding more about Grosz’s life in the United States and his visits to Germany after World War II.100 Grosz took up none of these suggestions in the end. However, as noted by the Grosz biographer Kay Flavell, Rowohlt’s German version of the autobiography nonetheless contained significant changes to the English text. Specifically, in the passages devoted to his encounter with Thomas Mann in New York in 1934, Grosz’s comments on the naïveté of German exile beliefs in Hitler’s short-lived reign were omitted. So too was any mention of Hitler in his comment: “Hitler served to confirm my old contempt for the masses as a herd of docile sheep directed by the will of their shepherd, with a perverted pleasure in choosing their own butcher.”101 Rowohlt rendered the line instead: “I have a healthy skepticism with a tendency to say no rather than yes, and my talent for observation has repeatedly confirmed for me that the masses are a pigsty, a docile herd of calves that prefer to select their own butcher.”102 As Flavell observes, that translation thus cast Grosz’s misanthropy as more a matter of his own personality than as part of his “political consciousness.”103 More to the point, these and other excisions in the German version of the autobiography elide the specific context in which his misanthropy first became a controversial dimension of Grosz’s artistic identity. These adjustments to the text also obviate the manner in which his misanthropic views, however unsavory, intervened in the larger debates on Germany, the Germans, and the question of their support for Hitler that inflamed the exile community during and after World War II. Rowohlt’s editorial decisions in this regard reflected the extent to which the issue of the exiles and their relationship to Germany’s postwar reconstruction had yet to be resolved. Lingering resentment over Grosz’s refusal to reclaim his German citizenship and residency subtended Der Spiegel’s coverage of his visit to Berlin that appeared in the June 1954 issue of the magazine. A photo of a grinning, suspender-wearing Grosz appeared on its front cover captioned by a line taken from one his early Dada poems, “Der traurigste Mensch in Europa” (The Saddest Man in Europe) (figure 59).104 The backdrop for his clownish photo portrait is an adaptation of one of Grosz’s watercolors, titled Passanten (Passersby), which appeared in his Ecce homo portfolio of 1922. Some of the everyday Berliners featured in that work, including a sailor and a woman, can be glimpsed behind and to the left and right sides of Grosz’s face. The cover’s subcaption, “Maler von Teufeln 172

The Exile Returns

FIGURE 59. George Grosz,

“Der traurigste Mensch in Europa” (The Saddest Man in Europe), on the cover of Der Spiegel, 30 June 1954.

und Dämonen” (Painter of Devils and Demons), referred to the tormented self-portraits, historical allegories, and apocalyptic landscapes to which Grosz had dedicated his artistic production after his departure from Germany in 1933, though few of the magazine’s readers were likely familiar with this dimension of his career. At the same time, this subcaption left open the possibility that the figures represented in the Passersby street scene behind the clownish Grosz might instead be the “devils and demons” that occupy his artistic concerns. In this regard, and in keeping with the magazine’s equivocal treatment of his exile, Der Spiegel’s cover thus also provocatively linked Grosz’s art with Thomas Mann’s demonic meditations on Germany and its people that had fueled the controversy surrounding the German reception of his novel Doktor Faustus, of 1947. Meanwhile, the overall tenor of the Spiegel essay aimed not to affirm Grosz’s avant-garde past but rather to mark his bygone status as a significant figure. The essay recounted his days as part of the Dada vanguard and his reputation as a notorious caricaturist of the Weimar years. But this artistically combative Grosz had disappeared in the United States, the Spiegel review maintained. The Exile Returns

173

There, the Germanic contents of his art had alienated him from his new environs. Moreover, his encounter with America did little more than change him into one of the bourgeois figures he had formerly held in contempt. Unlike other exiles, Grosz had not chosen to return. Instead he visited his former home in 1951, hoping to be recognized as a significant name in modern painting: “But one could hardly know that Grosz was in the country. He was so strikingly American in his attire, that people thought he was a Yankee and treated him like a stranger. So he fled back, weighed down by a new, not entirely undeserved faint sadness: the sadness of a man who has left his old fame behind him and now searches for it again in vain.”105

Grosz in the German Art Worlds of the Late 1950s Positive recognition had eluded Europe’s “saddest man” on his visit to Germany in 1951 and continued to elude him on his return visit in 1954, Der Spiegel caustically concluded. This negative judgment on Grosz and the diminished relevance the magazine ascribed to his career in postwar Germany were further reinforced by the exclusion of his art from the landmark documenta exhibit, which took place in Kassel in 1955. Arnold Bode organized the show with assistance from Werner Haftmann, author of the “seminal statement of postwar abstraction in the West,” Malerei im 20. Jahrhundert (Painting in the 20th Century, 1954).106 The documenta exhibit was deliberately staged in a bomb-damaged city in the process of rebuilding from World War II, which was also strategically located near the border with East Germany. The exhibition’s ambitious scale, its emplacement in a city under reconstruction, and its assertion of West Germany’s renewed connection to traditions of Western modernism all served to confront the country’s East German counterpart in cultural terms with the fruits of its ongoing “economic miracle.”107 The German Federal Republic’s accession to national sovereignty in May 1955 and its subsequent integration into NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization military alliance, headed by the United States) further underscored its recovery and integration into the West in political terms.108 Included in documenta were painting, sculpture, and architecture ranging in date from 1905 to 1955 and created by West Germans and artists of six other Western alliance countries. The stated purpose of the exhibit was to reintroduce Germans to the international avant-garde suppressed during the Hitler regime. The shrine-like entryway to the Museum Fridericianum, where the exhibit was housed, featured photographic portraits of artists who had been defamed by the Nazis. Among them were exiles such as Beckmann, Klee, and Kokoschka, whose flight from Germany otherwise went unremarked in the exhibit. Emphasis rested on presenting them instead as a useable past for the history of German modernism and its reintegration into an internationalist future aligned with the West. The programmatic repatriation of “Weimar in exile” was nonetheless implicit in the unusual staging of this first documenta. For part of the installation, organizers presented works on metal stands that stood in front of dark backgrounds in order to create an environment in which the art displayed hovered free of the walls and interjected itself into the viewer’s space. This arrangement evoked the model of Frederick Kiesler’s 1942 installation for Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This 174

The Exile Returns

Century gallery in New York, which had importantly featured exiled artists in its spaces during World War II.109 Also evocative of this German American history was the presentation of Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s Kneeling Woman as a key work of the documenta display. The sculpture had appeared in 1913 at the Armory Show in New York, an exhibit heralded for its introduction of European modernism to the United States before World War I. It also appeared in Degenerate Art and gained international fame once again in 1939 when it was purchased from the Lucerne auction of Nazi looted art and subsequently sold to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was then displayed in MoMA’s Art in Our Time exhibit of 1939, in which Alfred Barr had inaugurated his museum’s lead role in the project of “cultural rescue” of modernist art threatened by dictatorship and war. East Germans were excluded from documenta, as were Grosz and others whose critical realist works fell out of step with the exhibit’s narrative emphasis on modernist abstraction. Preference was given to Picasso, Matisse, and other towering examples of prewar French modernism and those German artists such as Wols and Fritz Winter, whose move toward abstraction could be seen to continue the line of formalist experiment their French counterparts had begun. In his book Painting in the Twentieth Century, Haftmann envisioned this French-German détente as the foundation for a new European cultural internationalism, distinct from the internationalisms of either the Soviet Union or the United States. John-Paul Stonard’s account of documenta and Haftmann’s role in the exhibit describes this as a “European Imperialism, defined at heart by a Franco-German axis, spilling over the traditional boundaries.” He also cites Haftmann’s globalist vision directly on this point: “The European outlook, developed in the last half century and reflected in modern art and architecture has today been accepted all over the world. In Europe and America, Canada and Brazil, Persia and Japan, it has overwhelmed the bastions of folk culture, many of which have been built up and preserved over thousands of years, and destroyed them at any rate on the surface. A world culture is beginning to be discernable. Today Klee, Kandinsky, Picasso are recognized the world over.”110 Grosz’s exclusion from Haftmann’s aesthetically defined one-world vision mirrored the implications of the Whitney Museum’s retrospective of his art in 1954, which was discussed at the end of chapter 3. There I noted how the Whitney exhibit had served to consign Grosz’s work to the annals of modern art’s history. Haftmann and West Germany’s ascendant art establishment effectively did the same by finding no place to configure his art in the new global vision of an internationalized modernism that was then taking shape. Exhibits of Grosz’s art continued to be held in West Germany, but from 1955 onward their purpose was largely to elaborate his role in art history with inclusion of his work in exhibits devoted to Dada and the Bauhaus.111 In the United States, meanwhile, Haftmann’s staging of the German Art of the Twentieth Century show, at MoMA in 1957, served to revive attention to his expressionist past. The exhibit touched off a veritable boom of American interest in early twentieth-century German Expressionism as part of a developing genealogy for the European roots of the “triumph of American painting” under the aegis of Abstract Expressionism.112 Meanwhile, East German assessments of Grosz’s career following his 1954 visit were predictably negative in response to the German release of his autobiography. Characteristic was Horst The Exile Returns

175

Jähner’s review for Bildende Kunst, titled “Grosz contra Grosz.” Jähner lamented the loss of the once brilliant caricaturist, who now insisted on dismissing his political past as nothing more than “years of clowning.” The socialist revolutionary had devolved into a cynical nihilist incapable of seeing the good in man and the possibility of a better world. Jähner concluded, “Grosz paints himself like one of his Stickmen, who stares with a hysterical gaze at a ruined landscape, in which rats feast and have created a big hole. [Grosz is] a painter of nothing, whose nihilism tells him that art is at an end.”113 Like several other critiques of Grosz that appeared in the East German art press in the coming years, Jähner’s essay was heavily illustrated by examples of his art, particularly Grosz’s satiric caricatures of the 1920s. In the case of Bildende Kunst, this editorial tactic of foregrounding Grosz’s past images within predictably negative evaluations of his current politics subtly underscored the nature of the post-Stalin “thaw.”114 This thaw, which led to a relaxation of East German cultural policy, resulted from Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956. From this point forward, exhibits of works by Picasso, Diego Rivera, and other modernist artists of the international left began to appear in East Germany. Henceforth modernist tendencies became available to East German artists for integration into an expanded definition of socialist realist art. This loosening of cultural dogma also precipitated a reevaluation of Grosz’s earlier art. In 1957, the East German art critic Wolfgang Hütt announced this reevaluation by reclaiming Grosz’s legacy and that of Germany’s other proletarian revolutionary artists of the 1920s as viable sources for East Germany’s unfolding project of national legitimacy and cultural modernization. This legacy had been declared irrelevant to East Germany’s socialist reality in the formalist campaigns of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Hütt’s analysis described them instead as outstanding progenitors of a distinctly German—​as opposed to Soviet—​socialist realism.115 In 1958, Grosz’s work was included in an exhibit staged by the Verband bildender Künstler (Association of Pictorial Artists) in Berlin, titled Revolutionary Art in Action. His work appeared alongside that of Otto Dix, Heinrich Ehmsen, John Heartfield, Käthe Kollwitz, Max Pechstein, Rudolf Schlichter, and other artists whose socially critical works of the Weimar era now received renewed attention.116 Grosz’s Weimar era work thus assumed an important role in the profound changes that marked the East German art world in its transition from the Stalinist internationalism of the GDR’s earliest years to the nationalized socialism pursued—​however fitfully—​in East German cultural policy from the mid-1950s onward.117 In 1958, an East German exhibit of prints and drawings by Grosz, Dix, Lea Grundig, Hans Grundig, Kollwitz, and Beckmann was staged at the USSR Academy of Arts, in Moscow. This exhibit signaled the extent to which not only Germany’s traditions of critical realism but also its legacy of expressionism were now to be integrated into the country’s expanded definition of “socialist humanism” in the arts.118 In July 1959, Grosz’s Peace II, of 1946, appeared in the American National Exhibition in Moscow.119 This work is a slightly altered and enlarged version of Peace I, Grosz’s homage to his mother that appeared in his 1946 exhibition, A Piece of My World in a World without Peace.120 The American National Exhibition was the first show of American art in the USSR following the cul176

The Exile Returns

tural exchange agreement that was signed between the two superpowers the previous year.121 The exhibit is best remembered today for the lavishly outfitted model American home that served as the backdrop for the Kitchen Debate between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Khrushchev. The debate established consumerism as the newest highly consequential front in the Cold War.122 But the American contribution as a whole narrowly escaped cancellation after McCarthyites threatened to scuttle the display. Right-wing critics raised alarm over the inclusion of “communist” artists in the painting section. They were particularly roiled over the use of “communistic” abstractions by Jackson Pollock and anti-militarist, allegedly unpatriotic figurative works by Grosz, Jack Levine, and others for this first propagandistically important airing of U.S. culture before Soviet audiences.123 Grosz’s Peace II thus took its place in the exhibition galleries at Moscow’s Sokolniki Park in the midst of Cold War cultural controversies that continued to mark the American art world and international relations well into the next decade. At the same time, his poignant image, which had been inspired by his mother’s tragic death in World War II, provided silent testimony to an earlier time removed from the entrenched antagonisms of the Cold War. That was a time not of conflict but of cooperation between the United States and the USSR as they struggled together against fascism. It was also a time before their alternative visions of the future divided one world into two. After the closing of his Whitney Museum retrospective in New York in 1954, Grosz wrote excitedly to curator John Baur about the positive response the catalogue had generated in Germany and his hope that the show might be restaged there. Against the backdrop of his years of struggle in the American art world, this expression of interest suggested to Grosz that he might be able to return to Germany and begin his career there anew. He quit his job at the Art Students League and severed his contract with his dealer, Reeves Lewenthal, at the Associated American Artists gallery. In short, the exile imagined that circumstances might now allow him to return “home.” But our examination of Grosz’s reception on both sides of Germany’s Cold War divide has revealed troubled commonalities between the cultural politics of his “home” and those that plagued his career in exile. Germany’s artistic debates resembled New York’s as modernist abstraction vied with traditionalist realism in ways that left little room once again for the “new humanity” Grosz explored in his art of the postwar period. The German context differed from that of the United States especially in the ferocity of those debates as they became imbricated in a perilous Cold War struggle between West and East Germany. Culture became a key instrument in that struggle as both sides made competing claims to national legitimacy. As a result, each looked to different facets of Grosz’s Weimar era art to meet their distinctive ideological needs. The West German art world valued above all his role as a member of the 1920s avant-garde and its legacy of modernist experiment. The East, by contrast, first vilified, then embraced Grosz as a leading artist of the Communist Party in the 1920s. It also first condemned, then looked to his earlier dissident art as a model for its state-sponsored socialist realism. Despite these differences, the West and the East German art worlds shared one thing, namely, their appreciation for Grosz’s artistic past over and against his current work. The Exile Returns

177

Indeed, the interest in Grosz’s American art that emerged in Germany immediately following the war quickly faded. Few, if any, followed the lead of writer Wolfgang Paul, who wrote a moving testimonial to Grosz in 1947 about his painting titled Cain. The work had inspired Paul to imagine an important role for Grosz’s art in helping Germans to reflect critically on their self-inflicted tragedy. As time would tell, however, the Germany Grosz had left behind did not subscribe to Paul’s vision for Grosz’s work. Nor was it anxious to welcome the exile home. His decision to immigrate to the United States and to pursue there his mordant reflections on the “devils and demons” of his German past was now construed as an unwelcome indictment of Germans and the German tragedy. Moreover, this indictment was proffered by someone who had abandoned his country in its darkest hour. For West German commentators in particular, Europe’s “saddest man” had thereby forfeited his right to speak for Germany, its troubled past, and its uncertain future. Like Thomas Mann, he had become instead a rootless cosmopolitan, neither fully German nor fully American but both at the same time. Though he and his wife, Eva, indeed returned to Germany in 1959, Grosz became, in effect, a permanent exile within the competing world orders that took shape on German soil during the Cold War. This permanent exile relegated him to the historical past of the “echt Deutsch” country and culture to which Grosz and his art nonetheless remained ambivalently tied.

178

The Exile Returns

CONCLUSION TEARS OF THE CLOWN Don’t forget that I have two souls in my breast, a schizophrenia, the German, Teutonic schizophrenia: clown and Mephisto, and on the other side, let’s say Thomas Mann. George Grosz, 1957

GROSZ AND EVA visited Germany once again in September 1958, assisted by the eighty thousand deutsche marks they received from the West German government as compensation for their assets confiscated under the Nazi regime. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, Eva was in any case anxious to return to the comfort of her loved ones there. The two stayed with her sister Lotte, whose husband, Otto Schmalhausen, had died that March. A letter from the president of the West German Akademie der Künste, Hans Scharoun, informed Grosz shortly after their arrival of the academy’s decision to bestow on him an honorary membership.1 Ironically, it also offered him use of the atelier formerly occupied by Hitler’s one-time favorite sculptor, Arno Breker.2 At the conclusion of this visit with family and friends, Grosz and Eva returned to New York for the end-of-year holiday season and in order to make arrangements for a permanent move to Germany. They departed the United States in May 1959, after Grosz was honored with a medal for his achievements in graphic arts by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.3 These positive recognitions in the United States and West Germany helped make this period a gratifying one for Grosz. Despite, or perhaps because of, a growing art world consensus that his career had already drawn to a close, it was also one marked by a reinvigorated burst of creativity. Since 1957, he had returned to his Dadaist roots and begun working in the collage medium once again. These works 179

prefigured the emergence of pop art in the coming decade with their boisterous satires of American consumerism. But the possibilities for where this new direction might have led Grosz were tragically cut short two months following his relocation to Berlin. After a drunken excursion with friends, he returned home that night, fell down a flight of stairs, and suffered asphyxiation and heart failure. He died on 6 July 1959 at the age of sixty-six. I conclude this study with one of these late collages, Grosz’s Self-Portrait as Clown and Variety Girl, from 1957 (figure 60). The work is not free of his notorious negativity, but its burlesque humor does depart significantly from the unrelieved despair evident in Grosz’s other self-portraits we have thus far considered. The famed satirist of the Weimar years becomes in this collage a shapely, lowbrow stage performer—​an entertainer rather than an artist—​clutching a bottle of cheap Four Roses whiskey in his left hand as he stands poised before a forest of skyscrapers. Reminiscent of Dada’s subversive gender play of the 1920s, Self-Portrait as Clown and Variety Girl portrays Grosz transformed by the American mass culture he so frequently railed against, including its alleged emasculating and commodifying effects. The ambivalence of this work, its humor mixed with pain, mirrors the possibility and limitation that characterized Grosz’s changing experience of exile throughout his years in the United States. We have explored that experience, including how it was shaped and inflected by the profound historical events of World War II and the Cold War. Scholars have long recognized this moment as a pivotal one in the history of modernity and its universalizing dream of human betterment. Grosz and others of the German emigration witnessed with particular horror the apparent end of that dream in the tragedy of Auschwitz and the Cold War antagonisms that ensued. As we have seen, Grosz measured his responses to these changes most especially against those of Thomas Mann. Mann served as the lead voice of the emigration. He had also frequently and eloquently expressed his hope for the fulfillment of modernity’s promise in a future oneworld order defined by democratic, humanist values. In Grosz’s Self-Portrait as Clown and Variety Girl, he, on the other hand, presents a wholly postmodern vision of the postwar order, in this case as seen through the tears of the clown and with a sensibility both playful and cynical at the same time. As he imagined it, this was a sensibility both Mann-like and Grosz-like in character. It was also fundamentally German in its dualism: “Don’t forget that I have two souls in my breast,” he once announced, “a schizophrenia, the German, Teutonic schizophrenia: clown and Mephisto, and on the other side, let’s say Thomas Mann.”4 The centered humanist subject prized by Mann had thus become for Grosz irrevocably rent asunder by historical cataclysm and unmoored by the culture of the commodity. Contrary to Mann’s view, Grosz’s Self-Portrait as Clown and Variety Girl suggests the experience of exile as a double displacement of the subject: first by the realities of political persecution and expulsion, and then by a sense of seemingly permanent migrancy, in which exile had become for Grosz an indelible existential condition of World War II’s aftermath. In more recent decades, what Grosz artistically intuited in this regard has counterintuitively assumed concrete (and barbed wire) tangibility in the many walls that have sprung up between the United States and Mexico, the Israelis and the Palestinians, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Pakistan and India, and elsewhere around the 180

Conclusion

FIGURE 60. George

Grosz, Self-Portrait as Clown and Variety Girl, 1957. Collage, 30.5 × 26.3 cm.

world. As noted by Wendy Brown in her book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, these walls are not fortifications that protect one nation-state from another. Instead, they are hyperbolic reactions against waning state sovereignty in the face of ungovernable powers and transnational flows of peoples whose migrancy is driven at an accelerating pace by environmental, economic, religious, and other factors.5 Our current epoch of apparently waning state sovereignty is different in the character of its murderous conflicts but perhaps not so far removed from the shrill nationalism that shaped Grosz’s life and art during the period covered in this study. In the earlier self-portraits we have considered, Grosz imagined himself differently as thoroughly and agonizingly rooted in a German national identity he had once hoped his emigration to the United States might free him from. Tears of the Clown

181

However “echt Deutsch” he became in exile, he was also part of an exile community that found itself negatively associated with an elitist and rootless cosmopolitanism, not only under the Nazi and Stalin regimes, but also in postwar Germany. Detractors vilified the exiles who constituted this cosmopolitanism as divorced from the culture and the people for whom they nonetheless continued to speak. This historical assault on cosmopolitanism carried anti-Semitic overtones as it joined a panoply of invectives that held in suspicion any view from outside with claim to commenting on the inside of the fortified nationalisms that emerged during this period.6 As we have seen, that critical outside view offered by Grosz and other members of the exile community was directed not only at the Hitler regime and the USSR but also at the contradictions of capitalist democracy in the United States and its claim to universal validity in the American Century. The critical self-reflexivity exhorted by Grosz’s art and Mann’s writings was altogether drowned out in the cultural antagonisms that settled in for the long chill of the Cold War. In Grosz’s case, this entailed art historical neglect of his career after 1933 and consignment of his significance to a bygone history of artistic achievement. As I have attempted to show, the Cold War aesthetic criterion that shaped the reception of Grosz’s art during his American years and since has obscured from view the profound and profoundly relevant issues his art addressed. I hope this book does something to rectify that obscurity, particularly as we enter an era when universalist, cosmopolitan thinking begins to transform in meaning from the exalted idealism of its origins to the recognition of an inescapable interconnectedness with which we must contend. That interconnectedness has taken shape in recent years in both positive and negative form, from accelerated and increasingly democratized communications technology to the undeniable signs of worldwide environmental peril and the effects of consolidating global capitalism. Under the circumstances, cosmopolitan thinking faces the challenge of imagining a nonhegemonic universality capable of confronting these new realities with an ethic of “universal concern” that is at the same time respectful of the “legitimate differences” between peoples, cultures, and histories of which our global interconnectedness has made us more cognizant than ever before.7 Current cosmopolitan understandings of difference lie well beyond the Western range of values that animated Grosz’s art and Mann’s writings. But the critical self-recognition exhorted by today’s cosmopolitanism finds its roots firmly anchored in the dimension of the modernist project, both its possibilities and its failings, that their circumspect lives and art traced in penetrating terms.8

182

Conclusion

Notes

Acknowledgments 1. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann, eds., Exiles and Émigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997). The show also traveled to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. 2. Otto-Karl Werckmeister, “Hitler the Artist,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 270–​97. 3. Exile research lost one of its most important scholars with the passing of Jutta Held in January 2007. As president of the Guernica-Gesellschaft and editor of its yearbook Kunst und Politik, she helped to establish the study of anti-fascist resistance in exile as an important history and enduring example of engaged artistic, intellectual, and political work. Among Keith Holz’s many influential publications on exile are: Modern German Art for Thirties Paris, Prague, and London: Resistance and Acquiescence in a Democratic Public Sphere (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004) and cowritten with Wolfgang Schopf, Im Auge des Exils: Josef Breitenbach und die Freie Deutsche Kultur in Paris 1933–​1941 (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2001). In addition to her curatorial and catalogue essay contributions to the Exiles and Émigrés exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1997, Sabine Eckmann’s works on exile include H. W. Janson and the Legacy of Modern Art at Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis, MO: Washington University Gallery, 2002) and, with Lutz Koepnick, the edited volume, Caught by Politics: German Exiles and American Visual Culture in the 1930s and 1940s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

183

Preface 1. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1986), first published in 1944 as Dialektik der Aufklärung (New York: Social Studies Association, 1944). 2. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 3. Grosz was put on trial three times during the Weimar Republic for his work: in 1921, on charges of insulting the military with his portfolio Gott mit uns (God Is on Our Side), which was displayed in the First International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920; in 1924, for obscenity based on watercolors and drawings published in his portfolio Ecce homo; and from 1928 to 1930, for images used as stage backdrops for Piscator’s play Schwejk. These images were also disseminated in a portfolio of Grosz drawings titled Hintergrund (Background). For a detailed account of these trials, see Rosamunde Neugebauer, George Grosz: Macht und Ohnmacht satirischer Kunst: Die Graphikfolgen “Gott mit uns,” Ecce homo, und Hintergrund (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1993). 4. In his recent book, David Dennis explores the pages of the Völkischer Beobachter to expose how Nazism appropriated “great works of humanism” in order to “validate inhumane policies.” The newspaper first appeared in 1920, and its circulation rose to over one million by 1939. As the party’s official organ until 1945, the Völkischer Beobachter played a key role in vilifying political and cultural influences deemed undesirable by Hitler’s NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers, or Nazi, Party). As Dennis recounts, the newspaper was also instrumental in the fashioning of Nazism’s Volksgemeinschaft, or people’s community, premised on values of cultural nationalism, anti-Semitism, and militarism. See David B. Dennis, Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1–​12. For the paper’s coverage of Grosz’s blasphemy trial, see ibid., 348–​51; “Der ärgerniserregende Freispruch im Falle George Grosz,” Völkischer Beobachter, 16 April 1929; and “ ‘Maulhalten, weiterdienen!’ ” Völkischer Beobachter, 6 December 1930. In a letter of March 1933, Grosz wrote of his continuing pillory in the Völkischer Beobachter, where he was “especially taken to task” and “relentlessly hounded.” See letter from Grosz to Richard and Beate Huelsenbeck (13 March 1933), in George Grosz, Briefe, 1913–​1959, ed. Herbert Knust (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1979). All translations from German are my own, unless otherwise indicated. 5. Among them, Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann, eds., Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2009); Claudia Mesch, Modern Art at the Berlin Wall: Demarcating Culture in the Cold War Germanys (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2009); and Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 6. Among the many recent treatments of this subject are: Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Nigel Dower and John Williams, eds., Global Citizenship: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002); Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006); Fred Evans, The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); and Gerard Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Introduction 1. John Dos Passos, “Grosz Comes to America,” Esquire, September 1936, 105, 128, 131. 2. Ibid., 128. 3. “The World in Watercolor: A Grosz Portfolio,” Esquire, September 1936, 106–​7; and “Mixed Ink and Acid: Examples of the Biting Line of George Grosz,” Esquire, September 1936, 104. 4. Grosz, Briefe, 133–​64.

184

Notes to pages xv–2

5. Characteristic in this regard is Grosz’s letter to his friend, the poet Gottfried Benn, insisting that his departure from Germany was not due to political reasons: “I left more out of ‘economic’ considerations—​mixed with the desire for adventure and travel . . . [in order to] get to know better this vast unknown land. . . . ” See letter from Grosz to Gottfried Benn (16 June 1933), in Grosz, Briefe, 178. 6. Letter to Grosz from Wieland Herzfelde (20 July 1933), George Grosz Archive, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (hereafter GAH), 189. 7. The Mannheim Kunsthalle exhibit was titled Kulturbolschewistische Bilder (Images of Cultural Bolshevism). It remained on view from 4 April to 5 June 1933. On this and other exhibits of defamed art during this period, see Christoph Zuschlag, “Entartete Kunst”: Ausstellungsstrategien im Nazi-Deutschland (Worms, Germany: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1995); and Christoph Zuschlag, “An ‘Educational Exhibition’: The Precursors of Entartete Kunst and Its Individual Venues,” in “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, ed. Stephanie Barron (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991), 83–​103. 8. Letter from Grosz to Wieland Herzfelde (3 August 1934), GAH 641. 9. For the most exemplary treatment of Grosz’s Weimar career, see Beth Irwin Lewis, George Grosz: Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). On Grosz’s trials, see Neugebauer, George Grosz. 10. Marsden Hartley, George Grosz at an American Place (New York: American Place Gallery, 1935). 11. For a thorough bibliographic survey and analysis of scholarship on German intellectuals and artists in exile, see Marion F. Deshmukh, “The Visual Arts and Cultural Migration in the 1930s and 1940s: A Literature Review,” Central European History 41 (2008): 569–​604. 12. Ernst Bloch, “Disrupted Language, Disrupted Culture,” Direction 2, no. 8 (December 1939): 16–​17, 36. Bloch arrived in exile in the United States in 1938. 13. Ibid. Bloch pleaded for a positive synthesis of these two poles of exile response into a new German-American culture “fostered by double but not divided loyalties—​by memory and a vigorous faith in the future.” 14. Jutta Held explored this distinction between the experience of prominent versus lesser-known artists, as well as narratives of assimilation versus isolation that have informed critical understandings of artistic exile during this period. See Jutta Held, “Das Exil der deutsche Künstler in den dreißiger und vierziger Jahren,” Exilforschung 12 (1994): 191–​99. 15. Among them, Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); and Dickran Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde, 1920–​1950 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995). 16. Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting (New York: Praeger, 1970). 17. For a recent and critical reassessment of the impact of exiled Bauhaus practitioners on American architecture and design, see Kathleen James-Chakraborty, “From Isolationism to Internationalism: American Acceptance of the Bauhaus,” in Bauhaus Culture from Weimar to the Cold War, ed. Kathleen James-Chakraborty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 153–​70. 18. Barbara McCloskey, George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 19. Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 138. 20. M. Kay Flavell, George Grosz: A Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). 21. Birgit Möckel, George Grosz in Amerika, 1932–​1959 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997). 22. Among them: Peter-Klaus Schuster, ed., George Grosz: Berlin–​New York (Berlin: Ars Nicolai, 1994); Ralph Jentsch, ed., George Grosz: Berlin–​New York (Milan, Italy: Skira, 2007); and Juerg M. Judin, ed., George Grosz: The Years in

Notes to pages 3–6

185

America 1933–​1958 (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009). 23. Most significant for me among their many important writings related to the subject of exile are: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 17–​46; and Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 357–​66. 24. Henry R. Luce, “The American Century,” Life, 17 February 1941, 61–​65. 25. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 39.

1. Making an Exile Culture Epigraph: Letter to Grosz from Walter William Spencer Cook (24 July 1937), GAH, 79. 1. Ibid. 2. Translation from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf by David Dennis. See Dennis, Inhumanities, 221–​22, where the author discusses in greater detail Hitler’s views on modernist art. 3. Among them, Peter-Klaus Schuster, ed., Die “Kunststadt” Munich 1937: Nationalsozialismus und “Entartete Kunst” (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1987); Barron, “Degenerate Art”; and Zuschlag, “Entartete Kunst.” The reputations, exhibition opportunities, and livelihoods of artists defamed as “degenerate” were damaged and in some cases destroyed by the antimodernist policies of the Hitler regime. However, more recent research demonstrates that proscriptions against the display and sale of modernist art in Nazi Germany were not as absolute and all-encompassing as some previous accounts have asserted. On this point especially see the data on and analysis of exhibits during the Third Reich in Martin Papenbrock and Gabriele Saure, eds., Kunst des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts in deutschen Ausstellungen, vol. 1: Ausstellungen deutscher Gegenwartskunst in der NS-Zeit: Eine kommentierte Bibliographie (Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2000). In summer 1937, the Nazi regime made its new cultural policy known to the broader international community through its contribution to the Paris World’s Fair. For a comprehensive account of the German pavilion at the fair, including the long history of French-German relations leading up to and following the event, see Karen Fiss, Grand Illusion: The Third Reich, the Paris Exposition, and the Cultural Seduction of France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 4. Benedict Nyson, “Modernism Is Now Verboten: Exhibitions of ‘Bad’ and Approved Works Reveal the Tastes Decreed by Hitler,” New York Times, 25 July 1937, 50. 5. Ibid. 6. Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2002), 140. 7. “Pre-War Struggler,” Time, 15 July 1935, 23. 8. “Paintings by Adolf Hitler,” Life 1, no. 2, 30 November 1936, 42–​43. 9. Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 53–​54. 10. Ibid., 61–​62. 11. Lippmann was not alone in failing to understand violence and oppressive measures directed against Jews as a core dimension of Nazi ideology. In the early 1930s, many construed actions taken against Germany’s Jews as part of the general turmoil of the regime’s transition to power. This lack of comprehension is perhaps harder to understand in the case of Lippmann, given his Jewish background. On Lippmann’s discomfort with his Jewish identity and his anti-Semitic response to the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany, see Deborah Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–​1945 (New York: Free Press, 1986), 45–​47. 12. In her analysis of American journalism and the public opinion it shaped, Lipstadt ties the tendency of the press to downplay worsening conditions in Germany to several factors. Among them was the circulation of discredited

186

Notes to pages 6–14

“atrocity stories” during World War I that bred skepticism among the press and public alike concerning stories of brutality coming out of Germany. Even in the face of countervailing reports that surfaced from time to time in the news, America’s entrenched isolationism continued to bolster this skepticism, as did anti-Semitic sentiment that enabled willful disregard of the unfolding tragedy. Lipstadt asserts: “Until Pearl Harbor many people in the United States read the reports of Nazi atrocities as if they were detective or horror stories, causing some gooseflesh but not to be taken too seriously.” See ibid., 140. 13. Letter from Grosz to Wieland Herzfelde (31 January 1934), in Grosz, Briefe, 188. 14. Ibid. Grosz’s observation on the presence of anti-Semitism in the United States at this time is addressed in Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 75–​78. Business leaders and Republican opponents of President Roosevelt assailed his recovery programs as a “Jew Deal” and railed against undue “Jewish influence” in his administration. Breitman and Lichtman note that these attacks made Roosevelt hesitant to address Jewish issues at this time. They argue that confronting anti-Semitism might have further fueled opposition to FDR’s New Deal by appearing to turn it into a “minority” program. 15. For an incisive analysis of Hitler’s image as an artist both within and without the Nazi regime during this period, see Werckmeister, “Hitler the Artist.” 16. Letter from Grosz to Bertolt Brecht (13 August 1934), in Grosz, Briefe, 200. 17. James K. Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 6. 18. Letter from Grosz to Wieland Herzfelde (6 June 1933), in Grosz, Briefe, 174–​77. 19. Letter from Grosz to Wieland Herzfelde (30 June 1934), in Grosz, Briefe, 199. 20. Letter from Grosz to Hermann Borchardt (7 October 1935), in Grosz, Briefe, 222–​25. 21. I discuss this portfolio, including its role in announcing Grosz’s renunciation of his earlier communist affiliations, in my book George Grosz and the Communist Party, 185–​90. For a recent and illuminating discussion of Grosz’s politicized use of sexuality and torture in his images for Interregnum, see James A. Van Dyke, “Torture and Masculinity in George Grosz’s Interregnum,” New German Critique 40, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 137–​65. 22. Letter from Grosz to Wieland Herzfelde (8 March 1935), in Grosz, Briefe, 213. 23. More specifically, “totalitarianism” also served the political repression of commonalities—​political, social, and economic—​that existed among the United States, Nazi Germany, and the USSR in the 1930s and subsequently. On the history and ideological instrumentality for the United States of likening the Hitler and Stalin regimes during World War II and the Cold War, see Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 24. Keith Holz, “ ‘Brushwork Thick and Easy’ or a ‘Beauty-Parlor Mask for Murder’? Reckoning with the Great German Art Exhibitions in the Western Democracies,” RIHA Journal (28 September 2012): 28. 25. The twenty Grosz works included in the Degenerate Art show came from the rounds of confiscations throughout Germany that resulted in the removal of his paintings and drawings from public collections. The inventory compiled by the Research Center “Degenerate Art” at the Freie Universität, in Berlin, lists 170 Grosz works confiscated at this time. See http://emuseum.campus.fu-berlin.de/eMuseumPlus. Some of these were sold off at the Fischer Gallery auction in Lucerne, Switzerland, in June 1939; others have never been recovered. For a list of Grosz’s works in the Degenerate Art exhibit, see Barron, ed., “Degenerate Art,” 242–​47. 26. The ownership history of Grosz’s Eclipse of the Sun in the United States remains unclear. He either sold or gave away the painting sometime in the first years after he settled in New York in 1933. It then remained in private hands until it was purchased by the Heckscher Museum of Art, in Huntington, New York, in 1968. My thanks to Kenneth Wayne, chief curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Heckscher, for sharing this information with me. For a more detailed discussion of the painting and its provenance, see Sabine Rewald, ed., Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 158–​60.

Notes to pages 14–18

187

27. A complete listing of Guggenheim fellows is available at the website for the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation: www.gf.org/fellows/all/. 28. “Guggenheim Fund Makes 58 Grants,” New York Times, 9 April 1938. 29. Grosz’s engagement with the grotesque dates to his explorations of the “comic-grotesque” in his Dada collages of the early years of the Weimar Republic. The mannequin studies of his American years depart from these earlier concerns. They instead reach back more explicitly to the demonic and uncanny aspects of the grotesque that were explored not only in the Northern Renaissance works of Bosch and Brueghel but also and more explicitly in the romantic traditions of the nineteenth century. On the grotesque, its history, and changing meanings, see Pamela Kort, ed., Comic Grotesque: Wit and Mockery in German Art, 1870–​1940 (New York: Neue Galerie, 2005). 30. Letter from Grosz to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (20 October 1936), cited and discussed in Flavell, George Grosz, 150. 31. George Grosz, “Unter anderem ein Wort für deutsche Tradition,” Das Kunstblatt 15, no. 3 (1931): 79–​84, English translation in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 499–​502. 32. On the role of history in exile literature, see Alexander Stephan, Die deutsche Exilliteratur, 1933–​1945 (Nördlingen, Germany: Beck’sche Elementarbücher, 1979), 194–​205. 33. On the complexities of Neue Sachlichkeit and its relationship to the politics of the conservative revolution during the late Weimar years, see the following authoritative works: James A. Van Dyke, Franz Radziwill and the Contradictions of German Art History, 1919–​1945 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011); James A. Van Dyke, “ ‘Neue Deutsche Romantik’ zwischen Modernität, Kulturkritik und Kunstpolitik, 1929–​1937,” in Adolf Dietrich und die Neue Sachlichkeit in Deutschland, ed. Dieter Schwarz (Winterthur, Switzerland: Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 1994), 137–​65; and Olaf Peters, Neue Sachlichkeit und Nationalsozialismus: Affirmation und Kritik, 1931–​1947 (Berlin: Reimer, 1998). 34. Judin, George Grosz, 142. This quote comes from a letter of 1939 in which Grosz described his notion of polarity. He also explained further his belief in the dualism of construction and destruction: “On the one side, one sees vaunted ‘progress’ and the finest discoveries and achievements in almost all walks of life—​and on the other side: dark middle ages, and the best heads busy themselves with possibilities of destruction.” See letter from Grosz to R. H. Norton (4 May 1939), in Grosz, Briefe, 282–​83. 35. As described by Grosz in Helen Bosworth, “Grosz Paints What He Can’t Forget,” Art Digest 17 (15 February 1943): 7. 36. Flavell, George Grosz, 144. 37. David Pike, German Writers in Soviet Exile, 1933–​1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 30. 38. Letter from Grosz to Ulrich Becher (9 June 1937), in Grosz, Briefe, 260–​61. 39. Letter from Grosz to Ulrich Becher (17 August 1934), in Grosz, Briefe, 201. 40. According to his friend, Erwin Piscator, Grosz was so moved by Mühsam’s murder that he immediately set about creating fifteen images devoted to his horrific fate. See Piscator’s introductory essay in George Grosz, 1893–​1959 (West Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1961), 9. One of these images, A Writer, Is He?, appeared in Interregnum in 1936. On this image, see my George Grosz and the Communist Party, 172–​73, 189–​90. For a discussion of Grosz’s series of works devoted to Mühsam, see Birgit Möckel, “Das Ende der Menschlichkeit: George Grosz’ Zeichnungen, Lithographien und Aquarelle aus Anlaß der Ermordung Erich Mühsams,” Schriften der Erich-Mühsam-Gesellschaft 13 (1997): 5–​36; and Van Dyke, “Torture and Masculinity.” 41. Letter from Grosz to Ulrich Becher (17 August 1934), in Grosz, Briefe, 201. 42. Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, trans. Walter D. Morris (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1983). See also Mark W. Clark, Beyond Catastrophe: German Intellectuals and Cultural Renewal after World War II, 1945–​1955 (New York: Lexington Books, 2006), 86.

188

Notes to pages 18–26

43. Thomas Mann, “An Appeal to Reason,” in Order of the Day: Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942). See also Wolf Lepenies, The Seduction of Culture in German History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 27–​35. 44. Manfred Görtemaker, Thomas Mann und die Politik (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2005), 80–​84. 45. “Reich Citizenship Is Lost by Mann,” New York Times (4 December 1936): 13. 46. Thomas Mann, “I Accuse the Hitler Regime,” The Nation (6 March 1937): 259–​61. 47. Letter from Grosz to Ulrich Becher (13 March 1937), in Ulrich Becher / George Grosz, Flaschenpost: Geschichte einer Freundschaft, ed. Uwe Naumann and Michael Töteberg (Basel: Lenos Verlag, 1989), 120–​24. 48. Claus-Dieter Krohn, Intellectuals in Exile: Refugee Scholars and the New School for Social Research (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 69. 49. In 1933, the University in Exile hosted 14 scholars; by 1945, the numbers had risen to 180. On this, see Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 74. 50. In April 1936, Löwenstein delivered a lecture, “Hitler’s War on Civilization,” at the Victor Hugo Café in Hollywood. In attendance were luminaries from the Hollywood film industry and prominent leftist activists, including screenwriter and Communist Party member Donald Ogden Stewart, who hosted the event. Stewart became head of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League (HANL) for the Defense of American Democracy, which formed shortly thereafter. The HANL drew national attention to events in Europe through, among other things, its call for a boycott of U.S. participation in the Berlin Olympics of 1936. On Löwenstein, Stewart, and the formation of the HANL, see Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–​1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 96–​121. 51. “Certificate of Incorporation of American Guild for German Cultural Freedom” (4 April 1935), reprinted in Deutsche Intellektuelle im Exil: Ihre Akademie und die “American Guild for German Cultural Freedom” (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1993), 59. See also Volkmar Zühlsdorff, Hitler’s Exiles: The German Cultural Resistance in America and Europe (London: Continuum, 2004), 36–​40. 52. “Mann Finds U.S. Sole Peace Hope,” New York Times, 22 February 1938, 13. 53. Grosz, diary entry (29 January 1938), GAH 1086. On this period in the history of the Frankfurt School, see Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 54. Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 273–​77; and Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile, 87–​88. The foundational study of the Frankfurt School remains Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–​1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 55. Letter from Grosz to Richard Huelsenbeck (19 January 1934), in Grosz, Briefe, 187. 56. Grosz, diary entry (4 February 1938), GAH 1086. Eisler’s brother was the Communist Party international functionary Gerhart Eisler, and his sister, the 1920s KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or the German Communist Party) leader, Ruth Fischer. Eisler was bent on bringing Grosz back into the communist fold in the 1930s; Grosz, meanwhile, found Eisler’s dogmatism insufferable. On Grosz and Eisler’s strained relationship, see my George Grosz and the Communist Party, 175; and the letter from Grosz to Bertolt Brecht (23 May 1935), in Grosz, Briefe, 216–​17. 57. Grosz, diary entry (11 February 1938), GAH 1086. 58. Letter from Grosz to his mother, Marie Wilhelmine Louise Groß (10 March 1938), in Grosz, Briefe, 268–​69. 59. Letter from Grosz to John Heartfield (31 March 1938), in Grosz, Briefe, 270–​71. 60. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, 86–​88. 61. Letter from Grosz to Erwin Piscator (29 June 1938), in Grosz, Briefe, 274. 62. Grosz produced an earlier tusche and pencil version of this theme, titled The Last Battalion, in 1937. For an illustration, see Möckel, George Grosz in America, figure 121.

Notes to pages 27–30

189

63. Homer Saint-Gaudens, “Pictorial Tolerance: A Review of the 1938 International,” Carnegie Magazine 12, no. 5 (October 1938): 131–​43. 64. Dagmar Grimm, “Karl Hofer,” in Exiles and Émigrés, ed. Barron and Eckmann, 255–​57. 65. Susan Platt, “Gambling, Fencing, and Camouflage: Homer Saint-Gaudens and the Carnegie International, 1922–​ 1950,” in International Encounters: The Carnegie International and Contemporary Art, 1896–​1996, ed., Vicky A. Clark (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 1996), 85. This catalogue also contains a complete listing of prize-winning artists throughout the history of the international, see “The Carnegie International, 1896–​1996,” 151–​72; Hofer’s first-prize award is listed on page 164. The following year, the Carnegie Institute also hosted a show of Hofer’s works produced between 1933 and 1938. See John O’Connor Jr., “Presenting Karl Hofer,” Carnegie Magazine (January 1940): 246–​48. 66. Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 114. 67. Grosz, diary entry (13 November 1938), GAH 1086. 68. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, 98–​103. 69. Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 114. America was severely unprepared in 1938 for the oncoming conflict. The number of divisions and troops the United States had at the time ranked its army eighteenth in the world, “just ahead of Bulgaria’s.” On this point, see Susan Dunn, 1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler—​the Election amid the Storm (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 33. 70. Immigration to the United States was severely curtailed following the stock market crash of 1929. In 1937, the Department of State moved for the first time to expand immigration to the United States. On this history, see Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 36, 94–​95. The situation for Jews was complicated by the Nazi seizure of their assets inside Germany, which thus confronted host nations with the prospect of a larger financial burden in providing for them. As part of his efforts, Roosevelt also moved therefore to have the “public charge” clause suspended following Kristallnacht in order to facilitate the extension of visas to Jews seeking refuge in the United States. Hurdles remained high, however, and the German immigration quota still went unfilled during this period. On Roosevelt’s efforts and the complexities of immigration at this time, see Dunn, 1940, 29; and Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 115–​16, 122–​23. 71. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, 105–​9. After the Anschluss, Roosevelt convened an international conference at Evian-lesbains in France in July 1938. The United States refused, however, to expand the number of refugees it was willing to admit to the country, precipitating a collapse of the conference as other countries followed suit. On Roosevelt’s attempt to internationalize the refugee problem, see Dunn, 1940, 28–​31. 72. “Noted Exiles Turn to U.S. Citizenship,” New York Times, 30 November 1938. 73. Roger Daniels, “American Refugee Policy in Historical Perspective,” in The Muses Flee Hitler: Cultural Transfer and Adaptation, 1930–​1945, ed. Jarrell C. Jackmann and Carla M. Borden (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983), 66–​69. According to Daniels, 1,919 Germans immigrated to America in 1933. In 1938, that number swelled to 17,199, and in 1939, the highpoint of the immigration, it peaked at 33,515. 74. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, 121–​22. 75. Frederick M. Binder and David M. Reimers, All the Nations under Heaven: An Ethnic and Racial History of New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 189. See also Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 76; Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, 124; and Dunn, 1940, 235–​36. 76. David Welky, The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 116–​32. See also Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 161–​62; and Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, 335–​50. Doherty discusses this film as the first to buck Hollywood’s unwillingness to incur damage to long-standing and mutually beneficial bilateral relations between the German and Hollywood film industries.

190

Notes to pages 31–33

77. Some newspapers attributed Europe’s fall to Nazi tyranny to the admission of refugees to France and elsewhere on the continent. Anti-Semitism also became a factor in these espionage scares as rumors of Nazi spies disguised as Jewish refugees began to circulate. See Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, 127–​29. Breitman and Lichtman liken this period to the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when similar waves of fear over national security and the scapegoating of “others” swept the United States. See Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 161–​66. 78. Erika Mann and Klaus Mann, Escape to Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1939), vii. 79. Ibid., 22, 229–​31. 80. Klaus Mann, Pariser Tageszeitung, 1 December 1936, cited in Möckel, George Grosz, 77. 81. Letter from Grosz to Walter Mehring (12 May 1939), in Grosz, Briefe, 283–​85. 82. “Art: Pieces of Worlds,” Time, vol. 33, March 27, 1939, 31. 83. Elizabeth McCausland, “Oils by George Grosz in First New York Showing,” Springfield Sunday Union and Republican, 26 March 1939, 6E. On McCausland’s career as a widely read and respected leftist art critic, see Susan Noyes Platt, Art and Politics in the 1930s: Modernism, Marxism, Americanism: A History of Cultural Activism during the Depression Years (New York: Midmarch Press, 1999), 65–​79. 84. “Citizen or Artist?” Art Digest 13 (15 April 1939): 7. 85. For a thorough account of this exhibit, see Karen Koehler, “The Bauhaus, 1919–​1928: Gropius in Exile and the Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., 1938,” in Art, Culture, and Media under the Third Reich, ed. Richard A. Etlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 293. According to Koehler, the political abstinence of the exhibition responded in part to participating artists who sought to avoid any content in the display that might elicit negative reprisal from the Nazi regime or further inflame isolationist sentiment in the United States. She also observes that Gropius may have had a more personal stake in sidestepping political questions at this time. After the Bauhaus was closed in 1933, Gropius tried to continue his architectural practice under the Nazis by compromising his earlier commitment to the international validity of High Modernist design. Specifically, he attempted to convince Nazi authorities of the fundamental Germanness and patriotism of his architectural work. His attempts were unsuccessful. In 1934 he immigrated to England and then settled permanently in the United States in 1937, where he assumed an appointment at Harvard University. For more details on Gropius’s activities during this period, including his refusal to engage with the organized German exile community before the outbreak of World War II, see Winfried Nerdinger, “Bauhaus Architecture in the Third Reich,” in Bauhaus Culture, ed. James-Chakraborty, 142. 86. Grosz, diary entry (17 April 1939), GAH 1087. 87. Letter to Grosz from Felix Weil (24 October 1939), GAH 451. 88. Letter from Grosz to Anna Peter (3 April 1939), in Grosz, Briefe, 281–​82. 89. Letter from Grosz to Hermann Borchardt (January 1939?), in Grosz, Briefe, 278. 90. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, complete and unabridged, fully annotated (New York: New School for Social Research, 1939). An abridged and highly sanitized translation approved for foreign distribution by the Nazi government appeared in 1933: Adolf Hitler, My Battle, abridged and translated by E. T. S. Dugdale (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933). The unabridged Mein Kampf went through ten editions within the first year of its appearance. 91. “ ‘Mein Kampf’ of Adolf Hitler,” book review in The Nation (4 March 1939): 263–​64. 92. Konrad Heiden, Hitler: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936). Heiden was a reporter for and editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung during the Weimar years. He also served as a staff member of the Vossisiche Zeitung. Heiden aroused the ire of the NSDAP with the publication of his critical polemic Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus: Die Karriere einer Idee (A History of National Socialism: The Career of an Idea) in 1932. He emigrated in April 1933 and proceeded to publish three other books on the history and political rise of the NSDAP. Heiden’s Hitler: A Biography was the first detailed critical biography of the führer. It was published in Zurich in 1936 and appeared simultane-

Notes to pages 33–36

191

ously in English and French editions. A second and strikingly similar English-language portrait of Hitler appeared at the same time, written by the exiled reporter Rudolf Olden of the Berliner Tageblatt. See Rudolf Olden, Hitler: A Biography (New York: Covici-Friede, 1936). 93. Heiden, Hitler, 317–​44. 94. Thomas Mann, “An Appeal to Reason,” 50. 95. For an incisive discussion of this essay, including Mann’s indebtedness to Nietzsche, see Heinrich Siefkin, “Thomas Mann’s Essay ‘Bruder Hitler,’ ” German Life and Letters 35 (1982): 165–​81. 96. Thomas Mann, “That Man Is My Brother,” Esquire, vol. 11, March 1939, 31, 132–​33. 97. Thomas Mann, “Bruder Hitler,” Das neue Tage-Buch 7 (1939): 306–​9. The essay was also anthologized under the title “A Brother,” in Mann’s Order of the Day: Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), 153–​61. 98. Günter Scholdt, Autoren über Hitler: Deutschsprachige Schriftsteller 1919–​1945 und ihr Bild vom “Führer” (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1993), 195–​96. 99. Leopold Schwarzschild, “Der Tag danach,” Das neue Tage-Buch 7, no. 29 (15 July 1939): 682–​86. See also Hans-Albert Walter, “Leopold Schwarzschild and the Neue Tage-Buch,” Journal of Contemporary History 1, no. 2 (1966): 103–​16. 100. Barr’s statements as reported in Edward Alden Jewell, “The Creative Life vs. Dictatorship,” New York Times, 13 August 1939, X7. 101. Keith Holz, “Scenes from Exile in Western Europe: The Politics of Individual and Collective Endeavor among German Artists,” in Exiles and Émigrés, ed. Barron and Eckmann, 43–​56. 102. Art in Our Time (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1939), plate 127. 103. Keith Holz has illuminated the complex and politicized process whereby expressionism came to stand in for the whole of a depoliticized German modern art during the World War II period. See his Modern German Art. Gregor Langfeld has also explored how expressionism functioned in the construction of a canon of modernist art during this period. See Gregor Langfeld, Deutsche Kunst in New York: Vermittler-Kunstsammler-Ausstellungsmacher, 1904–​ 1957 (Berlin: Reimer, 2011). 104. Art in Our Time, plate 122. This connection between German Expressionism and a disturbed psychological temperament emerged in American criticism after World War I. In the World War II era it took on additional explanatory power for the presumed insight expressionism gave into a German cultural psyche that had descended into the horrors of Nazism. On this issue, see Pamela Kort, “The Myths of Expressionism in America,” in New Worlds: German and Austrian Art, 1890–​1940, ed. Renée Price (New York: Neue Galerie, 2001), 260–​93. 105. Barbara Stehlé-Akhtar, “From Obscurity to Recognition: Max Beckmann and America,” in Max Beckmann in Exile, ed. Matthew Drutt (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1996), 21–​55. 106. “Exiled Art Finds Haven in Modern Museum,” Art Digest 13 (1 September 1939): 8, cited in Vivian Endicott Barnett, “Banned German Art: Reception and Institutional Support of Modern German Art in the United States, 1933–​1945,” in Exiles and Émigrés, ed. Barron and Eckmann, 278–​79. The role of Valentin, MoMA, and others in the sale and purchase of works confiscated by the Nazi regime remains a matter of ethical debate and litigation. On the subject of the art market in Nazi Germany, see Jonathan Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). On the current dispute over the disposition of some of Grosz’s works in this regard, see Melissa Müller and Monika Tatzkow, Lost Lives, Lost Art: Jewish Collectors, Nazi Art Theft, and the Quest for Justice (New York: Vendome Press, 2009), 36–​37; and William D. Cohan, “MoMA’s Problematic Provenances,” ArtNews (December 2011): 74–​85. The works in dispute are: Republican Automatons, 1920 (purchased by MoMA in 1946); Self-Portrait with a Model, 1928 (donated to MoMA in 1954); and Portrait of the Poet Max Herrmann-Neisse, 1927 (bought by MoMA in 1952).

192

Notes to pages 37–40

107. Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Alfred H. Barr, Missionary for the Modern (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989), 178–​79. 108. “Roosevelt’s Message to the Art Museum,” New York Times, 11 May 1939, 29. 109. Roosevelt’s speech as reported in Edward Alden Jewell, “The Creative Life vs. Dictatorship: Works Exiled from Reich Collections and Now Acquired by the Museum of Modern Art—​Freedom in Democracy,” New York Times, 13 August 1939, X7. 110. Art in Our Time, plate 223. 111. “Modern Artists Return to Painting Still Lifes Like Famous Old Dutch Masters,” Life, vol. 7, no. 9, 28 August 1939, 24–​26. 112. American Art Today, New York World’s Fair, 1939, reprint (Poughkeepsie, NY: Apollo, 1987), 78. 113. Letter to Grosz from Robert D. Kohn, vice president of the New York World’s Fair (13 September 1940), GAH 233. 114. “Mann Asks for Exhibit at Fair for Exiles,” New York Times, 12 May 1938, 16. 115. My discussion of the Freedom Pavilion and the controversy surrounding it is indebted to the thorough discussion of this show in Keith Holz and Wolfgang Schopf, Im Auge des Exils: Josef Breitenbach und die Freie Deutsche Kultur in Paris 1933–​1941 (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2001), 170–​209. Holz also addresses in detail various attempts to present German art in exile in New York as well as other centers of the emigration during this period. See his Modern German Art. On the New York World’s Fair specifically, see pages 241–​54. 116. Holz, Modern German Art, 246–​47. 117. Laura Z. Hobson, “Freedom Pavilion,” The Nation (29 April 1939): 492–​96. 118. “Hall of Palestine Dedicated at Fair,” New York Times, 20 May 1938, 42. 119. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, 58. 120. Breitman and Lichtman identify this event as key to histories that characterize Roosevelt as insensitive to the plight of the Jews. They also excavate a more nuanced picture that describes FDR’s attempt to aid Jews and others victimized by the Hitler regime as he worked to dismantle the United States’ Neutrality Acts and isolationist sentiment. At the same time, however, he was not himself immune to anti-Semitism, nor was he oblivious to the political climate of his day that also made it difficult for him to plead intervention in ways that would avoid drawing attention to “the Jewish problem.” On this, see Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 135–​39. Breitman and Lichtman’s account has touched off continuing debate concerning FDR’s record on the plight of the Jews. Especially at issue is the extent to which that record has become harnessed in the post–​World War II period to Middle East politics and the Israeli-Palestinian question. On this debate, see Laurence Zuckerman, “FDR’s Jewish Problem,” The Nation 297, no. 5/6 (5 August 2013): 29–​32; and responses to Zuckerman in “Exchange: FDR and the Holocaust,” with contributions by Rafael Medoff, Mark Gerstein, Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, and Laurence Zuckerman, The Nation 297, no. 15 (14 October 2013): 2, 26. 121. Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 92. 122. Jack Salzman, introduction to reprint of Equality, vols. 1 and 2, 1939–​40 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Reprint Corporation, 1970), unpaginated. On Coughlin’s Christian Front, see Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 171. 123. Letter to Grosz from Ludwig Wronkow (October 1939), GAH 476. 124. “Dies Accused by Roosevelt of Trying to Smear New Deal,” Life, 13 February 1939, 20. 125. Alexander Stephan, “Communazis”: FBI Surveillance of German Émigré Writers, trans. Jan van Heurck (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); originally published as Im Visier des FBI: Deutsche Exilschriftsteller in den Akten amerikanischer Geheimdienste (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1995). See also Andrea Weiss, “Communism, Perversion, and Other Crimes against the State: The FBI Files of Klaus and Erika Mann,” in Modernism on File: Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920–​1950, ed. Claire A. Culleton and Karen Leick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 221–​36. 126. Stephan, “Communazis,” 191.

Notes to pages 41–45

193

127. Helen Buchhalter, “Carnegie International, 1939,” Magazine of Art 32 (November 1939): 628–​37. 128. Susan Platt, “Gambling, Fencing, and Camouflage: Homer Saint-Gaudens and the Carnegie International, 1922–​ 1950,” in International Encounters: The Carnegie International and Contemporary Art, 1896–​1996, ed. Vicky A. Clark (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 1996), 66–​91. See also, “The Jury of Award,” Carnegie Magazine 13, no. 4 (September 1939): 111–​14. 129. Artists living in Germany and included in the show were Otto Dix, Karl Hofer, Paul Schmidt, and Werner Scholz. Their contributions consisted of landscape works and depictions of peasants. The Italian artists discussed by Buchhalter and given lukewarm praise for their competence were Gianni Vagnetti and Fausto Pirandello. 130. Buchhalter, “Carnegie International, 1939,” 630. 131. Ibid. 132. Letter from Grosz to Ulrich Becher (10 October 1939), in Ulrich Becher / George Grosz, ed. Naumann and Töteborg, 134–​44. 133. David S. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–​1941, 2nd ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 188. 134. Elizabeth Kessin Berman, “Moral Triage or Cultural Salvage? The Agendas of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee,” in Exiles and Émigrés, ed. Barron and Eckmann, 99–​112. 135. Hubertus Prinz zu Löwenstein, “Gefahren der Vernichtungs-Politik für die Alte Welt,” New Yorker Staatszeitung und Herold, 17 March 1940, excerpts reprinted in Deutsche Intellektuelle im Exil, 415–​17. 136. Letter from Klaus Mann to Hubertus Prinz zu Löwenstein (9 April 1940), excerpts reprinted in Deutsche Intellektuelle im Exil, 417–​18. 137. The Manns likely had in mind the anti-Enlightenment model of historical explanation for Germany’s current tragedy promoted by the American historian Peter Viereck in the pages of the journal Common Sense in late 1939. Viereck’s history of modern Germany rejected prevailing Marxist and Nietzschean interpretations of the Hitler phenomenon. Similar to Thomas Mann in his essay “That Man Is My Brother,” of 1939, Viereck viewed the causes of Nazism as cultural and not economic. Also like Mann he traced Nazism’s origins to the German romantic nationalism of the early nineteenth century. For Viereck, Hitler was thus not an anomaly but rather the ultimate expression of romantic era beliefs in an organic Volk community, Teutonic racial hegemony, and the profundity of German Kultur over and against the materialism of an enlightened Western Zivilisation. However, Viereck differed from Thomas Mann in 1939 and from Klaus and Erika Mann in 1940 by tending to reduce Germany’s modern history solely to its anti-Enlightenment dimension. For debate on this point between Thomas Mann and Viereck, see Peter Viereck, “Hitler and Richard Wagner,” Common Sense 8, no. 11 (November 1939): 3–​6; Peter Viereck, “Hitler and Wagner,” Common Sense 8, no. 12 (December 1939): 20–​22; and Thomas Mann, “A Defense of Wagner,” Common Sense 9, no. 1 (January 1940): 11–​14. Viereck summarized his controversial historical explanation of Nazism in Peter Viereck, Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941). 138. Deutsche Intellektuelle im Exil, 422–​26. 139. Grosz, diary entry (23 April 1940), GAH 1087. 140. Dunn, 1940, 61. 141. Ibid., 51, 60–​62. 142. Wilson included his proposal for a League of Nations in the Versailles Treaty of 1919. The plan ran aground in the U.S. Senate and prevented America’s participation in the league. The league idea was part of Wilson’s larger vision of a post–​World War I world order based on principles of national self-determination, free trade, and collective security. For more on this see Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 18. 143. Robert A. Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America during World War II (New York:

194

Notes to pages 45–48

Atheneum, 1967), 38–​39. 144. Herbert Agar et al., The City of Man: A Declaration of World Democracy (New York: Viking Press, 1941). The cosignatories of the declaration were Herbert Agar, Frank Aydelotte, G. A. Borgese, Hermann Broch, Van Wyck Brooks, Ada L. Comstock, William Yandell Elliott, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Christian Gauss, Oscar Jászi, Alvin Johnson, Hans Kohn, Thomas Mann, Lewis Mumford, William Allan Neilson, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Gaetano Salvemini. 145. Ibid., 70. The advocacy of American Social Democracy in The City of Man reflected Mann’s views as expressed in his speech “The Coming Victory of Democracy,” which he delivered in a lecture tour throughout the United States in 1938. Mann was a vocal champion of Roosevelt and the New Deal against political opponents who increasingly denounced both as “communist.” For him, the New Deal represented a commitment to social and economic egalitarianism not only appropriate to the mass societies of the day but also necessary as a bulwark against the sham socialism that commanded support in the dictatorial regimes in Europe. See Thomas Mann, The Coming Victory of Democracy, trans. Agnes E. Meyer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938), reprinted in Thomas Mann, “The Coming Victory of Democracy,” in Order of the Day, 114–​52. 146. “Issues at Stake: The City of Man,” Decision: A Review of Free Culture 1, no. 2 (February 1941): 6–​10. Decision appeared for the first time in January 1941. Klaus Mann served as chief editor, and the editorial board of advisers consisted of the following leading émigré and American writers and intellectuals: Sherwood Anderson, Wystan H. Auden, Edward Benes, Stephen Vincent Benét, G. A. Borgese, Ernest Boyd, Julian Green, Horace Gregory, Frank Kingdon, Freda Kirchwey, Thomas Mann, Somerset Maugham, Robert Nathan, Vincent Sheean, Robert E. Sherwood, and Stefan Zweig. In its inaugural editorial, the journal declared its commitment to the defense of culture and a “new humanism” against the dehumanization of man by totalitarian barbarism. See “Issues at Stake: Decision,” Decision 1, no. 1 (January 1941): 6–​8. 147. In his study of U.S. public diplomacy and foreign policy, Justin Hart identifies this period as a turning point in the United States and the country’s perception of its role in the world. According to him, “Although globalization of American society did not begin during the World War II era, the decision to start engaging the conversation over that process did.” See Justin Hart, Empire of Ideas: The Origin of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 11. 148. Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 172; and Dunn, 1940, 3. 149. Luce, “The American Century,” 61–​63. 150. In a diary entry of July 1940, Grosz noted with approval an essay by Lippmann that appeared in Life magazine. See Grosz diary entry (19 July 1940), GAH 1087. Lippmann published several articles in Life during this period. Given the date of Grosz’s diary notation, he likely refers to “America and the World,” in which Lippmann endorsed an end to isolationism and advocated the active defense of American values abroad. See Walter Lippmann, “America and the World,” Life, vol. 8, no. 23, 3 June 1940, 102–​4, 106. On Lippmann’s and Luce’s support for Willkie, see Dunn, 1940, 78, 82, 112–​15. 151. Divine, Second Chance, 60. 152. Ibid., 61–​62. 153. Grosz, diary entry (23 November 1941), GAH 1087. 154. On Biddle’s key role in the founding of the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) in 1933 for government funding of the arts, see Richard D. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 5–​10. 155. Gary O. Larson, The Reluctant Patron: The United States Government and the Arts, 1943–​1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 13. 156. Ibid., 13–​17. 157. Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement 1926–​1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 60, 83.

Notes to pages 48–50

195

158. George Biddle, “The Surrealists—​Isolationists of Art,” New Republic 105 (27 October 1941): 538. 159. Letter from Grosz to Elisabeth Lindner (16 May 1941), in Grosz, Briefe, 293. 160. Gil Troy, “From Literary Gadfly to Jewish Activist: The Political Transformation of Ben Hecht,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 40, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 431–​49. 161. Letter from Grosz to Otto Schmalhausen (15 January 1936), in Grosz, Briefe, 230–​32. 162. Ben Hecht, 1001 Afternoons in New York, with illustrations by George Grosz (New York: Viking Press, 1941). One of these stories, “The Bewitched Tailor,” was issued as a separate chapbook, also with an illustration by Grosz. See Ben Hecht, The Bewitched Tailor (New York: Viking Press, 1941). 163. This reference to “the German savage” appears in Hecht’s introduction to his book. See Hecht, 1001 Afternoons in New York, 15. 164. Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 156. See also Erika Doss, “Catering to Consumerism: Associated American Artists and the Marketing of Modern Art, 1934–​1958,” Winterthur Portfolio 26, no. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 1991): 143–​67. 165. Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism, 161. 166. Ibid., 156–​66. 167. Richard O. Boyer, “The Yankee from Berlin,” part 3 of an extended interview with Grosz featured in the New Yorker, 11 December 1943, 42. 168. Edward Alden Jewell, “Modern Museum Shows Grosz Art,” New York Times, 8 October 1941, 20. See also Edward Alden Jewell, “George Grosz Art Put on Exhibition,” New York Times, 14 October 1941, 21; and Edward Alden Jewell, “Survey at Metropolitan: Museum Shows Work by Contemporary Americans—​George Grosz and Others,” New York Times, 9 October 1941, X9. 169. Letter to Grosz from Felix Weil (29 October 1941), GAH 451. 170. Letter from Grosz to Felix Weil (November 1941), GAH 877. 171. Milton Brown, “Death of an Artist,” Parnassus (May 1941): 194. 172. “The Great Flight of Culture: Twelve Artists in U.S. Exile,” Fortune (December 1941): 103–​13.

2. Exile and the One World Order Epigraph: George Grosz, typescript for the “Art under Hitler” broadcast, July 1942, for the Living Art series, presented by CBS and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, conducted by John Morse of the museum staff, GAH, 1030. 1. The Foreign Policy Association originated in 1918 in support of President Woodrow Wilson’s peace plan and the creation of the League of Nations following World War I. After the United States Senate voted down American participation in the league, the association devoted itself to using mass media for the purpose of promoting the country’s awareness of foreign affairs. The association remained sympathetic to Wilsonian ideals throughout its existence. It nonetheless attempted to maintain a neutral and nonpartisan position. On the Foreign Policy Association, see Divine, Second Chance, 19–​20. 2. The Foreign Policy Association, War Atlas: 45 Maps Prepared by Experts to Help You Follow the War Wherever It May Spread throughout the World (New York: Headline Books, 1940), 84. 3. For a transcript and audio recording of Roosevelt’s speech, go to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “The Great Arsenal of Democracy,” radio address delivered 29 December 1940, at www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrarsenalofdemocracy.html (accessed 14 September 2013). 4. Aufbau, vol. 7, no. 51, 19 December 1941, 3. 5. Thomas Mann, “Germany’s Guilt and Mission,” Decision 2, no. 1 (July 1941): 9–​14. 6. Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 191.

196

Notes to pages 51–58

7. Thomas Mann et al., “Open Letter to President Roosevelt,” 251–​52, reprinted in Hitler’s Exiles: Personal Stories of the Flight from Nazi Germany to America, ed. Mark M. Anderson (New York: New Press, 1998). 8. Letter from Grosz to Erich Cohn (19 February 1942), in Grosz, Briefe, 297–​99. 9. Larson, The Reluctant Patron, 15–​17. 10. New York Post, 9 April 1942, 12. 11. Grosz, diary entry (21 May 1942), GAH 1088. 12. Hart, Empire of Ideas, 36, 58. In June 1942, Roosevelt signed an executive order that established the OWI. This new agency consolidated the Office of Facts and Figures, the Office of Emergency Management, and the Office of Government Reports in response to concerns about the lack of coordination between these three information agencies. This lack was thought to be undermining the quality and consistency of communication between the government and the public as the war progressed. As described by Hart, MacLeish and the OWI became involved in the controversial task of theorizing the place of propaganda in a democratic society (hence the extent of the public’s right to information in time of war) and shaping propaganda as a foreign policy tool (developing an unitary image of America for consumption abroad acceptable to the diverse and at times conflicting interests of a democratic society). A case in point came in April 1943 when artist Ben Shahn and a group of liberal and leftist writers and artists working for the OWI resigned in protest over the agency’s close relationship with corporate interests. They also condemned the OWI for its refusal to use the war as an opportunity to address social injustice in the United States, including race relations and the treatment of African Americans in the armed services. On the OWI, see Hart, Empire of Ideas, 71–​74. On Ben Shahn and the OWI, see Frances K. Pohl, Ben Shahn: New Deal Artist in a Cold War Climate, 1947–​1954 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 11–​14. 13. George Biddle, memorandum, 1 March 1942, cited in Col. H. Avery Chenoweth, Art of War: Eyewitness U.S. Combat Art from the Revolution through the Twentieth Century (New York: Michael Friedman Publishing Group, 2002), 116. 14. Grosz, diary entry (13 September 1943), GAH 1089. See also letters to Grosz from David M. Freudenthal thanking him for his contributions to war bond drives (1944), GAH 124a; and a letter to Grosz from the U.S. Treasury Department thanking him for donating a watercolor to help fund the War Finance Program (1943), GAH 436. 15. Metropolitan Museum of Art archives, files L7806. 16. Grosz diary entry (20 May 1942), GAH 1088. 17. Letter from Grosz to Herr Schueck (13 September 1942), in Grosz, Briefe, 308–​9. 18. Grosz’s corrections on an AAA press release (25 February 1943), GAH 24. In his interview with John Baur of 1954, Grosz claimed further that his depiction of the two poets was “suggested by some whom Grosz had known in Germany.” See John I. H. Baur, George Grosz (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art), 50. 19. As quoted in Edward Alden Jewell, “Free Art: Work Nazis Reject Shown at Museum,” New York Times, 28 June 1942, X5. 20. As testament to its enduring historical importance, Departure remains on view in MoMA’s galleries to this day. 21. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, 154–​57, 162–​69. Lipstadt attributes continuing inaction on providing assistance to the Jews after these London revelations to a persistent unwillingness or inability or both on the part of the government, press, and public in the United States to reorient their understanding of the Nazi slaughter and persecution of Jews in Europe. The World Jewish Congress led the way in attempts to make the world understand that the fate of the Jews was not simply part of the wages of war but rather a central ideology and deliberate policy of the Hitler regime. However, Breitman and Lichtman maintain that the reports coming out of Poland and disseminated by the World Jewish Congress still lacked the sources, “detached standing,” and “visible evidence” that could have decisively changed public and government perceptions at this time in favor of intervention on behalf of the Jews. See Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 196.

Notes to pages 58–67

197

22. Cited by Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, 166. 23. George Grosz, typescript for “Art under Hitler” broadcast, July 1942, GAH, 1030. 24. Beginning in April 1942, Deuel’s advice was also sought out by the U.S. State Department. Anticipating the regime’s imminent collapse, Washington began political propaganda campaigns against Hitler at this time. See Christof Mauch, The Shadow War against Hitler: The Covert Operations of America’s Wartime Secret Intelligence Service, trans. Jeremiah Riemer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 64. 25. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, 160. 26. Wallace R. Deuel, People under Hitler (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942), 25. On his use of Nazi “racial explanation,” Deuel commented further: “But the fact that the Nazis advance it, and that they do so in the bizarre vernacular they employ in these matters, does not necessarily make it untrue,” 25. At the conclusion of his chapter titled “The Germans: Are They Human?” Deuel summarized his racist diagnosis: “These, then, are the Germans: Big, heavy, powerful; with unusual capacities for hard work and for enduring privation and pain; on the whole unlovely; ponderous rather than graceful of manner and movement and not seldom gross and even coarse; a people suffering from a sense of inner insecurity and lack of a sense of form and proportion, of balance and control, and constantly striving to compensate for these deficiencies by seeking for authority and discipline to impose order and system” (35). 27. Barnett, “Banned German Art,” 283. See also Megan M. Fontanella, “ ‘Unity in Diversity’: Karl Nierendorf and America, 1937–​1947,” American Art 24, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 114–​25. 28. James Thrall Soby in the Artists in Exile catalogue (New York: Pierre Matisse Gallery, March 1942), cited in Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 64. 29. This transition also took on gendered character as an “effeminized” Parisian surrealist tradition was surpassed by America’s robust, “masculinized” vanguard. On this, see Romy Golan, “On the Passage of a Few Persons through a Rather Brief Period of Time,” in Exiles and Émigrés, ed. Barron and Eckmann, 128–​46. 30. Letter from Grosz to Max Pechstein (28 November 1934), in Grosz, Briefe, 205–​6. 31. Letter from Grosz to Herbert and Amrei Fiedler (23 January 1935), in Grosz, Briefe, 209–​10. 32. On Dalí’s work in fashion, see Richard Martin, Fashion and Surrealism (New York: Rizzoli, 1987). 33. Edward Alden Jewell, “Americans: Roundup at Whitney—​War Posters,” New York Times, 29 November 1942, X9. 34. Grosz diary entry (30 December 1942), GAH 1088. 35. Letter from Grosz to Hermann Borchardt (4 December 1942), in Grosz, Briefe, 310. 36. Letter from Grosz to Arnold Rönnebeck (3 March 1943), in Grosz, Briefe, 314. 37. Klaus Mann, “Surrealist Circus,” American Mercury (February 1943): 174–​81. See also Sawin, Surrealism in Exile, 168, 291–​93. 38. Mann, “Surrealist Circus.” 39. Bosworth, “Grosz Paints What He Can’t Forget,” 7. 40. Edward Alden Jewell, “With Accent on Modernism,” New York Times, 14 February 1943. 41. Letter to Grosz from Pegeen Sullivan (16 February 1943), GAH 24. 42. Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 74–​75. 43. Ibid., 70–​72. See also Doss, “Catering to Consumerism,” 163. H. W. Janson also expressed similar views regarding the connections between American regionalism and National Socialist art. See H. W. Janson, “The International Aspects of Regionalism,” College Art Journal (May 1943): 110–​15. On Janson’s role in the debates over nationalism and internationalism in the American art world at this time, see Eckmann, H. W. Janson and the Legacy of Modern Art, 31–​34. For a broader treatment of Janson’s career in the United States, see Elizabeth Sears and Charlotte Schoell-Glass, “An Émigré Art Historian and America: H. W. Janson,” Art Bulletin 95, no. 2 (June 2013): 219–​42.

198

Notes to pages 67–72

44. Divine, Second Chance, 68–​69; and Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 199. A declaration of the “United Nations” was signed in Washington on 2 January 1942 by the “big three”—​the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union. Roosevelt coined the term united nations to refer to the powers allied against the Axis at this time. The big three were eventually joined by China and twenty-two other nations at war with the Axis. 45. Divine, Second Chance, 71–​73. 46. Maureen Hart Hennessey, “The Four Freedoms,” in Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People, ed. Maureen Hart Hennessey and Anne Knutson (Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art, 1999), 95–​102. 47. “Killed in Action,” Life, vol. 15, no. 1, 5 July 1943. The list consisted of 12,987 names of those killed in the first eighteen months of the war. 48. “Three Americans: Where These Boys Fell, a Part of Freedom Fell: We Must Resurrect It in Their Name,” Life, vol. 15, no. 12, 20 September 1943, 34–​35. On the War Department’s “chamber of horrors,” see George H. Roeder Jr., The Censored War: American Visual Experience during World War II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 13. Other news outlets refused to print these images. 49. Larson, The Reluctant Patron, 16–​19. 50. Edward Alden Jewell, “War Art Display Opens Tomorrow,” New York Times, 17 August 1943, 13. The exhibit was first unveiled to the public at the National Gallery in Washington DC. It also went on a nationwide tour after its run at the Metropolitan Museum. 51. Letter to Grosz from Fernando Puma (September 1943), GAH 347. 52. “Rejected by the Carnegie,” Art Digest 16 (15 February 1942): 15. 53. “Puma’s Gallery to Display Only Work by Puma,” New York Herald Tribune, 2 October 1941; and “Opens New Gallery with Own Work,” Art Digest 17 (15 November 1942): 15. For more on Puma, see “Fernando Puma, Artist and Author, Dies; Critic, 36, Edited 3 ‘Seven Arts’ Volumes,” New York Times, 9 December 1955, 27. 54. Fernando Puma, transcript of radio broadcast The Artist Reviews Art, 19 November 1943, 6, in the Archives of American Art, Washington DC. 55. Letter to Grosz from Fernando Puma (September 1943), GAH 347. 56. Letter from Grosz to Fernando Puma (16 September 1943), GAH 776. 57. Fernando Puma, We Challenge War Art (New York: Puma Gallery, 1943). 58. “We Challenge,” Art News 42 (15 November 1943): 23. 59. Letter from Grace L. McCann Morley to Fernando Puma (18 November 1943), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (hereafter SFMOMA) archives, Arch.Exh.001, box 20, folder 2. 60. Telegram from Life magazine to Grace McCann Morley of the San Francisco Museum of Art (5 January 1944), SFMOMA archives, Arch.Exh.001, box 20, folder 2. A letter from Puma to Grace McCann Morley indicates that Puma assented to Life’s request. Though uncertain what the nature of the review would be (“We shall see how LIFE treats we challenge . . . ”), he was clearly swayed by the outstanding publicity to be gained by an exposé in the journal’s pages. See letter from Fernando Puma to Grace McCann Morley (undated), SFMOMA archives, Arch. Exh.001, box 20, folder 2. 61. “Studio War Art,” Life, vol. 16, no. 24, 12 June 1944, 76ff. 62. As described by Grosz in Amy Robinson, “Grosz Paints a Picture,” Art News 48 (December 1949): 35–​37, 63. 63. Letter to Grosz from Life magazine requesting information on his I, I Was Always Present for its upcoming review of We Challenge War Art (18 April 1944), GAH 260. See also Grosz’s reply: letter from Grosz to Miss Seiberling of Life (20 April 1944), GAH 703. 64. See Richard O. Boyer’s interviews with Grosz: “1. Demons in the Suburbs,” New Yorker, 27 November 1943, 32–​43; “2. The Saddest Man in All the World,” New Yorker, 4 December 1943, 39–​48; and “3. The Yankee from Berlin.” 65. Boyer, “Demons in the Suburbs,” 36.

Notes to pages 72–78

199

66. Boyer, “The Saddest Man in All the World,” 35. 67. Boyer, “Demons in the Suburbs,” 33. 68. The phrase “exiled in paradise” comes from Anthony Heilbut’s wide-ranging study of the German emigration in the United States. See Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise. For a recent treatment of the exile community in Los Angeles, see Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 69. Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America, 107. As Lyon notes, the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney’s Office required Brecht to secure a formal invitation to travel outside Los Angeles because of his status as an enemy alien. 70. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, 187. 71. Troy, “From Literary Gadfly to Jewish Activist”; Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, 200. Hecht’s cynical humor was of special use to the Bergson agenda. Hecht turned his talents to mass advertising directed at prompting immediate intervention on behalf of the Jews. Most notorious and much discussed was his full-page ad, which appeared on 16 February 1943. It asserted that Romania could be bought off from killing its Jews, at a price: “for sale to Humanity, 70,000 Jews, Guaranteed Human Beings at $50 a Piece.” 72. Hecht’s essay “1. Remember Us!” was the first of two parts. The second part, “2. Horror Unlimited,” was authored by the communist-affiliated author of the Red Decade (1941), Eugene Lyons. Lyons cited recent declarations by the United Nations regarding Germany’s systematic murder of Jewish citizens and eyewitness reports concerning the “scientific methods” the Germans were then using to kill large numbers of Jews. For Hecht’s and Lyons’s essays see “The Extermination of the Jews,” American Mercury (February 1943): 194–​203. 73. For film footage of the pageant, see United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Ben Hecht—​Film Footage,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_fi.php?ModuleId = 10007040&MediaId = 3107 (accessed 14 August 2013). 74. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, 224. See also United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “ ‘We Will Never Die’: Shattering the Silence Surrounding the Holocaust,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId = 10007036, (accessed 14 August 2013). 75. Robert E. Cazden, German Exile Literature in America, 1933–​1950: A History of the Free German Press and Book Trade (Chicago: American Library Association, 1970), 153. 76. Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America, 273–​74. 77. “Autoren-Manuskripte bringen $8,900,” Aufbau, 9 April 1943, 13. According to Lyon, Brecht was inspired to write a new play, Schwejk in the Second World War, after seeing the performance of two Czech comedians in We Fight Back. He conducted negotiations with Piscator and Weill to bring the performance to Broadway. Given his involvement with Piscator’s Adventures of the Good Soldier Schwejk in 1928, Grosz too was likely informed of, if not involved in, the project. However, creative disputes between Brecht and Weill vexed the plan from the start. At one juncture, Weill voiced his displeasure with Brecht’s libretto and suggested hiring Ben Hecht to “rework the text in an attempt to capture the humor of the original.” On this project and its fate, see Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America, 113–​18. 78. James H. Fraser, “German Exile Publishing: The Malik-Aurora Verlag of Wieland Herzfelde,” German Life and Letters 27, no. 2 (January 1974): 115–​24. 79. Cazden, German Exile Literature in America, 104–​5. 80. Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America, 102, 132–​41. The Private Life of the Master Race was the English-language title for the stage play adapted from Brecht’s Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches. On the role of this play in the anti-fascist resistance, see John J. White and Ann White, Bertolt Brecht’s “Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches”: A German Exile Drama in the Struggle against Fascism (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 1–​28. 81. Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America, 108–​9.

200

Notes to pages 79–81

82. Ibid., 108. 83. On Grosz’s encounter with Brecht at this time, see letters from Grosz to Hermann Borchardt (16 February 1943, 21 February 1943, and 10 March 1943), in Grosz, Briefe, 312–​16. 84. Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America, 256. See also the letter to Grosz from Lilly Latte (14 June 1943), GAH 248. Latte informed Grosz that Brecht had been especially impressed by the “herrlich” (splendid) still lifes in his New York exhibit at the AAA in 1943. She also told Grosz she was in touch with the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco to put on a show of his works. 85. According to Lyon, Brecht was unlike most refugees in his strong commitment to writing for postwar Germany and in his optimism that progressive theater would be revived there. See Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America, 110. 86. Bertolt Brecht, The Private Life of the Master Race: A Documentary Play, trans. Eric Bentley (New York: New Directions, 1944); see also Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America, 113–​20, 132–​33. 87. Flavell, George Grosz, 238. 88. Wieland Herzfelde, “The Curious Merchant from Holland,” Harper’s Magazine, vol. 187, November 1943, 569–​76. 89. Flavell, George Grosz, 238. 90. In 1937, Baron worked on New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s reelection campaign. He then was employed in the offices of Mayor La Guardia’s press secretary. In 1943, Baron began a career in journalism. He was also author of Men without Humor (1944) and The Bells Ring Loudly (1946); contributed to numerous popular magazines; and produced Broadway stage shows, including Tambourines to Glory. For more detail, see his obituary, “Sydney Stuart Baron, 60 Headed Own Public Relations Company,” New York Times, 20 October 1980, 17; and his entry in Who’s Who in America, 39th ed. (1976–​77), 174. 91. Divine, Second Chance, 72–​73; and Dunn, 1940, 314. 92. Wendell Willkie, One World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943). See also Divine, Second Chance, 105; and a review of Willkie’s book in Life, vol. 14, no. 17, 26 April 1943, 73. 93. “Darryl F. Zanuck and the Failure of ‘One World,’ 1943–​1945,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 7, no. 3 (1987): 279–​87. 94. Divine, Second Chance, 119–​20. See also Dunn, 1940, 87–​88, for a discussion of the 1945 Broadway play titled State of the Union, about Willkie’s life, political career, and one world ideas. In 1948, it was made into a Hollywood film, with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in the starring roles. 95. For a discussion of this exhibit, see Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 227–​35. See also Wendell Willkie, “Airways to Peace,” Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 11, no. 1 (August 1943): 3–​24. 96. “Geography’s Future Shown in Exhibition,” New York Times, 2 July 1943, 19. 97. The Germans initiated the use of murderous airpower first in Guernica (1937), followed by Warsaw (1939), Rotterdam (1940), Belgrade (1941), and London (1940–​41). British air forces began bombing German cities and industrial sites in May 1940. Beginning in February 1942, major cities including Essen, Lübeck, Rostock, and Cologne became targets. The United States Air Force joined these campaigns in the summer of 1942. Though their intent was to demoralize the German population, this aim “turned out to be illusory.” The raids served instead to strengthen popular susceptibility to Nazi propaganda and its efforts to rally the nation against its adversaries. On this point see, Wolfgang Benz, A Concise History of the Third Reich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 207–​8. 98. “The President’s War Globe to Go on Exhibition Here,” New York Times, 30 June 1943, 17. A second globe was presented to Winston Churchill. 99. In late 1942, Lippmann was particularly alarmed when German troops entered Moscow and became convinced the United States might lose the war because of strategic incompetence. On this, see Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, 175.

Notes to pages 81–86

201

100. Divine, Second Chance, 124–​27. 101. Norman D. Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941–​ 1948 (New York: Free Press, 1973), 36–​80. 102. Hart, Empire of Ideas, 47; and Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 295–​96. 103. Baron’s One Whirl went virtually unremarked in the press. However, a brief and favorable review of the book in the New York Times praised the volume’s “exasperated truth-telling” and the incisiveness of Grosz’s “excellent pen-and-ink drawings,” which captured the “generous feeling and bitter flavor of the text.” See Marjorie Farber, “A Nightmare for Utopians,” New York Times, 2 April 1944, book review, 3. Another review appeared in Aufbau the following year from the vantage point of Germany’s defeat and in the midst of disclosures concerning the country’s genocidal activities. Ben Bindol assessed One Whirl as a dated send-up of the “now quite defunct” Wilsonian idealism of international cooperation, which had earlier captivated some in the U.S. State Department. Bindol’s review also described Grosz’s work for One Whirl as representative of his “best output,” despite the lesser quality of some of the illustrations. See Ben Bindol, review of Sydney S. Baron’s One Whirl, Aufbau, vol. 11, no. 28, 12 July 1945, 10. 104. Sydney S. Baron, One Whirl (New York: Lowell Publishing Company, 1944), dust jacket. 105. Ibid., 7. 106. Mortimer Hays, “Letters to the Times: Six-Point Approach Urged,” New York Times, 6 September 1943, 16. For more on Hays, see his obituary: “Mortimer Hays, a Trial Lawyer,” New York Times, 1 October 1962, 31. My thanks to Dr. John R. Hose of Brandeis University for this reference. 107. On the National Committee, see Heike Bungert, Das Nationalkomitee und der Westen: Die Reaktion der Westaliierten auf das NKFD und die Freien Deutschen Bewegungen 1943–​1948 (Stuttgart: Franz Steine Verlag, 1997); and Kai P. Schoenhals, The Free Germany Movement: A Case of Patriotism or Treason? (New York: Greenwood, 1989). 108. Mauch, The Shadow War against Hitler, 73–​85. 109. Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America, 260–​61, 266–​67. 110. Stephan, “Communazis,” 81. 111. Ibid., 58–​61. 112. Thomas Mann, “The War and the Future” (13 October 1943), 23–​43, reprinted in Thomas Mann’s Addresses Delivered at the Library of Congress, 1942–​1949 (Washington DC: Library of Congress, 1963). Making clear his abhorrence of Stalinism, Mann stated more pointedly his belief in a “communistic” future world order by which he meant “a communal form of life, of mutual dependence and responsibility, of common rights to the enjoyment of earthly goods.” He saw these rights as demanded by the “ever closer relationship of the world, its contraction, its intimacy resulting from technical progress, a world wherein each and everyone has a right to live and whose administration is everyone’s concern.” Ibid., 41–​42. 113. Thomas Mann, letter to the editor, New York Times, November 29, 1943, 18. 114. On this, see Mann’s 13 October 1943 address to the Library of Congress: “The War and the Future,” 23–​43. Mann also expressed his sentiments on this matter to his secretary Agnes Meyer in a letter of 9 August 1943, cited in Görtemaker, Thomas Mann und die Politik, 159. 115. Flavell, George Grosz, 230–​31. 116. Grosz, diary entries for 1944, GAH 1089. 117. “Council for Democratic Germany Formed by Refugee Leaders Here,” New York Times, 3 May 1944, 10. 118. Stephan, “Communazis,” 181–​84. The State Department in particular looked on the organization as little more than a communist front. On this, see Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America, 278–​79. 119. Cazden, German Exile Literature in America, 50–​51. 120. Henry Morgenthau was Roosevelt’s secretary of the treasury. In 1943, he authored “Program to Prevent Germany

202

Notes to pages 86–91

from Starting World War III,” which advocated dividing and pastoralizing Germany. See Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 296. 121. My discussion of this strategy on the part of the council is indebted to the findings of Marjorie Lamberti. See Marjorie Lamberti, “German Antifascist Refugees in America and the Public Debate on ‘What Should be Done with Germany after Hitler,’ 1941–​1945,” Central European History 40 (2007): 279–​305. 122. Manfred George, “Am Scheideweg,” Aufbau, vol. 10, 12 May 1944; and Manfred George, “Verwirrte Gemüter,” Aufbau, vol. 10, 2 June 1944; both cited in Lamberti, “German Antifascist Refugees in America,” 297. 123. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, 219–​24. 124. Rex Stout editorial in the official organ of the Society for the Prevention of World War III, Prevent World War III, 1.1 (May 1944): 1. See also Steven Casey, “The Campaign to Sell a Harsh Peace for Germany to the American Public, 1944–​1948,” History 90 (2005): 62–​92. 125. Letter from Grosz to Richard Huelsenbeck (18 July 1944), in Grosz, Briefe, 335. 126. Ben Hecht, Guide for the Bedevilled (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944). See also letter from Grosz to Ben Hecht (21 May 1944), in Grosz, Briefe, 334–​35. 127. See, for example, John Chamberlain’s review of Guide for the Bedevilled, in “Books of the Times,” New York Times, 14 March 1944, 17; and Hal Borland, “Ben Hecht on Goons and Gutter Napoleons: A Guide for the Bedevilled,” New York Times, 26 March 1944, Book Reviews section, 5. 128. Hecht, Guide for the Bedevilled, 181–​82. 129. Letter from Grosz to Ben Hecht (21 May 1944), in Grosz, Briefe, 334–​35. 130. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, 233–​48, 263–​67. In the wake of these reports, Jewish advocates stepped up their efforts to persuade the United States to bomb crematoria and rail lines leading to Auschwitz. These efforts were to no avail, however. For some, inaction gave rise to the view that Roosevelt and the government were indifferent “or worse to the Holocaust.” This judgment weighs into assessments of Roosevelt’s presidency and the political use of this history down to the present day. In their FDR and the Jews, Breitman and Lichtman explore this motivated use of history as well as the political and military complexities that do not excuse, but might account for, U.S. inaction on this matter. On this, see Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 281–​87, 320–​21. 131. Grosz, diary entries (6 June, 23 August, 17 September, 7 November, 4 December, and 11 December 1944), GAH 1089. 132. Letter from Grosz to Erich Cohn (19 February 1942), in Grosz, Briefe, 297–​99. 133. Letter from Grosz to Mrs. Raphael Navas (5 April 1943), in Grosz, Briefe, 317–​18. 134. I am indebted to Pia Cuneo of the University of Arizona at Tucson for drawing my attention to this pictorial reference to Brueghel’s art. 135. Letter from Grosz to Reeves Lewenthal, recent notes on Cain, GAH 505. 136. Letter to Grosz from Arnott White (10 April 1943), GAH 456. 137. Grosz, diary entry (29 February 1945), GAH 1089. 138. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 382. 139. Letter from Grosz to Max Horkheimer (15 February 1945), GAH 649. 140. Letters from Grosz to Max Horkheimer (17 April 1945), GAH 649. During World War II, Schreiber, along with Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, produced paintings and drawings for Abbott Laboratories, an international pharmaceutical firm based in Chicago. Their works portrayed the patriotic role of the medical industry in the American military campaign as part of the company’s war art program. See Chenoweth, Art of War, 184–​85. 141. Cora Sol Goldstein, Capturing the German Eye: American Visual Propaganda in Occupied Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 21. 142. Thomas Mann, “Address to the German People,” The Nation 160 (12 May 1945): 535.

Notes to pages 91–98

203

143. Thomas Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” in Thomas Mann’s Addresses Delivered at the Library of Congress, 1942–​1949 (Washington DC: Library of Congress, 1963). 144. Thomas Mann, “Offener Brief für Deutschland,” Augsburger Anzeiger (12 November 1945), cited in Clark, Beyond Catastrophe, 94. 145. Letter from Grosz to Ben Hecht (23 June 1945), in Grosz, Briefe, 356. 146. Ibid. 147. John O’Connor, “Painting in the United States, 1945,” Carnegie Magazine 19, no. 5 (November 1945): 139–​46. Because of the war, the international had converted into a display of American works beginning in 1940. 148. Letter from Grosz to Reeves Lewenthal (19 January 1945), in Grosz, Briefe, 340. 149. Letter from Grosz to Reeves Lewenthal (19 January 1945), GAH 505. 150. Baur, George Grosz, 47–​49. 151. Letter from Grosz to Otto Schmalhausen (16 October 1937), in Grosz, Briefe, 264–​65. 152. “Carnegie Exhibition Provides True Cross-Section of U.S. Painting,” Art Digest 20 (15 October 1945): 6. 153. Life, 13 January 1947, cited in Jost Hermand, “From Nazism to NATOism: The West German Miracle according to Henry Luce,” in America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year History, vol. 2, ed. Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 74–​88. 154. Letter from Grosz to Ben Hecht (21 May 1944), in Grosz, Briefe, 334–​35. 155. Thomas Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” 62.

3. Exile in the Age of Anxiety Epigraph: Letter from Grosz to Marc Sandler (10 March 1950), in Grosz, Briefe, 442. 1. “Bikini,” Fortune, December 1946, 157–​64. 2. Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 96. 3. On these points specifically, see Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1945), trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 22–​23, 28–​29. See also Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956); for Sartre’s discussion on “freedom,” see pages 433–​615. Also in the book’s “Key to Special Terminology” (631), Sartre’s concept of “freedom” is defined in terms that distinguish it from mere solipsism and individual gratification. It is instead: “the very being of the For-itself which is ‘condemned to be free’ and forever must choose itself—​i.e., make itself. ‘To be free’ does not mean ‘to obtain what one has wished’ but rather ‘by oneself to determine oneself to wish’ (in the broad sense of choosing). In other words success is not important to freedom.” 4. Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 22. 5. For a thorough analysis of Abstract Expressionism and the cultural politics of its engagement with existentialism, see Nancy Jachec, The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism, 1940–​1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Nancy Jachec, “ ‘The Space between Art and Political Action’: Abstract Expressionism and Ethical Choice in Postwar America, 1945–​1950,” Oxford Art Journal 14, no. 2 (1991): 18–​29. 6. Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News (December 1952): 22ff. 7. Letter from Grosz to Marc Sandler (10 March 1950), in Grosz, Briefe, 442. 8. George Cotkin, Existential America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 9. Letter from Grosz to Mark Neven DuMont (18 May 1946), reprinted in George Grosz, Teurer Makkaroni! Briefe an Mark Neven DuMont, 1922–​1959, ed. Karl Riha (Berlin: Arlon Verlag, 1992), 201. See also Grosz’s letter to Hermann Borchardt (28 January 1946), in Grosz, Briefe, 361–​63. 10. Letters from Grosz to Mark Neven DuMont (3 January, 4 January, and 18 May 1946), reprinted in Grosz, Teurer Makkaroni! 199–​203.

204

Notes to pages 98–103

11. As recounted in a letter to his half sister Claire Steiner (6 March 1946). See Flavell, George Grosz, 247. 12. Grosz did a second, closely related, though larger-scale version (119.4 cm × 84.5 cm) of this work, titled Peace II, in 1946. The current location of Peace II is unknown. For a black-and-white illustration of the work, see Möckel, George Grosz in Amerika, illustration 143. 13. In his 1954 catalogue essay based on conversations with Grosz, John Baur underscored the gender indeterminacy of this figure. Though Grosz claimed to have created the work in memory of his mother, Baur identified the figure as male. In his words: “The gray man with the red-rimmed eyes who emerges is a grim personification of hopelessness.” See Baur, George Grosz, 42. 14. The work was also featured in the Whitney’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting in December 1946. The Whitney subsequently purchased it. 15. Letter to Grosz from Pegeen Sullivan (19 August 1946), GAH 24. 16. Pegeen Sullivan, introduction to the catalogue A Piece of My World in a World without Peace (New York: AAA Galleries, October 7–​26, 1946), unpaginated. 17. George Grosz, “A Piece of My World in a World without Peace,” A Piece of My World, unpaginated. In his private correspondence, Grosz elaborated on this dimension of his art explicitly in connection with the work of the medieval masters he had come to admire: “If you . . . look with a magnifying glass at the very fantasy-filled Bosch (fabulous), you realize how he has realistically depicted every detail, as if he painted from the model or directly from nature. That is the big secret, to bind the two together, the more horrible or fantastic the day dreams, the more believable they will be through completely exact representation.” By contrast he described current Picasso-inspired tendencies toward abstraction as a “dead end.” See letter from Grosz to Otto and Lotte Schmalhausen (4 November 1948), in Grosz, Briefe, 417. 18. Flavell, George Grosz, 248–​52. 19. Ben Hecht, “Grosz’s Art Is a Storm,” A Piece of My World, unpaginated. 20. Wieland Herzfelde, “The Man Who Gave Me New Eyes,” A Piece of My World, unpaginated. 21. Letter from Grosz to Hermann Borchardt (8 October 1946), in Grosz, Briefe, 379. 22. On the play and its production, see Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America, 167–​201. 23. Letter to Grosz from Edmund Wilson (25 October 1946), GAH 469, quoted in Flavell, George Grosz, 251. 24. Letter to Grosz from Pegeen Sullivan (29 August 1946), GAH 24; George Grosz, A Little Yes and a Big No: The Autobiography of George Grosz, trans. Lola Sachs Dorin (New York: Dial Press, 1946). 25. Letter to Grosz from Kyle Crichton (17 November 1946), GAH 82; also quoted and discussed in Flavell, George Grosz, 252–​53. 26. “John (Gustav) Rewald,” in Dictionary of Art Historians, www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/rewaldj.htm (accessed 13 April 2013). 27. John Rewald, “Book Reviews: A Little Yes and a Big No,” Magazine of Art (February 1947): 81–​82. 28. H. W. Janson, “Satirist’s Dilemma,” Saturday Review of Literature, 11 January 1947, 20–​21. 29. Eckmann, H. W. Janson and the Legacy of Modern Art, 31–​33. 30. Mark Andrew White, “One World: Advancing American Art, Modernism, and International Diplomacy,” in Scott Bishop et al., Art Interrupted: Advancing American Art and the Politics of Cultural Diplomacy (Athens, GA: Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, 2012), 30–​44. 31. On this exhibit see Margaret Lynne Arsfeld and Virginia M. Mecklenburg, eds., Advancing American Art: Politics and Aesthetics in the State Department Exhibition, 1946–​48 (Montgomery, AL: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, 1984). See also Bishop et al., Art Interrupted. This catalogue lists Grosz’s work as among thirty-eight watercolors that were purchased for tour in Asia but were never exhibited there. Instead, they were put on display, along with the seventy-nine oil paintings purchased by the Department of State at the Whitney Museum, and then sold as

Notes to pages 103–109

205

war surplus. The work was likely acquired from the AAA, along with pieces by Adolf Dehn and William Gropper. On these points, see Bishop et al., Art Interrupted, 17, 273. 32. “Your Money Bought These Paintings,” Look, 18 February 1947, 80–​81. 33. Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 19–​20; and Bishop et al., Art Interrupted, 38. The exhibition was titled the Soviet Exhibition of the Works of National Artists. 34. Larson, The Reluctant Patron, 23–​32. See also Arsfeld and Mecklenburg, Advancing American Art. 35. George Dondero, “Speeches in the Congressional Record for 1949,” 665–​68, reprinted in Art in Theory, 1900–​ 2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 665–​ 68. The speeches quoted date from 25 March and 16 August 1949. 36. Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America, 336–​37. 37. Letter to Grosz from Bertolt Brecht (March 1947), GAH 57; Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America, 286–​87; and Flavell, George Grosz, 258. 38. Bertolt Brecht, “The Anachronistic Procession or Freedom and Democracy,” in Bertolt Brecht, Poems, 1913–​1956, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim with the cooperation of Erich Fried (London: Methuen, 1976), 409–​14. The motif of a funeral dirge led by allegories of disease and human failing also recalls Grosz’s modern history painting Dedicated to Oskar Panizza, of 1917–​18, which constituted Grosz’s satiric assault on Germany’s crumbling imperial order as it neared the end of World War I. 39. Letter from Grosz to Bertolt Brecht (30 March 1947), in Grosz, Briefe, 389–​90. 40. Ibid. 41. Translated excerpts from Camus’s Sisyphus (1942) appeared in Partisan Review in 1946: Albert Camus, “Two Chapters from ‘The Myth of Sisyphus,’ ” Partisan Review 13, no. 2 (Spring 1946): 188–​200. Camus’s writings also received attention in popular magazines: “Man in a Vacuum,” Time, vol. 47, 20 May 1946, 92–​93; and “The Eternal Rock Pusher,” Newsweek, vol. 27, 15 April 1946, 97–​99. 42. While Flavell acknowledges the larger social and political commentary that might be contained in Grosz’s Stick Men works, she nonetheless attributes the despairing character of these works to the specifics of his troubled biography at this time. See Flavell, George Grosz, 253–​60. Her biographical assessment of Grosz’s Stick Men in 1988 also appears in John Baur’s remarks in 1954, in which he described Grosz’s Painter of the Hole I as a self-portrait. See Baur, George Grosz, 53. 43. For this and other details cited here concerning Sartre’s early reception in the United States, see Sawin, Surrealism in Exile, 375–​76. 44. Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Search for the Absolute,” in Alberto Giacometti, Alberto Giacometti: Sculptures, Paintings, Drawings (New York: Pierre Matisse Gallery, 1948), reprinted in Art in Theory, 1900–​2000, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 611–​16. On Pierre Matisse’s relationship to Giacometti and the planning of the exhibit, see William M. Griswold and Jennifer Tonkovich, Pierre Matisse and His Artists (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 2002), 64–​66. 45. Sartre, “The Search for the Absolute,” 14. 46. Ibid., 4. 47. Ibid., 2. 48. Ibid., 4–​6. 49. Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 25. 50. Cotkin, Existential America, 92. 51. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness was not translated into English until 1956. 52. Cotkin, Existential America, 114.

206

Notes to pages 110–115

53. Ibid., 102. 54. On Heidegger’s impact in Germany, see Yule F. Heibel, Reconstructing the Subject: Modernist Painting in Western Germany, 1945–​1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 40–​44. 55. These essays were gathered together and republished in part 1 of William Barrett, What Is Existentialism? (New York: Grove Press, 1964). My citations are from this volume. 56. Ibid., 26. 57. Ibid., 67. 58. Ibid., 66. Heidegger invokes the notion of freedom-toward-death in his summary of authentic “Sein zum Tode” (being-toward-death). In this authentic being-toward-death, “anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom towards death—​a freedom which has been released from the Illusions of the ‘they’, and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious.” (italics and bold-face text in the translation). See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 311. 59. Barrett, What Is Existentialism? 94–​97. 60. José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Notes on the Novel, trans. Helene Weyl (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948). 61. Letter from Grosz to Otto Schmalhausen (7 January 1950), in Grosz, Briefe, 441. 62. Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art, 28–​29. Ortega y Gasset ventured the possibility that this disdain for melodrama might instead stem from a “respect for life and unwillingness to confuse it with art, so inferior a thing is art.” In the next sentence, however, he dismissed such a possibility as “impertinent.” 63. Ibid., 54. 64. Grosz, gallery notes for the Stick Men exhibit, Associated American Artists, 1948, quoted in Flavell, George Grosz, 261. 65. For a thorough and insightful analysis of the connections among these works, earlier themes in Grosz’s art, and postwar literature, see Möckel, George Grosz in Amerika, 166–​83. 66. Quoted in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945–​1948, trans. Kelly Barry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 19. 67. Letter to Grosz from Richard Huelsenbeck (18 April 1948), GAH 204. 68. Letter from Grosz to Pegeen Sullivan (1948), GAH 505. 69. Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 100. 70. Letter from Grosz to Walter Mehring (22 April 1949), in Grosz, Briefe, 429–​30. 71. Letter from Grosz to Elizabeth Lindner (17 March 1949), in Grosz, Briefe, 426–​29. 72. Orwell denied the anti-socialism ascribed to 1984 and clarified that instead his intention was to show “the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism.” Quoted in John Rossi and John Rodden, “A Political Writer,” in The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell, ed. John Rodden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1–​11. 73. Letter from Grosz to Otto Schmalhausen (20 June 1949), in Grosz, Briefe, 431–​32. See also Flavell, George Grosz, 260. 74. Letter from Grosz to Otto Schmalhausen (20 June 1949). In Grosz, Briefe, 431–​32. 75. Herf, Divided Memory, 109–​11. 76. Hannah Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” Partisan Review 15, no. 2 (1948): 743–​63. Her reference to the “living dead” appears on page 746. 77. Jachec provides a probing analysis of Arendt’s reflections on the camps as microcosms of a totalitarian order. She

Notes to pages 116–121

207

also explores the relationship between Arendt’s writings and the philosophical underpinnings of Abstract Expressionism, including its insistence on individual creativity in the face of this administered world. See Jachec, The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism, 42–​43. 78. Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” 749. 79. Grosz received a letter in 1954 from Lester Rees, of Styletone, Inc., in Chicago, who evidently saw his Gray Man at the AAA, had wanted to purchase it, but had to retract his offer because of his wife’s objection to the work “on the basis of what is would do to [his] character.” A letter of 1956, responding to Grosz’s request for a photo of the Gray Man, indicates that Rees eventually went ahead and bought the painting without his wife’s knowledge. He put it in his office but confessed he would have to put it back in storage before his partner returned. “Most people are disturbed by it which I like,” he told Grosz. See letters to Grosz from Lester Rees (12 February 1954 and 19 December 1956), GAH 354. 80. “Are These Men the Best Painters of America Today?” Look, 3 February 1948. 81. Look also asked its top ten artists to submit their own ranked lists. Grosz’s response positioned Thomas Hart Benton at the top of the list, followed by Eugene Berman, Paul Burlin, Eugene Speicher, Ivan Albright, John Sloan, Philip Evergood, Philip Guston, Romare Beardon, and himself as number ten. See letter from Grosz to Charlotte Devree of Look magazine (8 November 1947), GAH 711. 82. “New York: World Art Center,” Look, 8 June 1948, 54–​55. 83. Clement Greenberg, “The Decline of Cubism,” Partisan Review (March 1948): 369, cited in Serge Guilbaut, “The Frightening Freedom of the Brush: The Boston Institute of Contemporary Art and Modern Art,” in Dissent: The Issue of Modern Art in Boston (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1985), 62–​63. 84. Life, 11 October 1948, 56–​79. 85. “ ‘Modern Art’ and the American Public: A Statement by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Formerly the Institute of Modern Art” (17 February 1948), reprinted in Dissent: The Issue of Modern Art in Boston (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1985), 52–​53. 86. Marquis, Alfred H. Barr, 208–​9; and Emily Genauer, “The Fur-Lined Museum,” Harper’s, July 1944. 87. “ ‘Modern Art’ and the American Public.” 88. Ibid. 89. “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter?” Life, 8 August 1949, 45. 90. Letter from Grosz to Rudolf Schlichter (18 August 1949), in Grosz, Briefe, 435–​36. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid. 93. Hans Belting, The Germans and Their Art: A Troublesome Relationship, trans. Scott Kleager (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 80–​89. 94. Letter from Grosz to Rudolf Schlichter (December 1948), in Grosz, Briefe, 421–​22. 95. For an insightful discussion of Schlichter’s place in the conservative revolution and his publications during and after World War II, see Olaf Peters, “Rudolf Schlichters Das Abenteuer der Kunst, oder: Der Künstler als Kunsthistoriker,” in Kunstgeschichte nach 1945: Kontinuität und Neubeginn in Deutschland, ed. Nikola Doll, Ruth Heftrig, Olaf Peters, and Ulrich Rehm (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2006), 125–​36. 96. Hans Sedlmayr, Verlust der Mitte: Die bildende Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts als Symbol der Zeit (Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag, 1948); published in English translation as Art in Crisis: The Lost Center, trans. Brian Battershaw (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1958). 97. On Sedlmayr’s contributions to the New Vienna School and the popularity of his postwar writings on modern art, see Christopher S. Wood’s introduction, in The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s, ed. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 9–​72. In the United States, Sedlmayr’s Nazi credentials

208

Notes to pages 121–127

were already a matter of discussion in art historical circles beginning in the mid-1930s. For an account of unpublished correspondence between Meyer Schapiro and Otto Pächt in 1935 concerning Sedlmayr’s Nazi connections, see Cindy Persinger, “Reconsidering Meyer Schapiro and the New Vienna School,” Journal of Art Historiography 3 (December 2010): 1–​17. For a probing analysis of Sedlmayr’s place in the field of art history in the 1920s and 1930s and the emergence of Frankfurt School critical theory, see Frederic J. Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 137ff. 98. On Sedlmayr, Nazism, and right-wing Catholicism in the postwar period, see Jutta Held, “Hans Sedlmayr in München,” Kunst und Politik 8 (2006): 121–​69. 99. Maria Mitchell, “Materialism and Secularism: CDU Politicians and National Socialism, 1945–​1949,” Journal of Modern History 67, no. 2 (June 1995): 278–​308. 100. Sedlmayr, Verlust der Mitte, 147. 101. Ibid., 157. 102. George Grosz, “Der Mensch ist nicht gut—​sondern ein Vieh!” George Grosz, exhibition catalogue (Hanover, Germany: Galerie von Garvens, 1922). For a discussion of this essay and its critical objective, see Lewis, George Grosz, 103. 103. Sedlmayr, Verlust der Mitte, 215. 104. This translation comes (with my alterations based on the German original) from the English-language version of Sedlmayr’s text, Art in Crisis: The Lost Center, 220–​21. 105. Letter from Grosz to Marc Sandler (10 March 1950), in Grosz, Briefe, 442. The Bittner volume to which Grosz referred came out in 1944: George Grosz Drawings (New York: H. Bittner and Co., 1944). 106. Letter from Grosz to Hans Sedlmayr (15 July 1950), GAH 814. Grosz and Sedlmayr continued to have contact with one another in the 1950s. In 1955, he sent Sedlmayr praise for his book Die Revolution in der modernen Kunst (The Revolution in Modern Art). Grosz thanked him for his “profound” and “stimulating” analysis of the current state of “nihilism” in the arts. Grosz also mentioned his frequent contacts with Schlichter in Germany regarding Sedlmayr and the “far too few” opportunities he found in the United States to exchange ideas over the concerns raised in Sedlmayr’s writings. See letter from Grosz to Hans Sedlmayr (5 December 1955), GAH 814. Sedlmayr responded with thanks. He wrote that the praise was especially appreciated given that he was currently under attack by West German critics and art historians as the “devil of ‘reaction,’ ,” even though artists like Grosz seemed to understand and value what his writings were attempting to explore. Grosz also sent Sedlmayr a catalogue of his works at this time. His images captured “humanity, wounded humanity,” Sedlmayr wrote, “but still true, genuine.” See letter to Grosz from Hans Sedlmayr (9 December 1955), GAH 389. 107. Hans Gerhard Evers, ed., Darmstädter Gespräch: Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit (Darmstadt: Neue Darmstädter Verlagsanstalt Gmbh, 1950). 108. For an incisive analysis of Sedlmayr’s book and the Darmstadt debates, see John-Paul Stonard, Fault Lines: Art in Germany 1945–​1955 (London: Ridinghouse, 2007), 247–​59. On Baumeister in this context, see Peter Chametzky, Objects as History in Twentieth-Century German Art: Beckmann to Beuys (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 103–​7. 109. Stonard, Fault Lines, 258. Adorno was at this time a virtual unknown in the art world and broader intellectual circles in Germany. This would largely remain the case until the republication of Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1969. 110. For an English translation of Adorno’s comments at Darmstadt, see “Hans Sedlmayr (1896–​1984) and Theodor Adorno (1903–​1969) from the ‘Darmstadt Colloquy,’ ” in Art in Theory, ed. Harrison and Wood, 663–​65. 111. Letter to Grosz from Hans Sedlmayr (8 August 1950), GAH 389. 112. Howard Devree, “The Saints Depart,” New York Times Book Review, 27 April 1958, 26. Sedlmayr forwarded an autographed copy of the English edition to Grosz, who replied by sending along a copy of the Times review, which

Notes to pages 127–131

209

Grosz dismissed as “stupid criticism.” See letter from Grosz to Hans Sedlmayr (8 May 1958), GAH 814. 113. Pohl, Ben Shahn, 72–​77. 114. “A Statement on Modern Art,” reproduced in Dissent, 88–​89. 115. For an in-depth discussion of left-wing critiques of an ascendant American abstraction during this period, see Hemingway, Artists on the Left. 116. “75 Painters Deny Museum Is Hostile,” New York Times, 4 July 1950, 9. 117. Letter to Grosz from Raphael Soyer (13 December 1951), GAH 413. With reference to the political pedigree of the artists associated with this group, Evergood, Gwathmey, Hirsch, Shahn, and Soyer were among those who threw their support behind the Progressive Party leader Henry A. Wallace in the 1948 presidential campaign that pitted Republican Thomas E. Dewey against the Democratic incumbent, Harry Truman. See “We Are for W ­ allace,” New York Times, 20 October 1948, 32. Wallace had served as vice president under Roosevelt. He ­established himself at that time as an outspoken defender of racial justice, economic equality, and the New Deal with his speech “Century of the Common Man,” in 1942, which assailed Henry Luce’s American Century vision of world domination by U.S. capitalism. On Wallace’s role in Popular Front politics and his failed presidential campaign, see Doug Rossinow, Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 183–​94. 118. Letter to Grosz from Joseph Hirsch (30 April 1951), GAH 194. 119. The journal’s first issue carried the endorsement of forty-six prominent U.S. artists, including Isabel Bishop, Philip Evergood, William Gropper, Edward Hopper, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jacob Lawrence, Raphael Soyer, and John Sloan, who joined the group shortly before his death. Isabel Bishop, Alexander Dobkin, Edward Hopper, Jack Levine, Henry Varnum Poor, Joseph Solman, Raphael Soyer, and Sol Wilson served on the editorial committee. 120. “Statement,” Reality 1, no. 1 (Spring 1953): 1. 121. “Editorial: The Response of Reality,” Reality 2 (Spring 1954): 1–​2. 122. Letter from Grosz to Joseph Hirsch (20 May 1951), GAH 646. 123. Letter from Grosz to Raphael Soyer (21 December 1951), GAH 833. 124. Grosz refers here to Mihály Munkácsy, a nineteenth-century Hungarian painter of German Jewish descent who studied in Vienna, Munich, and Düsseldorf. Munkácsy was acclaimed for his realist history paintings and genre scenes of peasant life. His impact on the work of Max Liebermann is discussed in Barbara C. Gilbert, ed., Max Liebermann: From Realism to Impressionism (Los Angeles: Skirball Cultural Center, 2005), 26, 29, 167, 190. Basil Wereschagin was a Russian realist artist of the nineteenth century, also known for his landscape and genre works. Both were currently being promoted in East Germany as models for socialist realist painting. 125. Letter from Grosz to Raphael Soyer, unsent (17 December 1951), GAH 833. 126. I discuss this commission in greater depth in my essay “Exile for Hire: George Grosz in Dallas,” in Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture, ed. Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 33–​60. See also Heather MacDonald, Flower of the Prairie: George Grosz in Dallas (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 2012). 127. Letter to Grosz from John Hall (16 November 1950), GAH 162. 128. Letter to Grosz from Robert Parsons, executive director of the AAA (21 September 1948), GAH 24. 129. Flavell, George Grosz, 338, chap. 8, n. 1. 130. See letter to Grosz from the Abbott Kimball Company regarding the layout for a Strathmore ad to appear in American Artist (1952), GAH 1; and an ad for the Delta Brush Manufacturing Corporation in American Artist (March 1949): 19. 131. Wieland Herzfelde, “The Man Who Gave Me New Eyes,” in A Piece of My World in a World without Peace, exhibit catalogue (New York: Associated American Artists, 1946), unpaginated.

210

Notes to pages 131–135

132. On “Amerikanismus” in the German avant-garde, see Beeke Sell Tower, Envisioning America: Prints, Drawings and Photographs by George Grosz and His Contemporaries, 1915–​1933 (Cambridge, MA: Busch-Reisinger Museum, 1990); and my essay “From the Frontier to the Wild West: German Artists, American Indians, and the Spectacle of Race and Nation in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in I Like America, ed. Pamela Kort (Frankfurt am Main: Schirn Kunsthalle, 2006), 299–​321. 133. “Grosz Arrives to Paint Dallas in Fortnight,” Dallas Daily Times Herald, 14 May 1952, section 15, page 3. 134. Letter from Grosz to Otto Schmalhausen (19 March 1953), in Grosz, Briefe, 463–​64. See also the letter from Grosz to Leon Harris (14 May 1953), GAH 625. 135. For an in-depth treatment of Dallas’s history in this regard, see Michael Phillips, White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841–​2001 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006). 136. Fortune described this as Kramer Sr.’s “pet project.” See Holland McCombs and Holly Whyte, “The Dynamic Men of Dallas,” Fortune, February 1949, 98–​103, 162–​66. See also Jim Schutze, The Accommodation: The Politics of Race in an American City (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1986), 63. As a national phenomenon, such slum “clearance” had the effect not of improving the lives of the black citizenry but rather of facilitating corporate land development while concentrating blacks in “projects.” Dallas, despite whatever altruistic motivations Kramer might have entertained, was no exception to this rule. 137. Schutze, The Accommodation, 101. 138. Leon Harris, Merchant Princes: An Intimate History of Jewish Families Who Built Great Department Stores (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). 139. Schutze, The Accommodation, 21. 140. See November election coverage in the Dallas Express. See also Louis Margot III, “ ‘The Dallas Express’: A Negro Newspaper: Its History, 1892–​1971, and Its Point of View,” MS thesis, East Texas State University, 1971; and a letter from Grosz to Otto Schmalhausen (9 October 1952), in which Grosz refers to the upcoming elections and his tendency to “lean toward” Stevenson for president (in Grosz, Briefe, 458–​59). 141. The state of Texas as a whole continued to indulge its deplorable record on race relations well beyond 1952. After the Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954, Texas exempted itself from federally mandated desegregation. With its extremist track record, Dallas fostered a climate hostile to President John Kennedy’s “New Frontier” policies. Indeed, some were little surprised that Kennedy was assassinated there in November 1963. For a contemporary discussion on “Why Dallas?” see Reece McGee (a sociology professor at the University of Texas), “Texas: The Roots of the Agony . . . ,” The Nation 197 (21 December 1963): 427–​31. 142. See Möckel, George Grosz in Amerika, 185, for a discussion of how Grosz recycled some of his earlier depictions of New York street types in this image. On Deep Ellum as the Harlem of the South and a summary discussion of Dallas’s African American community during this period, see Maxine Homes and Gerald D. Saxon, eds., The WPA Dallas Guide and History, compiled between 1936 and 1942 (Dallas: Dallas Public Library, Texas Center for the Book, and University of North Texas Press, 1992), 294–​305. 143. Since 1936, the DMFA resided on the grounds of the state fair, located in Fair Park in east Dallas. After the fair, Grosz’s Impressions of Dallas series was slated to tour Texas and adjoining states throughout the following year. See “George Grosz Is Adding Last Touches to ‘Impressions of Dallas’ for Fair,” Dallas Daily Times Herald, 22 September 1952. 144. Impressions of Dallas (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 1952). 145. Bob Brock, “Museum Fair Exhibition Is Variety-Packed Show,” Dallas Daily Times Herald, 5 October 1952. Grosz’s exhibit did receive national attention in Time magazine. See “Wine’s Better Than Acid,” Time, 17 November 1952, 98–​99. 146. “ ‘All Citizens Welcome on All Days’ Says State Fair Official,” Dallas Express, 4 October 1952, 1.

Notes to pages 135–141

211

147. Schutze, The Accommodation, 94; and Nancy Wiley, The Great State Fair of Texas: An Illustrated History (Dallas: Taylor Publishing Company, 2000), 158. 148. Letter from George Grosz to Rudolf Schlichter (14 January 1953), in Grosz, Briefe, 460. 149. Letter from George Grosz to Felix Weil (10 June 1953), in Grosz, Briefe, 467. 150. “Resolution on the Promotion of the Work of Communist Artists,” Public Affairs Luncheon Club of Dallas (16 March 1955), quoted in Francine Carraro, Jerry Bywaters: A Life in Art (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 173. 151. Carraro, Jerry Bywaters, 186. 152. The DMFA purchased Grosz’s Model Arranging Her Hair for $275 in 1945, along with Benton’s Prodigal Son for $1,200. Lewenthal had also arranged reduced prices for the DMFA on works by Raphael Soyer, Adolf Dehn, William Gropper, Grosz, Benton, and others. See letter to Jerry Bywaters from Reeves Lewenthal (9 February 1945); and letter from Jerry Bywaters to Reeves Lewenthal (12 February 1945), in Bywaters Special Collections, Hamon Arts Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. 153. A. F., “Editorial: Shame in Dallas,” Art News 54, no. 4 (Summer 1955): 23. 154. Baur, George Grosz. The exhibit subsequently traveled to the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, in Kansas City; the Pasadena Art Institute; and the San Francisco Museum of Art. 155. Letter from Grosz to Leon Harris (14 May 1953), in Grosz, Briefe, 466. 156. Baur, George Grosz, 7–​8. 157. Henry McBride, “George Grosz: Becalmed Petrel,” Art News 52, no. 10 (February 1954): 27, 52. Two Art News readers condemned McBride for accusing Grosz of being “rude” by bringing up the subject of war in his art. One reader claimed that, on the contrary, his negative paintings were instead an effective way to maintain the peace. See letters to the editor from Miriam Shorr and Wendell Haas in Art News 53 (March 1954): 6. Arnott White of the AAA also wrote of his displeasure over McBride’s commentary to the editors of Art News. See letter to Grosz from Arnott White (March 1954), GAH 456. 158. Letter from Grosz to John Baur (7 August 1954), in Grosz, Briefe, 481–​82.

4. The Exile Returns 1. Letter to Grosz from Wolfgang Paul (16 February 1947), GAH 323. 2. “George Grosz,” Heute, vol. 28, 5 January 1947, 18. “Das Modell hat Grosz nie zu Gesicht bekommen; ebensowenig wie die Zwerge, Übermenschen und Zauberer seiner schrecklichen Märchenwelt. Doch in dieser Märchenwelt hatte er die ungeheuerlichen Gestalten deutlicher gesehen, als später Millionen es vermochten, die sie in Fleisch und Blut erblickten, die in der Nachbarschaft der Greuel dahingelebt haben und nun fassungslos ausrufen, sie hätten nichts von alle diesem Furchtbaren auch nur gehört.” 3. Flavell also documents a similar mention of Grosz in a pamphlet issued in December 1946 by the Unabhängige Gesellschaft zur Pflege junger Wissenschaft und Kunst (Independent Society for the Promotion of Youth in Science and Arts). Rolf Walter’s essay in the pamphlet states, “When I see that the Germans do not wish to see the guilty people (because they themselves share part of the responsibility), when I see that they regret only that they lost the war, and not that they began it: in short, when the contagion of lies and hypocrisy keeps on growing, then I ask: where is Grosz?” (translation by Flavell, in Flavell, George Grosz, 252). For his part, Grosz believed that his art was at the time better understood in Germany than in the “Woolworth-world” of the United States, where “one belongs in the notion department [and] art is merchandise.” See letter from Grosz to Bertolt Viertel (21 October 1946), in Grosz, Briefe, 379–​80. 4. Wolfgang Paul, Mauer der Schande (Munich: Bechtle, 1961). 5. Goldstein, Capturing the German Eye, 130.

212

Notes to pages 141–146

6. Martin Papenbrock, “Entartete Kunst,” Exilkunst, Widerstandkunst in westdeutschen Ausstellungen nach 1945: Eine kommentierte Bibliographie (Weimar: VDG, 1996), 55–​56. 7. Stonard, Fault Lines, 139–​68. 8. Ulrike Niederhofer, Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Expressionismus in der Bildenden Kunst im Wandel der politischen Realität der SBZ und der DDR 1945–​1989 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 1996), 82–​83; and Stonard, Fault Lines, 96–​100. Popular preference for traditional art was of course not specifically a German proclivity, as the controversy over the Advancing American Art show similarly revealed in the case of American public taste in 1946. As Stonard notes about the German context, however, this proclivity tended to be attributed to long-standing traditionalism and anti-modernism in ways that foreclosed examination of the more recent impact of Nazi anti-modernist campaigns on public opinion. He therefore observes, “In the postwar period, it is thus important to separate the language in which this anti-modernism was expressed, clearly informed by Nazism, and the strong distaste for modern art itself, a much older feeling.” See Stonard, Fault Lines, 100. 9. Stonard, Fault Lines, 189–​90. 10. Papenbrock, “Entartete Kunst,” 15. 11. Josef Haubrich, “Umgang mit modernen Malern,” Die Zeit, 14 September 1950. 12. A. Rieth, “Vorwort,” in Moderne deutsche Kunst, exhibition catalogue (Tübingen, 1947): “Heute die Werke wieder selbst sprechen,” cited and discussed in Papenbrock, “Entartete Kunst,” 15–​16. 13. Christian Saehrendt, “The Art of the Brücke as a Political Issue,” in New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History, ed. Christian Weikop (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), 223. On Nolde’s support for Hitler and connection to the Nazi Party, see also James Van Dyke, “Something New on Nolde, National Socialism, and the SS,” Kunstchronik 65 (2012): 265–​70. 14. Schivelbusch, In a Cold Crater, 28–​29. 15. Cited in Niederhofer, Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Expressionismus, 71: “Der Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands will die große deutsche Kultur, den Stolz unseres Vaterlandes, wiedererwecken und ein neues Geistesleben begründen.” On the Kulturbund, see also Stonard, Fault Lines, 156–​68. 16. For this observation and a comprehensive discussion of this exhibit, see Kurt Winkler, “Allgemeine deutsche Kunstausstellung,” in Stationen der Moderne: Die bedeutenden Kunstausstellungen des 20. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1988), 352–​77. On the failure of the British Zone of Occupation to participate, see page 360, note 11. 17. Günther Feist and Eckhart Gillen, Kunstkombinat DDR: Daten und Zitate zur Kunst und Kunstpolitik der DDR 1945–​1990 (Berlin: Nishen, 1990), 10. 18. Letter to Grosz from Heinrich Ehmsen (6 May 1947), GAH 35. 19. Ibid.: “So leben wir und bauen aus geistigen Trümmern unsere bescheidene Welt.” 20. Letter from Grosz to Elizabeth Lindner (5 August 1948), in Grosz, Briefe, 411–​13. 21. Hans Rudolf Vaget, “ ‘German’ Music and German Catastrophe: A Re-reading of Doktor Faustus,” in A Companion to the Works of Thomas Mann, ed. Herbert Lehnert and Eva Wessell (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), 221–​ 44. 22. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 529. 23. Clark, Beyond Catastrophe, 92–​115. On the “great controversy,” see also Ursula Reinhold, Dieter Schlenstedt, and Horst Tanneberger, eds., Erster deutscher Schriftstellerkongreß: Protokoll und Dokumente (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1997), 37–​40. 24. Letter to Grosz from Brecht (March 1947), translated and discussed in Flavell, George Grosz, 258. 25. Papenbrock, “Entartete Kunst,” 28. For a through analysis of the reception of exile art in Germany after 1945, see Sabine Eckmann, “German Exile, Modern Art, and National Identity,” in Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and Amer-

Notes to pages 146–151

213

ican Visual Culture, ed. Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 95–​125. 26. “German Artists Resist Controls,” New York Times, 15 December 1946, 21. 27. The Times article referred to this organization as the Deutsche Kulturbund, though the description more appropriately fits the Deutsche Künstlerbund. The article also states that the “Deutsche Kulturbund” was closed in 1933. The Deutsche Künstlerbund closed in 1936, and that is the date I have used here. See “Deutscher Künstlerbund: Tradition und Zukunft,” at www.kuenstlerbund.de/deutsch/historie/deutscherkünstlerbund/index.html 28. I treat this issue in more detail in my essay “Dialectic at a Standstill: East German Socialist Realism in the Stalin Era,” in Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures, ed. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2009), 105–​16. My findings were indebted to several authoritative accounts of the East German art world. Foremost among these are: Ulrike Goeschen, Vom sozialistischen Realismus zur Kunst im Sozialismus: Die Rezeption der Moderne in Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft der DDR (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2001); and Martin Damus, Malerei der DDR: Funktionen der bildenden Kunst im Realen Sozialismus (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991). 29. Most decisive in this regard was the publication of Anatol Schnittke’s essay “Dreissig Jahre sowjetische Malerei” (Thirty Years of Soviet Painting) in bildende kunst in 1947. Karl Hofer, who co-edited bildende kunst with Oskar Nerlinger, threatened to resign over the publication of Schnittke’s essay and its implications for the Stalinization of the journal. Hofer staunchly defended artistic autonomy. As a result he became a prime target of Dymschitz and others in the ensuing anti-formalism campaigns. See Anatol Schnittke, “Dreissig Jahre sowjetische Malerei,” bildende kunst 1, no. 7 (1947): 4–​7; Alexander Dymschitz, “Über die formalistische Richtung in der deutschen Malerei,” Tägliche Rundschau, 24 November 1948; and Feist and Gillen, Kunstkombinat DDR, 13. 30. Belmonte, Selling the American Way, 30. 31. Reinhold, Schlenstedt, and Tanneberger, eds., Erster deutscher Schriftstellerkongreß, 25. 32. On Lasky’s history as a Trotskyist–​left New York intellectual and the circumstances of his evolving cultural Cold Warrior views, see Giles Scott-Smith, “ ‘A Radical Democratic Political Offensive’: Melvin J. Lasky, Der Monat, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 2 (2000): 263–​80. 33. Melvin J. Lasky’s speech before the First German Writers Congress, reprinted in Erster deutscher Schriftstellerkongreß, ed. Reinhold, Schlenstedt, and Tanneberger, 295–​300. It should be noted that Lasky was also highly critical of policies in the British and American zones of occupation concerning free expression. He pointed to censorship in those zones and the failure to rebuild the material conditions necessary for renewed German intellectual life. In his words: “The Allied powers prefer to perpetuate the political stupor of the Germans, rather than to shake them into self-consciousness and into genuine awareness of what is happening in the world.” His analyses exposed the fundamental contradiction that nettled the actions of the Western powers as they sought to “impose” principles of “free” democratic expression in a defeated Germany. Lasky warned further that this “semi-totalitarian dimness in the German picture” achieved little more than opening the door for Stalinist tendencies to have their own way in charting the future direction of German political and intellectual life. On these points, see Melvin J. Lasky, “Berlin Letter,” Partisan Review 15, no. 1 (1948): 60–​68. 34. “Ideologies,” Time, 20 October 1947, 31. 35. Letter from Grosz to Herbert Fiedler (11 October 1948), in Grosz, Briefe, 414–​15. 36. Scott-Smith, “ ‘A Radical Democratic Political Offensive,’ ” 266. Scott-Smith is here quoting Willie Thompson, The Communist Movement since 1945 (Oxford, 1998), 20. 37. Lawrence S. Wittner, “Who’s Afraid of World Government?” Toward Democratic World Federation 19, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 1, 6. Forty-five national labor unions, churches, chambers of commerce, and Democratic and Republican Party organizations endorsed the United World Federalists platform. By 1949, twenty American state legislatures had also signed on. Ninety-one members of the House of Representatives from the Democratic and Republican

214

Notes to pages 152–154

Parties also pushed a resolution in support of world government as a U.S. foreign policy objective. 38. For Einstein’s original message, see Albert Einstein, “A Message to the World Congress of Intellectuals,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (October 1948): 295, 299. For the abbreviated and altered Polish version (in English translation), see “Polish Version of Einstein’s Message,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (October 1948): 320. 39. “Red Visitors Cause Rumpus,” 39; “The Russians Get a Big Hand from U.S. Friends,” 40–​41; and “Red Rumpus,” 42–​43; all in Life, vol. 26, no. 4, 4 April 1949. 40. Clark, Beyond Catastrophe, 116. 41. Letter from Grosz to Wieland Herzfelde (25 August 1949), in Grosz, Briefe, 438–​39. 42. This homology between victims of the Nazis and German victims of Soviet brutality became an instrument in West German reconstruction ideology and legitimation. For an authoritative account of the cultural politics of perpetrators and victims in postwar West German art, see Paul Jaskot, The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). See also Robert G. Moeller, “Remembering the War in a Nation of Victims: West German Pasts in the 1950s,” in The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–​1968, ed. Hanna Schissler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 83–​109. The last remaining German prisoners of war in the USSR were released in 1955. The controversial Historians’ Debate of the mid-1980s revived the memory of the imprisonment of German POWs by the Soviets following the war. Specifically, right-wing historians engaged in the debate raised the question of whether a moral equivalence existed between German and Soviet crimes during World War II and its aftermath. On this, see Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 43. Clark, Beyond Catastrophe, 119. 44. Feist and Gillen, Kunstkombinat DDR, 12. 45. Heinz Lüdecke, “Die Entwirklichung der bürgerlichen Kunst,” bildende kunst 2, no. 5 (1948): 10–​13. 46. Adolf Behne, “Was will die moderne Kunst?” bildende kunst 1 (1948). See also Feist and Gillen, Kunstkombinat DDR, 13. 47. Georg Lukács, “ ‘Grösse und Verfall’ des Expressionismus,” Internationale Literatur 1 (1934): 153–​73. For an English translation see Georg Lukács, “Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline,” in Essays on Realism, ed. Rodney Livingstone, trans. David Fernbach (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980), 76–​113. 48. “Warum wir in diesem Zusammenhang an George Grosz erinnern? Seine Abkehr von der eigenen Vergangenheit, die all Berichte aus New York übereinstimmend zu vermelden wissen, erscheint uns charakteristisch für das, was hier ‘Entwirklichung der Kunst’ genannt wird: der große kritische Realist verliert sich an Atelierprobleme und phantastische Spielereien. Uns steht der George Grosz, der die obige Lithographie gemacht hat, näher.” 49. Many of the leftist artist groups that formed in the Soviet Occupation Zone after 1945 traced their origins to the communist left ASSO (Assoziation Revolutionärer Bildender Künstler Deutschlands; Association of Revolutionary Pictorial Artists of Germany) of the 1920s. In 1949, the SED declared “no more ASSO” in efforts to purge the East German art world of its revolutionary artistic traditions of the past and to bring it more firmly under Soviet control. On this, see Stonard, Fault Lines, 207–​8. 50. Letter to Grosz from Horst Palm (16 May 1949), GAH 321. 51. George Grosz, “George Grosz antwortet: Eine Anklage gegen ihn und ihr Ende,” Die neue Zeitung, 31 July 1949. 52. On the history of Die neue Zeitung, see Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “Art Is Democracy and Democracy Is Art: Culture, Propaganda, and the Neue Zeitung in Germany, 1944–​1947,” Diplomatic History 23, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 21–​43. On OMGUS’s censorship policies at this time, see Goldstein, Capturing the German Eye, 105–​12. 53. Grosz’s response is also included in his letter to Palm. See letter from Grosz to Horst Palm (20 June 1949), in Grosz, Briefe, 430–​31. “Weil meine soziale Entwicklung nicht mit der ‘Ideologie’ seiner Auftraggeber zusam-

Notes to pages 154–158

215

mengeht. Esse ich von ‘goldenen Tellern’, so ißt er aus der Hand eines vermummten Mächtigen. Wie auch könnten ihm die Stickmen gefallen? Ich meine nicht den kleinen, nur ausführenden Schreiber, ich meine ‘den mächtigen großen Bruder.’ ” 54. Grosz’s works in the 1949 2. Deutsche Kunstausstellung exhibit in Dresden were: The Death of the Artist (1935), Made in USA (1936), Brothers (1945), and The Hermit (1934). 55. Saehrendt, “The Art of the Brücke as a Political Issue,” 229. 56. These mural projects fell short of the mark, however. Artists’ collectives produced sketches based on their experience of factory life in Saxony. As Stonard observes, they had difficulty squaring socialist realist optimism with the reality of the dismal working and living conditions they encountered. None of the mural designs shown in the 1949 exhibit was purchased by the SED. Of the murals that were eventually realized, all but one was destroyed in the 1950s. On this issue, see Stonard, Fault Lines, 317–​18. 57. Hannes König, “Ein Brief aus Westdeutschland,” bildende kunst 3, no. 10 (1949): 353–​54. 58. Ibid. “Sollten sich Euch bei diesen Behauptungen Zweifel einstellen, dann bedenkt, daß Ihr vieles hinter Euch gebracht habt, was hier noch zäher Kämpfe bedarf, daß Ihr vieles erreicht habt, was hier noch Zukunftsmusik bedeutet.” 59. Scott-Smith, “ ‘A Radical Democratic Political Offensive.’ ” 60. Letter to Grosz from Wieland Herzfelde (5 June 1950), GAH 189. 61. Letter from Grosz to Otto Schmalhausen (15 June 1950), in Grosz, Briefe, 445–​46. 62. Grosz further confided to Schmalhausen that his close friend Hermann Borchardt had also died that January. His sister and Borchardt were buried on the same day. See letter from Grosz to Otto and Lotte Schmalhausen (27 January 1951), in Grosz, Briefe, 451; and letter from Grosz to Felix Weil (17 May 1951), in Grosz, Briefe, 454. 63. Richard F. Hanser, “In the Soviet Doghouse: Brecht’s Pacifist Play Causes Him Trouble in East Germany,” New York Times, 29 April 1951, X3. 64. Niederhofer, Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Expressionismus, 114. 65. N. Orlow, “Wege und Irrwege der modernen Kunst,” Tägliche Rundschau, 20 January 1951. 66. Niederhofer, Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Expressionismus, 131. 67. Letter from Grosz to Priscilla Henderson (2 April 1952), in Grosz, Briefe, 456: “außer alten Erinnerungen: Freunde verschwanden, Häuser verschwanden—​alles etwas traurig, muß ich sagen. Ja, ich habe den Kontakt verloren, es scheint mir alles ganz ‘fremd.’ . . . Doch muß ich zugeben, daß ich irgendwie froh war, zurückzukommen. ­Europa hat sich verändert—​oder vielleicht ich mich—​ich weiß nicht. Etwas ist verschwunden, und in Deutschland sind die Menschen sehr emsig and versuchen zu vergessen; man hat immer das Gefühl, daß sie es versuchen, aber innerlich können sie es nicht, und so scheint es (um einen psychoanalytischen Ausdruck zu benutzen), also ob sie mehr oder weniger im ‘Trauma leben’. (Sonst hasse ich psychoanalytische Terminologie—​ aber hier stimmt’s.)” 68. Heibel, Reconstructing the Subject, 131. 69. Letter from Grosz to Raphael Soyer, unsent (17 December 1951), GAH 833. On the “German-American line” of abstraction, see letter from Grosz to Rudolf Schlichter (14 January 1953), in Grosz, Briefe, 460–​62. 70. Letter from Grosz to Otto Schmalhausen (20 April 1953), in Grosz, Briefe, 464–​66. 71. Letter from Grosz to Otto Schmalhausen (12 February 1953), in Grosz, Briefe, 462–​63. 72. On these events, see Herf, Divided Memory, 125–​33; and “Soviet Zone Police Raid Jews’ Houses,” New York Times, 19 January 1953, 5. 73. On this 1922 trip, see Lewis, George Grosz, 108–​9; and my treatment of the event in George Grosz and the Communist Party, 95–​97. 74. See letters from Grosz to Alfred McCormack and Lloyd Laporte of the FBI (7 and 31 May 1955), in Grosz, Briefe,

216

Notes to pages 158–164

489–​92. 75. I discuss this exhibit in greater detail in my essay “Dialectic at a Standstill.” 76. Helmut Holtzhauer, “Die III. Deutsche Kunstausstellung in Dresden,” Bildende Kunst 2 (1953): 30. 77. Dürer’s appropriation by cultural nationalists and Nazi ideologues went into full swing with celebrations surrounding the four hundredth anniversary of his death in 1928. For a probing analysis of art historian Heinrich Wölfflin’s role in racialist and racist cultural discussions of Dürer at this time, see Jaskot, The Nazi Perpetrator, 20–​22. Martin Papenbrock’s statistical survey of university lectures in Germany between 1933 and 1945 highlights Dürer’s preeminence and popularity as a cultural icon and topic of tendentious art historical analysis under the Third Reich. On this, see Martin Papenbrock, “Kunstgeschichtliche Forschung und Lehre im Nationalsozialismus,” in Kunstgeschichte im Nationalsozialismus: Beiträge zur Geschichte einer Wissenschaft zwischen 1930 und 1950, ed. Nikola Doll, Christian Fuhrmeister, and Michael Sprenger (Weimar: VDG, 2005), 30–​35. See also Dennis, Inhumanities, 40–​46, 58–​61, 404–​8. 78. For a discussion of Dürer’s reception in the GDR, see Sigrid Hofer, “The Dürer Heritage in the GDR: The Canon of Socialist Realism, Its Areas of Imprecision, and Its Historical Transformations,” Getty Research Journal 4 (2012): 109–​26. 79. Mike Dennis, The Rise and Fall of the German Democratic Republic, 1945–​1990 (Essex, UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2000), 60–​65. 80. On the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section, see Goldstein, Capturing the German Eye, 75. 81. Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, “German Museums at the Crossroads,” College Art Journal 7, no. 2 (Winter 1947–​48): 121-26; and “Art in Germany Today,” Magazine of Art 41, no. 8 (December 1948): 314–​15. 82. Among the many individuals acknowledged by Lehmann-Haupt as advisers and consultants on this work are Meyer Schapiro, Erwin Panofsky, Melvin Lasky, Willi Baumeister, and Karl Hofer. See Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a Dictatorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), vii–​ix. 83. Ibid., xx. 84. Dos Passos’s “Satire as a Way of Seeing” from Grosz’s Interregnum, of 1936, as quoted in Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a Dictatorship, 60. This essay also appeared under the title “Grosz Comes to America,” in Esquire, September 1936. 85. Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a Dictatorship, 243. 86. Grosz, diary entry (25 February 1954), GAH 1093. 87. Dr. Marek S. Korowicz, “I Escaped to Speak for the Enslaved, Part I,” Life, 1 March 1954, 102ff. 88. Dr. Marek S. Korowicz, “I Escaped to Speak for the Enslaved, Part II,” Life, 8 March 1954, 128ff. See also “Address by Dr. Marek Korowicz to Students of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy upon the Occasion of His Appointment as Research Professor of International Law and International Organization, February 16, 1954.” This address is contained in a series of documents submitted as part of his appeal for residency made to the House of Representatives, 84th Congress, 1st Session, Report 254 (21 March 1955). These documents also reveal that Korowicz was paid ten thousand dollars for his essays in Life and made seven thousand dollars per year in his job at Tufts College. 89. Letter from Grosz to Otto Schmalhausen (May 1954), in Grosz, Briefe, 477. 90. “Grosz Is a ‘Camera,’ ” New York Times, 24 July 1955, SM12. 91. Letter to Grosz from Oberregierungsrat Dr. Jannasch, Senator für Volksbildung (19 June 1954), GAH 397. See also Grosz’s description of his reception on his return to Germany in his letter to Ernest and Herta Ashton (9 August 1954), in Grosz, Briefe, 483–​85. 92. Flavell, George Grosz, 291. 93. Sharry Underwood, “Ballet Ballads,” Dance Chronicle 9, no. 3 (1986): 279–​327.

Notes to pages 164–169

217

94. Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America, 101. 95. For a brief history of the Berliner Festspiele, see http://archiv2.berlinerfestspiele.de/de/aktuell/festivals/01_berliner_festspiele/bf_imagebuch/bf_imagebuch.php (accessed 1 October 2012). 96. On the politics of fairy tales in East Germany, see David Bathrick, “Little Red Riding Hood in the GDR: Folklore, Mass Culture, and the Avant-Garde,” in The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR, ed. David Bathrick (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 167–​91. In its early years, the SED purged fairy tales for children on the grounds of their irrationalism and reactionary bourgeois character. By 1952, however, East German officials permitted the rehabilitation of fairy tales in altered form as allegories of class struggle. They thus became part of efforts to create Volkstümlichkeit (popular culture) to counter that of the West. On the changing importance of Grimms’ fairy tales in debates over German national identity and legitimacy, see also Jack Zipes, The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the Tale in Sociocultural Context (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvy Publishers, 1983). 97. Grosz was involved with nine theater productions in the Weimar years: Orestie einfach klassisch (1919); Cäser und Kleopatra (1920); Kanzlist Krehler (1922); Nebeneinander (1923); Androkles und der Löwe (1924); Das trunkene Schiff (1926); Die Abenteuer des braven Soldaten Schwejk (1928); Der Kandidat (1930); and Der Streit am den Sergeanten Grischa (1930). For analysis of these plays and Grosz’s designs for them, see Andrew DeShong, The Theatrical Designs of George Grosz (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982). 98. Hermann Wanderscheck, “Vier Premieren beim Berlin Festival,” Abendpost (Frankfurt am Main) (29 September 1954), cited in DeShong, The Theatrical Designs of George Grosz, 114. 99. DeShong, The Theatrical Designs of George Grosz, 111–​16. 100. Letter to Grosz from Dr. Willi Wolfradt (27 July 1954), GAH 370. 101. Grosz, A Little Yes and a Big No, 318–​19. 102. George Grosz, Ein kleines Ja und ein großes Nein: Sein leben von ihm selbst erzählt, (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1986), 266. This German version of the autobiography, including the chapter “Russlandreise” omitted from the original English version, has also been translated into English: George Grosz: An Autobiography, trans. Nora Hodges (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 103. Flavell, George Grosz, 119, 224. 104. Der Spiegel reprinted the poem from which this line comes: “Ach knallige Welt, du Lunapark, / Du seliges Abnormalitätenkabinett, / Paß auf! Hier kommt Grosz, / Der traurigste Mensch in Europa, / ‘Ein Phänomen an Trauer’. /  Steifen Hut im Gnick, / Kein schlapper Hund!!!!” (O gaudy world, you Luna Park, / You blessed freak show, / Watch out! Here comes Grosz, / The saddest man in Europe, / “A phenomenon of mourning”. / Bowler hat tipped back, /  No flabby dog!!!!) George Grosz, “Gesang an die Welt” (Song to the World), 1918: Neue Blätter für Kunst und Dichtung 1 (November 1918): 154–​55. For a discussion of this poem and Grosz’s activities in literary Berlin during World War I, see Lewis, George Grosz, 15–​39. 105. “Grosz: Ein großes Nein,” Der Spiegel, vol. 27, 30 June 1954, 26–​30. “Aber man konnte kaum wissen, daß George Grosz im Lande war. Er war so auffällig amerikanisch gekleidet, daß man ihn also Yankee betrachtete und sogar also Fremden ausbeutete. So entfloh er wieder, mit einer neuen, nicht ganz unverdienten leisen Traurigkeit beladen: der Traurigkeit eines Mannes, der seinen alten Ruhm hinter sich gelassen hat und der nun vergeblich nach einem neuen sucht.” 106. Stonard, Fault Lines, 329. 107. Papenbrock, “Entartete Kunst,” 28. See also Walter Grasskamp, “Die unbewältigte Moderne: Entartete Kunst und documenta 1: Verfemung und Entschärfung,” in Museum der Gegenwart—​Kunst in öffentlichen Sammlungen bis 1937 (Düsseldorf: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 1987), 12–​24. 108. The Soviet Union granted East Germany national sovereignty in 1954. East Germany was also integrated into the

218

Notes to pages 169–174

Warsaw Pact military alliance, which was set up by the USSR in response to NATO in May 1955. 109. For details on documenta, see Roger M. Buergel, “Der Ursprung,” in Archive in Motion: 50 Jahre documenta, 1955–​ 2005, ed. Michael Glasmeier and Karin Stengel (Kassel, Germany: Kunsthalle Fridericianum, 2005), 173–​80 and related documents on pages 163–​72. 110. Stonard, Fault Lines, 332. The citation is from the English edition of Haftmann’s text: Werner Haftmann, Painting in the Twentieth Century, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Praeger, 1960), 375. 111. These included an exhibit of Grosz’s drawings and watercolors from 1916 to 1946 held by the Gesellschaft der Freunde Junger Kunst at the Staatliche Kunsthalle, in Baden-Baden, in 1957 and a traveling retrospective of his art organized by the Meta Nierendorf gallery, in Berlin, in 1958. Plans for an exhibit devoted to the subject of “deutsche Künstler von Amerika,” to be held at the Staatliche Kunsthalle, in Baden-Baden, in 1958 never materialized. Organizers planned to feature in it works by Grosz, Feininger, Beckmann, Scharl, and the Austrian artist Thöny. See letters to Grosz from Dr. Mahlow, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden (8 November 1956 and December 1956), GAH 28. 112. Kort, “The Myths of Expressionism in America,” 280. See also “Violent Images of Emotion: Expressionist Art Has a Big Revival,” Life, 12 May 1958, 87–​88, 90. 113. Horst Jähner, “Grosz contra Grosz,” Bildende Kunst 6 (1955): 453–​54, 484–​88. 114. Lothar Lang took much the same approach in his essay of 1958. See Lothar Lang, “Ein Künstler, der den Weg verfehlte,” 11 Bildende Kunst (1958): 768–​71. The essay criticizes Grosz’s schematic renderings of workers and is illustrated by five of Grosz’s political caricatures of the 1920s. 115. Wolfgang Hütt, “Der kritische Realismus in Deutschland,” Bildende Kunst 1 (1957): 9–​13. 116. Grosz’s work was also featured in the Modern Graphics, 1900–​1925 exhibit, which was staged in Dresden in late 1957 and foregrounded the work of expressionist artists. On the significance of the 1957 Dresden and 1958 Berlin exhibits in the broadening definition of socialist realism in East Germany at this time, see Martin Papenbrock, “Antifaschistische Kunst in Ausstellungen der DDR (1950–​1990),” in Kunst des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts in deutschen Ausstellungen, vol. 2: Antifaschistische Künstler/innen in Ausstellungen der SBZ und der DDR, ed. Martin Papenbrock and Gabriele Saure (Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Gesiteswissenschaften, 2000), 41–​42. 117. On this development see, Goeschen, Vom sozialistischen Realismus zur Kunst im Sozialismus; and April Eisman, “Bernhard Heisig and the Cultural Politics of East German Art,” PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2007. 118. Susan E. Reid, “Toward a New (Socialist) Realism: The Re-engagement with Western Modernism in the Khrushchev Thaw,” in Russian Art and the West: A Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture, and the Decorative Arts, ed. Rosalind P. Blakesley and Susan E. Reid (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), 217–​39. Grosz also took note of the rehabilitation of his artist friends who were formerly out of favor in the East German art world. See his letters for references to an exhibit of Otto Dix’s art at the East Berlin Academy of Art and the bestowal of the Lenin Order first class on John Heartfield, both in 1957. On Dix, see letter from Grosz to Herbert Fiedler (25 May 1957), in Grosz, Briefe, 503–​4. And on Heartfield, see letter from Grosz to Ulrich Becher (27 December 1957), in Grosz, Briefe, 511–​12. 119. The current location of Peace II is unknown. For an illustration see Möckel, George Grosz in Amerika, figure 143. 120. Peace I is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Peace I measures 66 × 51 cm; Peace II measures 119.4 × 84.5 cm. See, http://whitney.org/Collection/GeorgeGrosz. 121. Belmonte, Selling the American Way, 83. 122. On this exhibit and the competitive consumerisms of the United States and the Soviet Union during this period, see Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front, 148–​70. 123. Marilyn S. Kushner, “Exhibiting Art at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959,” Journal of Cold War Studies 4, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 6–​26.

Notes to pages 175–177

219

Conclusion Epigraph: A speech by Grosz cited in Judin, George Grosz, 267. 1. Letter to Grosz from Hans Sharoun (15 December 1958), GAH 5. 2. Letter to Grosz from the Akademie der Künste (7 April 1959), GAH 5. On Breker in the Third Reich, see Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain, 215–​53. 3. Aldous Huxley and Arthur Miller were also honored at this time. See “Huxley Honored for his Novels,” New York Times, 21 May 1959, 28. 4. Judin, George Grosz, 267. 5. Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 24–​26. 6. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, xvi. 7. Ibid., xv. 8. On the place of critical cosmopolitan thinking in modernity, see Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination, 5–​13.

220

Notes to pages 179–182

Selected Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 2005. First published by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1951. Agar, Herbert, et al. The City of Man: A Declaration of World Democracy. New York: Viking Press, 1941. American Art Today, New York World’s Fair, 1939. Reprint. Poughkeepsie, NY: Apollo, 1987. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006. Arendt, Hannah. “The Concentration Camps,” Partisan Review 15, no. 2 (1948): 743–​63. Arsfeld, Margaret Lynne, and Virginia M. Mecklenburg, eds. Advancing American Art: Politics and Aesthetics in the State Department Exhibition, 1946–​48. Montgomery, AL: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, 1984. Art in Our Time. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1939. Bahr, Ehrhard. Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Barnett, Vivian Endicott. “Banned German Art: Reception and Institutional Support of Modern German Art in the United States, 1933–​1945.” In Exiles and Émigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, edited by Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann, 273–​84. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997. Baron, Sydney S. One Whirl. New York: Lowell Publishing Company, 1944. Barrett, William. What Is Existentialism? New York: Grove Press, 1964. Barron, Stephanie, ed. “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991.

221

Barron, Stephanie, and Sabine Eckmann, eds. Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2009. ———. Exiles and Émigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997. Bathrick, David. “Little Red Riding Hood in the GDR: Folklore, Mass Culture, and the Avant-Garde.” In The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR, edited by David Bathrick, 167–​91. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Baur, John I. H. George Grosz. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1954. Belmonte, Laura A. Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Belting, Hans. The Germans and Their Art: A Troublesome Relationship. Translated by Scott Kleager. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Benz, Wolfgang. A Concise History of the Third Reich. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Berman, Elizabeth Kessin. “Moral Triage or Cultural Salvage? The Agendas of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee.” In Exiles and Émigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, edited by Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann, 99–​112. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997. Biddle, George. “The Surrealists—​Isolationists of Art.” New Republic 105 (27 October 1941): 538. Binder, Frederick M., and David M. Reimers. All the Nations under Heaven: An Ethnic and Racial History of New York City. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Bishop, Scott, et al. Art Interrupted: Advancing American Art and the Politics of Cultural Diplomacy. Athens, GA: Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, 2012. Bloch, Ernst. “Disrupted Language, Disrupted Culture.” Direction 2, no. 8 (December 1939): 16–​17, 36. Bosworth, Helen. “Grosz Paints What He Can’t Forget.” Art Digest 17 (15 February 1943): 7. Boyer, Richard O. “Demons in the Suburbs” (part 1 of interview with George Grosz). New Yorker, 27 November 1943, 32–​43. ———. “The Saddest Man in All the World” (part 2 of interview with George Grosz). New Yorker, 4 December 1943, 39–​48. ———. “The Yankee from Berlin” (part 3 of interview with George Grosz). New Yorker, 11 December 1943, 37–​44. Brecht, Bertolt. “The Anachronistic Procession or Freedom and Democracy.” In Bertolt Brecht, Poems, 1913–​1956, 409–​ 14. Edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim with the cooperation of Erich Fried. London: Methuen, 1976. ———. The Private Life of the Master Race: A Documentary Play. Translated by Eric Bentley. New York: New Directions, 1944. Breitman, Richard, and Allan J. Lichtman. FDR and the Jews. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. Brown, Wendy. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. New York: Zone Books, 2010. Buchhalter, Helen. “Carnegie International, 1939.” Magazine of Art 32 (November 1939): 628–​37. Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Buergel, Roger M. “Der Ursprung” and related documents. In Archive in Motion: 50 Jahre documenta, 1955–​2005, edited by Michael Glasmeier and Karin Stengel, 173–​80 and 163–​72. Kassel: Kunsthalle Fridericianum, 2005. Bungert, Heike. Das Nationalkomitee und der Westen: Die Reaktion der Westaliierten auf das NKFD und die Freien Deutschen Bewegungen 1943–​1948. Stuttgart: Franz Steine Verlag, 1997. Carraro, Francine. Jerry Bywaters: A Life in Art. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

222

Selected Bibliography

Casey, Steven. “The Campaign to Sell a Harsh Peace for Germany to the American Public, 1944–​1948.” History 90 (2005): 62–​92. Castillo, Greg. Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Cazden, Robert E. German Exile Literature in America, 1933–​1950: A History of the Free German Press and Book Trade. Chicago: American Library Association, 1970. Chametzky, Peter. Objects as History in Twentieth-Century German Art: Beckmann to Beuys. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Cheah, Pheng, and Bruce Robbins, eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Chenoweth, Col. H. Avery. Art of War: Eyewitness Combat Art from the Revolution through the Twentieth Century. New York: Michael Friedman Publishing Group, 2002. Clark, Mark W. Beyond Catastrophe: German Intellectuals and Cultural Renewal after World War II, 1945–​1955. New York: Lexington Books, 2006. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Cohan, William D. “MoMA’s Problematic Provenances.” Art News (December 2011): 74–85. Cotkin, George. Existential America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Damus, Martin. Malerei der DDR: Funktionen der bildenden Kunst im Realen Sozialismus. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991. Daniels, Roger. “American Refugee Policy in Historical Perspective.” In The Muses Flee Hitler: Cultural Transfer and Adaptation, 1930–​1945, edited by Jarrell C. Jackmann and Carla M. Borden, 61–​77. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983. Delanty, Gerard. The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Dennis, David B. Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Dennis, Mike. The Rise and Fall of the German Democratic Republic, 1945–​1990. Essex, UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2000. Deshmukh, Marion F. “The Visual Arts and Cultural Migration in the 1930s and 1940s: A Literature Review.” Central European History 41 (2008): 569–​604. DeShong, Andrew. The Theatrical Designs of George Grosz. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1982. Deuel, Wallace R. People under Hitler. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942. Deutsche Intellektuelle im Exil: Ihre Akademie und die “American Guild for German Cultural Freedom.” Munich: K. G. Saur, 1993. Dissent: The Issue of Modern Art in Boston. Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1985. Divine, Robert A. Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America during World War II. New York: Atheneum, 1967. Doherty, Thomas. Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–​1939. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Dondero, George. “Speeches in the Congressional Record for 1949.” Reprinted in Art in Theory, 1900–​2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 665–​68. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. Dos Passos, John. “Grosz Comes to America.” Esquire, September 1936, 104–​7, 128, 131. Doss, Erika. Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Selected Bibliography

223

———. “Catering to Consumerism: Associated American Artists and the Marketing of Modern Art, 1934–​1958.” Winterthur Portfolio 26, no. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 1991): 143–​67. Dower, Nigel, and John Williams, eds. Global Citizenship: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2002. Dunn, Susan. 1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler—​the Election amid the Storm. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Eckmann, Sabine. “German Exile, Modern Art, and National Identity.” In Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture, edited by Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick, 95–​125. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ———. H. W. Janson and the Legacy of Modern Art at Washington University in St. Louis. St Louis, MO: Washington University Gallery of Art, 2002. Eckmann, Sabine, and Lutz Koepnick, eds. Caught by Politics: German Exiles and American Visual Culture in the 1930s and 1940s. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Einstein, Albert. “A Message to the World Congress of Intellectuals.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (October 1948): 295, 299. ———. “Polish Version of Einstein’s Message.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (October 1948): 320. Eisman, April. “Bernhard Heisig and the Cultural Politics of East German Art.” PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2007. Evans, Fred. The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Evers, Hans Gerhard, ed. Darmstädter Gespräch: Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit. Darmstadt: Neue Darmstädter Verlagsanstalt Gmbh, 1950. Feist, Günther, and Eckhart Gillen. Kunstkombinat DDR: Daten und Zitate zur Kunst und Kunstpolitik der DDR 1945–​ 1990. Berlin: Nishen, 1990. Flavell, M. Kay. George Grosz: A Biography. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988. Fontanella, Megan M. “ ‘Unity in Diversity’: Karl Nierendorf and America, 1937–​1947.” American Art 24, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 114–​25. Foreign Policy Association. War Atlas: 45 Maps Prepared by Experts to Help You Follow the War Wherever It May Spread throughout the World. New York: Headline Books, 1940. Fraser, James H. “German Exile Publishing: The Malik-Aurora Verlag of Wieland Herzfelde.” German Life and Letters 27, no. 2 (January 1974): 115–​24. George Grosz, 1893–​1959. West Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1961. Geyer, Michael, and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds. Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Giacometti, Alberto. Alberto Giacometti: Sculptures, Paintings, Drawings. New York: Pierre Matisse Gallery, 1948. Gienow-Hecht, Jessica C. E. “Art Is Democracy and Democracy Is Art: Culture, Propaganda, and the Neue Zeitung in Germany, 1944–​1947.” Diplomatic History 23, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 21–​43. Gilbert, Barbara C., ed. Max Liebermann: From Realism to Impressionism. Los Angeles: Skirball Cultural Center, 2005. Glasmeier, Michael, and Karin Stengel, eds. Archive in Motion: 50 Jahre documenta, 1955–​2005. Kassel: Kunsthalle Fridericianum, 2005. Goeschen, Ulrike. Vom sozialistischen Realismus zur Kunst im Sozialismus: Die Rezeption der Moderne in Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft der DDR. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2001. Golan, Romy. “On the Passage of a Few Persons through a Rather Brief Period of Time.” In Exiles and Émigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, edited by Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann, 128–​46. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997.

224

Selected Bibliography

Goldstein, Cora Sol. Capturing the German Eye: American Visual Propaganda in Occupied Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Görtemaker, Manfred. Thomas Mann und die Politik. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2005. Grasskamp, Walter. “Die unbewältigte Moderne: Entartete Kunst und documenta 1: Verfemung und Entschärfung.” In Museum der Gegenwart—​Kunst in öffentlichen Sammlungen bis 1937, 12–​24. Düsseldorf: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 1987. Grimm, Dagmar. “Karl Hofer.” In Exiles and Émigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, edited by Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann, 255–​57. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997. Griswold, William M., and Jennifer Tonkovich. Pierre Matisse and His Artists. New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 2002. Grosz, George. Briefe, 1913–​1959. Edited by Herbert Knust. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1979. ———. “Der Mensch ist nicht gut—​sondern ein Vieh!” In George Grosz, exhibition catalogue. Hanover, Germany: Galerie von Garvens, 1922. ———. Ein kleines Ja und ein großes Nein: Sein leben von ihm selbst erzählt. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1986. First published in German in 1955. ———. George Grosz: An Autobiography. Translated by Nora Hodges. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. ———. A Little Yes and a Big No: The Autobiography of George Grosz. Translated by Lola Sachs Dorin. New York: Dial Press, 1946. ———. “Russlandreise, 1922.” Der Monat 5, no. 56, May 1953, 135–​52. ———. Teurer Makkaroni! Briefe an Mark Neven DuMont, 1922–​1959. Edited by Karl Riha. Berlin: Arlon Verlag, 1992. ———. “Unter anderem ein Wort für deutsche Tradition.” Das Kunstblatt 15, no. 3 (1931): 79–​84. English translation in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, 499–​502. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Guilbaut, Serge. “The Frightening Freedom of the Brush: The Boston Institute of Contemporary Art and Modern Art.” In Dissent: The Issue of Modern Art in Boston. Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1985. ———. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Haftmann, Werner. Painting in the Twentieth Century. Translated by Ralph Mannheim. New York: Praeger, 1960. Harris, Leon. Merchant Princes: An Intimate History of Jewish Families Who Built Great Department Stores. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory, 1900–​2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Hart, Justin. Empire of Ideas: The Origin of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Hartley, Marsden. George Grosz at an American Place. New York: American Place Gallery, 1935. Hecht, Ben. The Bewitched Tailor. New York: Viking Press, 1941. ———. Guide for the Bedevilled. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944. Republished in 1996 by MILAH Press, New London, NH. ———. 1001 Afternoons in New York. With illustrations by George Grosz. New York: Viking Press, 1941. Hecht, Ben, and Eugene Lyons. “The Extermination of the Jews.” American Mercury (February 1943): 194–​203. Heibel, Yule F. Reconstructing the Subject: Modernist Painting in Western Germany, 1945–​1950. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Heiden, Konrad. Hitler: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936.

Selected Bibliography

225

Heilbut, Anthony. Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Held, Jutta. “Das Exil der deutsche Künstler in den dreißiger und vierziger Jahren.” Exilforschung 12 (1994): 191–​99. ———. “Hans Sedlmayr in München.” Kunst und Politik 8 (2006): 121–​69. Hemingway, Andrew. Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement 1926–​1956. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Hennessey, Maureen Hart. “The Four Freedoms.” In Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People, edited by Maureen Hart Hennessey and Anne Knutson, 95–​102. Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art, 1999. Herf, Jeffrey. Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Hermand, Jost. “From Nazism to NATOism: The West German Miracle according to Henry Luce.” In America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year History, vol. 2, edited by Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh, 74–​88. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. Herzfelde, Wieland. “The Curious Merchant from Holland.” Harper’s Magazine, vol. 187, November 1943, 569–​76. ———. “The Man Who Gave Me New Eyes.” In A Piece of My World in a World without Peace, unpaginated exhibit catalogue. New York: Associated American Artists, 1946. Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Complete and unabridged, fully annotated. New York: New School for Social Research, 1939. First published in 1925. Hofer, Sigrid. “The Dürer Heritage in the GDR: The Canon of Socialist Realism, Its Areas of Imprecision, and Its Historical Transformations.” Getty Research Journal 4 (2012): 109–​26. Holz, Keith. “ ‘Brushwork Thick and Easy’ or a ‘Beauty-Parlor Mask for Murder’? Reckoning with the Great German Art Exhibitions in the Western Democracies.” RIHA Journal (28 September 2012). ———. Modern German Art for Thirties Paris, Prague, and London: Resistance and Acquiescence in a Democratic Public Sphere. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. ———. “Scenes from Exile in Western Europe: The Politics of Individual and Collective Endeavor among German Artists.” In Exiles and Émigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, edited by Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann, 43–​56. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997. Holz, Keith, and Wolfgang Schopf. Im Auge des Exils: Josef Breitenbach und die Freie Deutsche Kultur in Paris 1933–​1941. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2001. Homes, Maxine, and Gerald D. Saxon, eds. The WPA Dallas Guide and History, compiled between 1936 and 1942. Dallas: Dallas Public Library, Texas Center for the Book, and University of North Texas Press, 1992. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1986. First published in 1944. Impressions of Dallas. Dallas: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 1952. Jachec, Nancy. The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism, 1940–​1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ———. “ ‘The Space between Art and Political Action’: Abstract Expressionism and Ethical Choice in Postwar America, 1945–​1950.” Oxford Art Journal 14, no. 2 (1991): 18–​29. James-Chakraborty, Kathleen. “From Isolationism to Internationalism: American Acceptance of the Bauhaus.” In Bauhaus Culture from Weimar to the Cold War, edited by Kathleen James-Chakraborty, 153–​70. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Janson, H. W. “The International Aspects of Regionalism.” College Art Journal (May 1943): 110–​15. Jaskot, Paul B. The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

226

Selected Bibliography

Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–​1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Jentsch, Ralph, ed. George Grosz: Berlin–​New York. Milan, Italy: Skira, 2007. Judin, Juerg M., ed. George Grosz: The Years in America, 1933–​1958. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009. Koehler, Karen. “The Bauhaus, 1919–​1928: Gropius in Exile and the Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., 1938.” In Art, Culture, and Media under the Third Reich, edited by Richard A. Etlin, 287–​315. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Koopmann, Helmut, and Klaus Dieter Post, eds. Exil: Transhistorische und transnationale Perspektiven. Paderborn, Germany: Mentis, 2001. Kort, Pamela. “The Myths of Expressionism in America.” In New Worlds: German and Austrian Art, 1890–​1940, edited by Renée Price, 260–​93. New York: Neue Galerie, 2001. ———, ed. Comic Grotesque: Wit and Mockery in German Art, 1870–​1940. New York: Neue Galerie, 2004. Krohn, Claus-Dieter. Intellectuals in Exile: Refugee Scholars and the New School for Social Research. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. Kushner, Marilyn S. “Exhibiting Art at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959.” Journal of Cold War Studies 4, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 6–​26. Lamberti, Marjorie. “German Antifascist Refugees in America and the Public Debate on ‘What Should Be Done with Germany after Hitler,’ 1941–​1945.” Central European History 40 (2007): 279–​305. Langfeld, Gregor. Deutsche Kunst in New York: Vermittler-Kunstsammler-Ausstellungsmacher, 1904–​1957. Berlin: Reimer, 2011. Larson, Gary O. The Reluctant Patron: The United States Government and the Arts, 1943–​1965. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. Lasky, Melvin J. “Berlin Letter.” Partisan Review 15, no. 1 (1948): 60–​68. Lehmann-Haupt, Hellmut. “Art in Germany Today.” Magazine of Art 41, no. 8 (December 1948): 314–​15. ———. Art under a Dictatorship. New York: Oxford University Press, 1954. ———. “German Museums at the Crossroads.” College Art Journal 7, no. 2 (Winter 1947–​48): 121–​26. Lepenies, Wolf. The Seduction of Culture in German History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Lewis, Beth Irwin. George Grosz: Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Lipstadt, Deborah. Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–​1945. New York: Free Press, 1986. Luce, Henry R. “The American Century.” Life, 17 February 1941, 61–​65. Lukács, Georg. “Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline.” In Essays on Realism, edited by Rodney Livingstone, translated by David Fernbach, 76–​113. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980. Lyon, James K. Bertolt Brecht in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. MacDonald, Heather. Flower of the Prairie: George Grosz in Dallas. Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 2012. Maier, Charles, S. The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Mann, Erika, and Klaus Mann. Escape to Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1939. ———. The Other Germany. New York: Modern Age Books, 1940. Mann, Klaus. “Surrealist Circus.” American Mercury (February 1943): 174–​81. Mann, Thomas. “Address to the German People.” The Nation 160 (12 May 1945): 535. ———. “Bruder Hitler.” Das neue Tage-Buch 7 (1939): 306–​9. ———. “A Defense of Wagner.” Common Sense 9, no. 1 (January 1940): 11–​14.

Selected Bibliography

227

———. Doctor Faustus. Translated by John E. Woods. New York: Vintage Books, 1999. First published in 1947. ———. “Germany’s Guilt and Mission.” Decision 2, no. 1 (July 1941): 9–​14. ———. “I Accuse the Hitler Regime.” The Nation (6 March 1937): 259–​61. ———. “Open Letter to President Roosevelt.” Reprinted in Hitler’s Exiles: Personal Stories of the Flight from Nazi Germany to America, edited by Mark M. Anderson, 251–​52. New York: New Press, 1998. ———. Order of the Day: Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades. New York: Alfred A. Knopf: 1942. ———. Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. Translated by Walter D. Morris. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1983. ———. “That Man Is My Brother.” Esquire, vol. 11, March 1939, 31, 132–​33. ———. Thomas Mann’s Addresses Delivered at the Library of Congress, 1942–​1949. Washington DC: Library of Congress, 1963. Margot, Louis, III. “ ‘The Dallas Express’: A Negro Newspaper. Its History, 1892–​1971, and Its Point of View.” MS Thesis, East Texas State University, 1971. Markowitz, Norman D. The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941–​1948. New York: Free Press, 1973. Marquis, Alice Goldfarb. Alfred H. Barr, Missionary for the Modern. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989. Martin, Richard. Fashion and Surrealism. New York: Rizzoli, 1987. Mauch, Christof. The Shadow War against Hitler: The Covert Operations of America’s Wartime Secret Intelligence Service. Translated by Jeremiah Riemer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. McBride, Henry. “George Grosz: Becalmed Petrel.” Art News 52, no. 10 (February 1954): 27, 52. McCloskey, Barbara. “Cartographies of Exile.” In Exile and Otherness: New Approaches to the Experience of the Nazi Refugees, edited by Alexander Stephan, 135–​52. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005. ———. “Dialectic at a Standstill: East German Socialist Realism in the Stalin Era.” In Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures, edited by Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann, 104–​17. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2009. ———. “Exile for Hire: George Grosz in Dallas.” In Caught by Politics: German Exiles and American Visual Culture in the 1930s and 1940s, edited by Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick, 33–​60. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ———. “From the Frontier to the Wild West: German Artists, American Indians, and the Spectacle of Race and Nation in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” In I Like America, edited by Pamela Kort, 299–​321. Frankfurt am Main: Schirn Kunsthalle, 2006. ———. George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. ———. “Hitler and Me: George Grosz and the Experience of German Exile.” In Exil: Transhistorische und transnationale Perspektiven, edited by Helmut Koopmann and Klaus Dieter Post, 243–​258. Paderborn, Germany: Mentis, 2001. McGee, Reece. “Texas: The Roots of the Agony . . . ,” The Nation 197 (21 December 1963): 427–​31. McKinzie, Richard D. The New Deal for Artists. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973. Mesch, Claudia. Modern Art at the Berlin Wall: Demarcating Culture in the Cold War Germanys. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2009. Mitchell, Maria. “Materialism and Secularism: CDU Politicians and National Socialism, 1945–​1949.” Journal of Modern History 67, no. 2 (June 1995): 278–​308. Möckel, Birgit. “Das Ende der Menschlichkeit: George Grosz’ Zeichnungen, Lithographien und Aquarelle aus Anlaß der Ermordung Erich Mühsams.” Schriften der Erich-Mühsam-Gesellschaft 13 (1997): 5–​36. ———. George Grosz in Amerika, 1932–​1959. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997. Moeller, Robert G. “Remembering the War in a Nation of Victims: West German Pasts in the 1950s.” In The Miracle

228

Selected Bibliography

Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–​1968, edited by Hanna Schissler, 83–​109. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Müller, Melissa, and Monika Tatzkow. Lost Lives, Lost Art: Jewish Collectors, Nazi Art Theft, and the Quest for Justice. New York: Vendome Press, 2009. Naumann, Uwe, and Michael Töteberg, eds. Ulrich Becher / George Grosz, Flaschenpost: Geschichte einer Freundschaft. Basel: Lenos Verlag, 1989. Nerdinger, Winfried. “Bauhaus Architecture in the Third Reich.” In Bauhaus Culture from Weimar to the Cold War, edited by Kathleen James-Chakraborty, 139–​52. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Neugebauer, Rosamunde. George Grosz: Macht und Ohnmacht satirischer Kunst: Die Graphikfolgen “Gott mit uns,” Ecce homo, und Hintergrund. Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1993. Niederhofer, Ulrike. Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Expressionismus in der bildenden Kunst im Wandel der politischen Realität der SBZ und der DDR 1945–​1989. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996. O’Connor, John, Jr. “Presenting Karl Hofer.” Carnegie Magazine (January 1940): 246–​48. Olden, Rudolf. Hitler: A Biography. New York: Covici-Friede, 1936. Orlow, N. “Wege und Irrwege der modernen Kunst.” Tägliche Rundschau, 20 January 1951. Ortega y Gasset, José. The Dehumanization of Art and Notes on the Novel. Translated by Helene Weyl. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948. First published in Madrid, 1925. Papenbrock, Martin. “Entartete Kunst,” Exilkunst, Widerstandkunst in westdeutschen Ausstellungen nach 1945: Eine kommentierte Bibliographie. Weimar: VDG, 1996. ———. “Kunstgeschichtliche Forschung und Lehre im Nationalsozialismus.” In Kunstgeschichte im Nationalsozialismus: Beiträge zur Geschichte einer Wissenschaft zwischen 1930 und 1950, edited by Nikola Doll, Christian Fuhrmeister, and Michael Sprenger, 30–​35. Weimar: VDG, 2005. Papenbrock, Martin, and Gabriele Saure, eds. Kunst des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts in deutschen Ausstellungen. Vol. 1: Ausstellungen deutscher Gegenwartskunst in der NS-Zeit: Eine kommentierte Bibliographie. Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2000. ———, eds. Kunst des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts in deutschen Ausstellungen. Vol. 2: Antifaschistische Künstler/innen in Ausstellungen der SBZ und der DDR. Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Gesiteswissenschaften, 2000. Persinger, Cindy. “Reconsidering Meyer Schapiro and the New Vienna School.” Journal of Art Historiography 3 (December 2010): 1–​17. Peters, Olaf. Neue Sachlichkeit und Nationalsozialismus: Affirmation und Kritik, 1931–​1947. Berlin: Reimer, 1998. ———. “Rudolf Schlichters Das Abenteuer der Kunst, oder: Der Künstler als Kunsthistoriker.” In Kunstgeschichte nach 1945: Kontinuität und Neubeginn in Deutschland, edited by Nikola Doll, Ruth Heftrig, Olaf Peters, and Ulrich Rehm, 125–​36. Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2006. Petropoulos, Jonathan. The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Phillips, Michael. White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841–​2001. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Pike, David. German Writers in Soviet Exile, 1933–​1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. Piscator, Erwin. George Grosz, 1893–​1959. West Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1961. Platt, Susan Noyes. Art and Politics in the 1930s: Modernism, Marxism, Americanism: A History of Cultural Activism during the Depression Years. New York: Midmarch Press, 1999. ———. “Gambling, Fencing, and Camouflage: Homer Saint-Gaudens and the Carnegie International, 1922–​1950.” In International Encounters: The Carnegie International and Contemporary Art, 1896–​1996, edited by Vicky A. Clark, 66–​91. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 1996. Pohl, Frances K. Ben Shahn: New Deal Artist in a Cold War Climate, 1947–​1954. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989.

Selected Bibliography

229

Puma, Fernando. We Challenge War Art. New York: Puma Gallery, 1943. Reid, Susan E. “Toward a New (Socialist) Realism: The Re-engagement with Western Modernism in the Khrushchev Thaw.” In Russian Art and the West: A Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture, and the Decorative Arts, edited by Rosalind P. Blakesley and Susan E. Reid, 217–​39. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007. Reinhold, Ursula, Dieter Schlenstedt, and Horst Tanneberger, eds. Erster deutscher Schriftstellerkongreß: Protokoll und Dokumente. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1997. Rewald, Sabine. Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Roeder, George H., Jr. The Censored War: American Visual Experience during World War II. New Haven. CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Rosenberg, Harold. “The American Action Painters.” Art News (December 1952): 22ff. Rossinow, Doug. Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Saehrendt, Christian. “The Art of the Brücke as a Political Issue.” In New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History, edited by Christian Weikop, 221–​36. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. Said, Edward W. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. ———. “Reflections on Exile.” In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, edited by Russell Ferguson, et al., 357–​66. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Saint-Gaudens, Homer. “Pictorial Tolerance: A Review of the 1938 International.” Carnegie Magazine 12, no. 5 (October 1938): 131–​43. Sandler, Irving. The Triumph of American Painting. New York: Praeger, 1970. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956. ———. Existentialism Is a Humanism. Translated by Carol Macomber. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. First published in 1945. ———. “The Search for the Absolute.” In Alberto Giacometti, Alberto Giacometti: Sculptures, Paintings, Drawings. New York: Pierre Matisse Gallery, 1948. Sawin, Martica. Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945–​1948. Translated by Kelly Barry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Schoenhals, Kai P. The Free Germany Movement: A Case of Patriotism or Treason? New York: Greenwood, 1989. Scholdt, Günter. Autoren über Hitler: Deutschsprachige Schriftsteller 1919–​1945 und ihr Bild vom “Führer.” Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1993. Schuster, Peter-Klaus, ed. Die “Kunststadt” Munich 1937: Nationalsozialismus und “Entartete Kunst.” Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1987. ———, ed. George Grosz: Berlin–​New York. Berlin: Ars Nicolai, 1994. Schutze, Jim. The Accommodation: The Politics of Race in an American City. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1986. Schwartz, Frederic J. Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Schwarzschild, Leopold. “Der Tag danach.” Das neue Tage-Buch 7, no. 29 (15 July 1939): 682–​86. Scott-Smith, Giles. “ ‘A Radical Democratic Political Offensive’: Melvin J. Lasky, Der Monat, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom.” Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 2 (2000): 263–​80. Sears, Elizabeth, and Charlotte Schoell-Glass. “An Émigré Art Historian and America: H. W. Janson.” Art Bulletin 95, no. 2 (June 2013): 219–​42. Sedlmayr, Hans. Verlust der Mitte: Die bildende Kunst des 19. Und 20. Jahrhunderts als Symbol der Zeit. Salzburg: Otto

230

Selected Bibliography

Müller Verlag, 1948. Published in English translation as Art in Crisis: The Lost Center, translated by Brian Battershaw. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1958. Siefkin, Heinrich. “Thomas Mann’s Essay ‘Bruder Hitler.’ ” German Life and Letters 35 (1982): 165–​81. Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2002. Staniszewski, Mary Anne. The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Stehlé-Akhtar, Barbara. “From Obscurity to Recognition: Max Beckmann and America.” In Max Beckmann in Exile, edited by Matthew Drutt, 21–​55. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1996. Stephan, Alexander. “Communazis”: FBI Surveillance of German Émigré Writers. Translated by Jan van Heurck. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Originally published as Im Visier des FBI: Deutsche Exilschiftsteller in den Akten amerikanischer Geheimdienste. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1995. ———. Die deutsche Exilliteratur, 1933–​1945. Nördlingen, Germany: Beck’sche Elementarbücher, 1979. ———, ed. Exile and Otherness: New Approaches to the Experience of the Nazi Refugees. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005. Stonard, John-Paul. Fault Lines: Art in Germany 1945–​1955. London: Ridinghouse, 2007. Strauss, Herbert A. “The Movement of People in a Time of Crisis.” In The Muses Flee Hitler: Cultural Transfer and Adaptation, 1930–​1945, edited by Jarrell C. Jackman and Carla M. Borden, 45–​59. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983. Tashjian, Dickran. A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde, 1920–​1950. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995. Tower, Beeke Sell. Envisioning America: Prints, Drawings and Photographs by George Grosz and His Contemporaries, 1915–​ 1933. Cambridge, MA: Busch-Reisinger Museum, 1990. Troy, Gil. “From Literary Gadfly to Jewish Activist: The Political Transformation of Ben Hecht.” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 40, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 431–​49. Underwood, Sharry. “Ballet Ballads.” Dance Chronicle 9, no. 3 (1986): 279–​327. Vaget, Hans Rudolf. “ ‘German’ Music and German Catastrophe: A Re-reading of Doktor Faustus.” In A Companion to the Works of Thomas Mann, edited by Herbert Lehnert and Eva Wessell, 221–​44. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Van Dyke, James A. Franz Radziwill and the Contradictions of German Art History, 1919–​1945. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. ———. “ ‘Neue Deutsche Romantik’ zwischen Modernität, Kulturkritik und Kunstpolitik, 1929–​1937.” In Adolf Dietrich und die Neue Sachlichkeit in Deutschland, edited by Dieter Schwarz, 137–​65. Winterthur, Switzerland: Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 1994. ———. “Something New on Nolde, National Socialism, and the SS.” Kunstchronik 65, no. 5 (May 2012): 265–​70. ———. “Torture and Masculinity in George Grosz’s Interregnum.” New German Critique vol. 40, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 137–​65. Viereck, Peter. “Hitler and Richard Wagner.” Common Sense 8, no. 11 (November 1939): 3–​6. ———. “Hitler and Wagner.” Common Sense 8, no. 12 (December 1939): 20–​22. ———. Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941. Walter, Hans-Albert. “Leopold Schwarzschild and the Neue Tage-Buch.” Journal of Contemporary History 1, no. 2 (1966): 103–​16. Weiss, Andrea. “Communism, Perversion, and Other Crimes against the State: The FBI Files of Klaus and Erika Mann.” In Modernism on File: Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920–​1950, edited by Claire A. Culleton and Karen Leick, 221–​36. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Selected Bibliography

231

Welky, David. The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Werckmeister, Otto-Karl. “Hitler the Artist.” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 270–​97. Wheatland, Thomas. The Frankfurt School in Exile. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. White, John J., and Ann White. Bertolt Brecht’s “Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches”: A German Exile Drama in the Struggle against Fascism. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010. White, Mark Andrew. “One World: Advancing American Art, Modernism, and International Diplomacy.” In Scott Bishop et al., Art Interrupted: Advancing American Art and the Politics of Cultural Diplomacy, 30–​44. Athens, GA: Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, 2012. Wiggershaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Significance. Translated by Michael Robertson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Wiley, Nancy. The Great State Fair of Texas: An Illustrated History. Dallas: Taylor Publishing Company, 2000. Willkie, Wendell. One World. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943. Winkler, Kurt. “Allgemeine deutsche Kunstausstellung.” In Stationen der Moderne: Die bedeutenden Kunstausstellungen des 20. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland, 352–​77. Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1988. Wittner, Lawrence S. “Who’s Afraid of World Government?” Toward Democratic World Federation 19, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 1, 6. Wood, Christopher S. Introduction. In The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s, edited by Christopher S. Wood, 9–​72. New York: Zone Books, 2000. Wyman, David S. Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–​1941. 2nd ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. Zipes, Jack. The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the Tale in Sociocultural Context. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvy Publishers, 1983. Zühlsdorff, Volkmar. Hitler’s Exiles: The German Cultural Resistance in America and Europe. London: Continuum, 2004. Zuschlag, Christoph. “An ‘Educational Exhibition’: The Precursors of Entartete Kunst and Its Individual Venues.” In “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, edited by Stephanie Barron, 83–​97. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991. ———. “Entartete Kunst”: Ausstellungsstrategien im Nazi-Deutschland. Worms, Germany: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1995.

232

Selected Bibliography

Illustrations

1. George Grosz, Die Besitzkröten (The Toads of Property), from Das Gesicht der herrschenden Klasse (The Face of the Ruling Class), 1921  /  xvii 2. George Grosz, Maul halten und weiter dienen (Shut Up and Do Your Duty), from Hintergrund (Background), 1927 / xvii 3. George Grosz, Eclipse of the Sun, 1926; and Adolf Hitler, Old Abbey at Messines, 1914 / 12 4. George Grosz, Sonnenfinsternis (Eclipse of the Sun), 1926  /  13 5. George Grosz, Art Is Eternal, in Interregnum, 1936 / 16 6. George Grosz, So Cain Killed Abel, in Interregnum, 1936 / 17 7. George Grosz, Still Life with Mexican Hat and Mask, 1936 / 19 8. George Grosz, Draped Dummy, 1936 / 20 9. George Grosz, Polarity/Apocalyptic Landscape, 1936 / 23 10. George Grosz, Remembering, 1937 / 23 11. George Grosz on rooftop of his parents-in-law’s house, Savignyplatz 5, Berlin, 1928  /  24 12. George Grosz, Self-Portrait, 1937 / 24 13. George Grosz, Myself and the Barroom Mirror, 1937 / 25 14. George Grosz, A Piece of My World II (The Last Battalion), 1938 / 30

233

15. Karl Hofer, The Wind, 1937 / 31 16. Max Beckmann, Abfahrt (Departure), 1932–​33  /  39 17. George Grosz, God of War, 1940 / 46 18. “U.S. Foreign Trade,” 1940  /  56 19. George Grosz, I Woke Up One Night and I Saw a Burning House, 1942 / 59 20. George Grosz, I, I Was Always Present, 1942 / 60 21. George Grosz, Manifest Destiny, in Interregnum, 1936 / 61 22. George Grosz painting a caricature of Hitler for the annual ball at the Art Students League, 1943  /  63 23. George Grosz, The Mighty One on a Little Outing Surprised by Two Poets, 1942 / 65 24. George Grosz, The Wanderer, 1943 / 71 25. George Strock, Buna Beach, New Guinea, 1943 / 74 26. Fernando Puma, They Will Not Conquer, ca. 1943  /  76 27. William Gropper, Pearl Harbor, ca. 1942  /  77 28. Designer Herbert Bayer, curator Monroe Wheeler, “Global Strategy” section, Airways to Peace, Museum of Modern Art, 1943  /  83 29. Herbert Bayer and assistants installing the “outside-in” globe, Airways to Peace, 1943 / 84 30. “Outside-in” globe, Airways to Peace, 1943 / 84 31. Entrance, Airways to Peace, 1943 / 85 32. George Grosz, frontispiece for Sydney S. Baron, One Whirl, 1944 / 87 33. George Grosz, Hitler’s suicide in Sydney S. Baron, One Whirl, 1944 / 88 34. George Grosz, Tojo surrenders in Sydney S. Baron, One Whirl, 1944 / 88 35. George Grosz, world peace conference delegates in Sydney S. Baron, One Whirl, 1944 / 89 36. George Grosz, Cain, or Hitler in Hell, 1945 / 93 37. Photo of George Grosz painting Cain in his studio, Douglaston, Long Island, 1943  /  95 38. George Grosz, The Survivor, 1944 / 99 39. George Grosz, Peace I, 1945 / 104 40. George Grosz, No Let-Up, in Interregnum, 1936 / 105 41. George Grosz, Painter of the Hole I, 1948 / 113 42. Alberto Giacometti, photo of the artist’s studio, Plaster Study for the “Man Walking,” 1947, 1948 / 115 43. Alberto Giacometti, photo of the artist’s studio, Studies for the “Tall Figure” and “The Burglar,” 1947, 1948 / 115 44. George Grosz, The Invasion, 1948 / 119 45. George Grosz, Attacked by the Stick Men, 1947 / 119 46. George Grosz, The Gray Man Dances, 1948 / 122 47. George Grosz, The Gray Man Dances, 1949 / 123 48. Photo of George Grosz on Fifth Avenue in New York, 1948  /  125 49. Reproduction of George Grosz’s Drapery Study, 1936 / 129

234

Illustrations

50. George Grosz, In Front of the Hotel, 1952 / 137 51. George Grosz, Old Negro Shacks, 1952 / 139 52. George Grosz, A Glimpse inside the Negro Section of Dallas, 1952 / 140 53. Illustration of untitled Grosz caricature in bildende kunst, 1948 / 157 54. Illustration of George Grosz’s Der Einsiedler (The Hermit), 1934, in bildende kunst, 1949 / 159 55. George Grosz, illustration for Life, 1 March 1954  /  167 56. George Grosz, illustration for Life, 8 March 1954  /  168 57. Performance photo for Little Red Riding Hood and the Wicked Wolf, from Bilderbogen aus Amerika, 1954 / 170 58. George Grosz, design for the costume of the Wicked Wolf, 1954  /  171 59. George Grosz, “Der traurigste Mensch in Europa” (The Saddest Man in Europe), on the cover of Der Spiegel, 30 June 1954 / 173 60. George Grosz, Self-Portrait as Clown and Variety Girl, 1957 / 181

Illustrations

235

Index

2. Deutsche Kunstausstellung (1949), 158–​60

Advancing American Art (exhibition, 1946), 109–​10

20th-Century Fox Studios, 82

The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schwejk, xvi, 29, 44,

9/11, xvi, 191n77 1984, 120–​21, 144. See also George Orwell

200n77. See also Erwin Piscator Airways to Peace: An Exhibition for Geography of the Future (exhibition, 1943), 83–​86, 83fig., 84figs., 85fig.

AAA. See Associated American Artists

See also Museum of Modern Art

Abstract Expressionism, 4, 72, 102, 109, 127, 144, 175

Akademie der Künste, West Germany, 179

abstraction, in art: in the United States, xviii, 4, 5, 72,

Albright, Ivan, 64, 208n81

106, 132, 133, 177; in European art, 51, 99; opposition

Alien Registration Act, 47

to in the United States, 110, 125–​26, 142, 162, 177;

Allgemeine deutsche Kunstausstellung (exhibition, 1946),

as humanist, 130–​31, 132; in postwar Germany, 149, 152, 156, 162, 174, 175; Grosz’s views on, 112–​1 4, 127, 162; José Ortega y Gasset on, 117; Hans Sedlmayr on, 127–​28 Adenauer, Konrad, Chancellor of West Germany (1949–​63), 127, 155 Adorno, Theodor, xv, xviii, 7, 8, 48, 79, 131, 144. See also Dialectic of Enlightenment

148–​49 Allies: World War I, 1, 14, 15; World War II, 47, 72, 80, 82, 86, 88–​89, 93, 97, 100, 152, 174 American Academy of Arts and Letters, 169, 179. See also George Grosz: Honors and Awards American Artist (journal), 134 the American Century, 7, 8, 49, 54, 56, 57, 86, 100, 109, 182. See also Henry Luce

237

American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, 27–​28, 33, 42, 48. See also Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein American Legion, 142

ASSO. See Assoziation revolutionärer bildender Künstler Deutschlands Associated American Artists (AAA), 62, 64, 69, 81,

American Mercury (magazine), 70, 79

96, 97, 205n31; Grosz’s contract with, 52, 169, 177;

American National Exhibition (Moscow, 1959), 176–​7 7

exhibitions of Grosz’s art, 52–​53, 70–​72, 105–​9, 118–​

American Place Gallery, 3 American scene painting, 68, 72, 109 Amerikanische Malerei: Werden und Gegenwart (exhibition, 1951), 162

20, 134–​35, 142. See also Reeves Lewenthal Assoziation revolutionärer bildender Künstler Deutschlands (ASSO), 215n49 Auf bau (journal), 57, 80, 91

Andersen-Nexö, Martin, 163

Aufricht, Ernst Josef, 80, 171

Anderson, Benedict, 6

Auschwitz, 7, 93, 180, 203n130. See also concentration

Anschluss, 29, 55

and death camps, Nazi

anti-Comintern pact, 18

Ausgewanderte Künstler (exhibition, 1955), 151

anti-fascist resistance, 3, 14, 36; myth of, in East

Avery, Milton, 132

Germany, 146, 149

Axis alliance, 18, 58, 63, 67, 89

anti-formalism campaign: in the Soviet Union, 152–​3; in East Germany, 155–​56, 161–​62, 164 anti-German sentiment, in the United States, 33–​34, 36, 38, 45, 68 anti-Semitism, 14, 32, 92, 182; in the United States, 43–​4 4, 49, 51–​52, 186n12, 187n14, 193n120, 197n21, 203n130; in Dallas, 138; in Nazi Germany, 28;

Amerika Barlach, Ernst, 66, 128, 149, 152, 161 Baron, Sydney, 82, 86–​90 Barr, Alfred H., 4, 38–​40, 47, 64, 66, 125, 175. See also Museum of Modern Art

Frankfurt School study of, 28, 97; in the Soviet

Barrett, William, 116–​17

Union, 163; in East Germany, 163

Battle of Berlin, 97, 103

anti-Stalinism, among the American intelligentsia, 115–​16 anti-Zionism, 163 Arendt, Hannah, 121, 144

Baudelaire, Charles, 117 Bauhaus, 4, 175 Bauhaus, 1919–​1928 (exhibition, 1938), 34–​35, 40, 191n85. See also Museum of Modern Art: exhibitions

Armory Show (exhibition, 1913), 175

Baumeister, Willi, 130–​31, 149, 217n82

Art Digest (journal), 34, 71, 133

Baur, John, 99, 142–​43, 177. See also Whitney Museum

Art in Our Time (exhibition, 1939), 38–​42, 45, 66, 175. See also Museum of Modern Art Artists for Victory, 64 Artists for Victory (exhibition, 1942), 64. See also Metropolitan Museum of Art Artists in Exile (exhibition, 1942), 68. See also Pierre Matisse Gallery

of American Art Bayer, Herbert, 4; installation design for Airways to Peace exhibit (1943), 83–​86, 83fig., 84figs., 85fig. Baziotes, William, 124 BBC. See British Broadcasting Corporation Becher, Johannes R., 148, 155 Becher, Ulrich, 26, 27, 46, 107

Art News (journal), 76, 124, 133, 142, 143

Beckmann, Mathilde (Quappi), 39

Art of This Century gallery, 69, 174–​75. See also Peggy

Beckmann, Max, 39–​40, 39fig., 66, 130, 147, 149, 151,

Guggenheim Art Students League, New York, 62, 69. See also George Grosz: at the Art Students League Art under a Dictatorship, 165–​66. See also Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt

238

Ballet Ballads, 169–​70. See also Bilderbogen aus

Index

174, 176 Beethoven, Ludwig Van, 117 Behne, Adolf, 156 Benn, Gottfried, 18 Benton, Thomas Hart, 52, 64

Bergner, Elizabeth, 81, 91

Brown Shirts, 39. See also Sturmabteilung (SA)

Bergson, Peter, 79, 100

Die Brücke, 147, 149

Berlin blockade, 120, 160

Brueghel, Pieter, 21, 22, 30, 94–​95, 127, 164

Berliner Festspiele, 170–​71

Buchenwald, 120; as a Soviet internment camp, 155.

Berlin Wall, xviii, 146

See also concentration and death camps, Nazi

Berman, Eugene, 53

Buchhalter, Helen, 45

Biddle, George, 50–​51, 62–​63, 64, 73, 75, 92

Buchholz Gallery, New York, 40. See also Curt Valentin

Bierstadt, Albert, 42

Buna Beach, New Guinea (photo, 1943), 73, 74fig., 95–​

Bikini Atoll, 101 Bilderbogen aus Amerika, 169–​71. See also John Latouche bildende kunst (journal, 1947–​53), 153, 156–​57, 159–​60,

96. See also George Strock Burchfield, Charles, 41, 124 Bywaters, Jerry, 141–​42. See also Dallas Museum of Fine Arts

161 Bildende Kunst (journal, 1953–​91), 164, 176

Cain, or Hitler in Hell, (1945), 7, 17, 57, 62, 92–​98, 100,

Bishop, Isabel, 64

105, 145–​46, 150, 158, 178. See also George Grosz:

Bittner, H., 130

Paintings

Der Blaue Reiter, 147

Camus, Albert, 112, 113, 114, 116

Bloch, Ernst, 4, 90, 153

Carnegie Institute. See Carnegie Museum of Art

Blume, Peter, 64

Carnegie International Exhibition of Paintings. See

Bode, Arnold, 174. See also documenta

Carnegie Museum of Art

Bohrod, Aaron, 63, 74

Carnegie Magazine, 31

Bonheur, Rosa, 136

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Exhibitions:

book burning, in Nazi Germany, 3, 15

International Exhibition of Paintings, 1938, 31–​32;

Borchardt, Hermann, 2, 25–​26, 35, 70, 79, 81

International Exhibition of Paintings, 1939, 45;

Borgese, G. A., 58

International Exhibition of Paintings, 1941, 74;

Bosch, Hieronymus, 21, 22, 30, 127, 164

Painting in the United States, 1945, 99–​100

Bosworth, Helen, 71

Carroll, John, 132

Boyer, Richard O., 78–​79

Casablanca Conference (1943), 89

Braque, Georges, 124

Catholic Center Party, in Germany, 91

Brecht, Bertolt, xv, 6, 7, 21, 25, 28, 29, 36, 57, 79,

Catholic conservative movement, in Germany, 127

82, 93, 97, 111, 113, 116, 151, 153, 161, 169, 171; on

Central Broadcasting System (CBS), 66–​68, 96

Hitler, 15, 17, 36, 93; and the organized exile com-

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 160

munity, 80–​82, 89, 90, 91; and The Private Life of

Cézanne, Paul, 128

the Master Race, 80–​81; and Galileo, 107, 111; and

Chagall, Marc, 53, 68

the First German Writers congress, 153; and The

Chamberlain, Neville, British Prime Minister, 30

Trial of Lucullus, 161; before the HUAC (House

Chaplin, Charlie, 154

Un-American Activities Committee), 111

Chiang Kai-Shek, 87

Breker, Arno, 179

Chrichton, Kyle (Robert Forsythe), 107–​8

Breton, André, 47, 68, 69, 70

Christian Democratic Union, in West Germany, 127

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 38

Christian Front, 44. See also Father Coughlin

Brock, Bob, 141

Churchill, Winston, Prime Minister of Great Britain,

Brown, Milton, 53

89, 97, 100, 153

Brown, Wendy, 181

CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency

Browne, Byron, 132

Citizen’s Council, of Dallas, 138

Index

239

The City of Man (1941), 48–​49. See also New School for Social Research

Dada, 28, 40, 51, 92, 110, 159, 175. See also George Grosz: and Dada

civil rights movement, 103, 135, 138, 144

Daily Times Herald (of Dallas), 141. See also Bob Brock

Clay, General Lucius D., military governor of the U.S.

Daladier, Édouard, French Prime Minister, 30

Occupation Zone, 158

Dalí, Salvador, 4, 53, 69, 70, 133

Clifford, James, 6

Dallas Art Association, 142

Cohn, Erich, 58–​62, 93

Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (Dallas Museum of Art),

Cold War, xvi, xviii, 6, 7, 100, 102, 103, 121, 144, 153,

141, 142

180, 182; and cultural politics, xvi, xviii, 4, 102, 109–​

Darmstadt colloquy (1950), 130–​31

10, 177–​8; in the United States art world, 109–​10,

Daughters of the American Revolution, 142

115, 126, 131, 132, 138, 143, 163–​4; in the German art

Daumier, Honoré, 155

world, 8, 113, 146, 147, 151, 170; and totalitarianism,

Davidson, Jo, 142

120, 165–​66

Davis, Stuart, 64, 124

Cologne Sonderbund (exhibition, 1912), 147

Dawes Plan, 11

Combat (journal), 113. See also Albert Camus

De Beauvoir, Simone, 102–​3, 116

Committee for a Democratic Foreign Policy, 88. See

Decision (journal), 49, 58, 195n146. See also Klaus

also Mortimer Hays Communazis, 45 concentration and death camps, Nazi, xv, 32, 35, 97–​ 98, 121, 141; at Auschwitz, 7, 93; at Dachau, 25–​26, 79; at Oranienburg, 26; at Buchenwald, 120, 155; as Soviet detention camps, 120, 155, 215n42; Hannah

Mann degenerate art, 19, 40, 116, 127, 128, 135, 186n3; in post-war Germany, 147–​48. See also Gallery Fischer auction Degenerate Art (exhibition, 1937), 8, 9–​10, 11, 18, 31–​32, 38, 39, 41, 106, 165, 175, 187n25

Arendt on, 121, 144. See also Japanese American

Dehn, Adolf, 132

internment camps, in the United States

De Kooning, Willem, 124

Confessions of a Nazi Spy (film, 1939), 33

Demuth, Charles, 41

confiscation of art, in Germany, 9, 41

denazification, 100, 111, 120, 151

Congress for Cultural Freedom, 160. See also Der

Departure (1933), 39–​40, 39fig., 66. See also Max

Monat contemporary art. See Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston Coordination Council of French Relief Societies, 68. See also First Papers of Surrealism

Beckmann Derain, André, 40 Deuel, Wallace R., 67–​68 Deutsche Akademie der Künste, East Berlin, 154 Deutsche Kulturkartell, 42–​43

Copeland, Aaron, 154

Deutsche Künstlerbund (German Artists Union), 152

Corbino, Jon, 62

Devree, Howard, 131

cosmopolitanism, xiii, 8, 178, 182; in art, 152

Dewey, John, 91

Cotkin, George, 102–​3

Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), 131, 144. See also

Coughlin, Father (Charles), 44, 48

Theodor Adorno; Max Horkheimer

Council for a Democratic Germany, 90–​92

Dial Press, 78, 79, 107

Craven, Thomas, 92

Dies, Martin, 44–​45. See also House Un-American

Crawford, Ralston, 101

Activities Committee

cubism, 110, 152

Dix, Otto, 9, 116, 135, 147, 149, 155, 159, 161, 165, 176

Curry, John Steuart, 52, 64

DMFA. See Dallas Museum Fine Arts doctor’s plot, in the USSR, 163

Dachau, 25–​26, 79. See also Hermann Borchardt

240

Index

documenta (exhibition, 1955), 174–​75

Doktor Faustus, 150, 173. See also Thomas Mann Dondero, George, U.S. Senator, 110, 126, 131, 132, 142 Dos Passos, John, 1–​2, 3, 10, 103, 107, 165–​66

112–​13, 114, 118, 124, 126, 134, 143, 144; and Abstract Expressionism, 102 expressionism, German, 40, 106, 110, 175, 192n103,

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 117

192n104; and Max Beckmann’s art, 39; in postwar

Dove, Arthur, 162

Germany, 147–​48, 149, 156, 161, 176. See also George

Dramatic Workshop, 29, 79. See also New School for

Grosz: and expressionism

Social Research Dresden, bombing of, 145

Fadiman, Clifton, 91–​92

Duchamp, Marcel, 68

Federal Art Project, 41, 50

Dürer, Albrecht, 164, 217n77

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 44, 45, 58, 111,

Dymschitz, Alexander, 149, 152, 153, 161

163. See also J. Edgar Hoover Federal Constitution of the World, 154. See also world

East Germany: as a “victim of fascism,” 121, 146; Soviet

peace movement

control over, 126, 135, 146; socialist realism in, 126,

Federal Republic of Germany, founding of, 155, 174

158–​59, 161, 164, 176–​7 7; anti-formalism campaign

Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, New

in, 161–​2; responses to Grosz in, 146, 155–​58, 160,

York, 72

175–​7 7; Thomas Mann in, 155; founding of, 155, 158;

Feininger, Lyonel, 64, 124, 152

anti-Semitism in, 162–​63; refugees from, 163, 164;

Feuchtwanger, Lion, 21, 28, 80, 91, 153

Cold War cultural politics and, 149, 158, 160, 161,

Feuerbach, Anselm, 161

165, 170, 174–​75; Grimm’s fairy tales in, 218n108

Fiedler, Herbert, 154

Ehmsen, Heinrich, 149–​50, 154, 176

Final Solution, 79. See also Jews, destruction of

Einstein, Albert, 10, 42, 44, 58, 80, 154

Finley, David, director of the United States National

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 135, 138 Eisler, Gerhart, 189n56 Eisler, Hanns, 28, 35, 48, 111 Emergency Rescue Committee, 47, 68. See also Varian Fry Enlightenment, xv, xviii, 7, 48, 67, 94. See also Dialectic of Enlightenment Equality (journal), 44. See also Ludwig Wronkow

Gallery of Art, 62 First German Writers Congress (Erster Deutscher Schriftstellerkongreß, 1947), 153–​54, 160 First Papers of Surrealism (exhibition, 1942), 68, 70 Fischer, Ruth, 189n56 Flavell, M. Kay, 6, 106, 172 Force, Juliana, 62, 64. See also Whitney Museum of American Art

Ernst, Max, 4, 43, 47, 53, 68, 70, 126, 151

Ford, Henry, 48

Erster Deutscher Schriftstellerkongreß (First German

Foreign Nationalities Branch, U.S. government Office

Writers Congress, 1947), 153–​54, 160 Escape to Life (1939), 33. See also Erika Mann; Klaus Mann

of Strategic Services, 90 Foreign Policy Association, 55, 56, 196n1. See also Varian Fry

Esquire (magazine), 1–​2, 3, 36, 37, 165–​66

Forsythe, Robert. See Kyle Crichton

Evergood, Philip, 132

Fortune (magazine), 53, 100, 101

Evian-les-Bains conference, 190n71. See also refugee

France, fall of, 47, 49, 50, 68

crisis

Franco, General Francisco, 87

Existential America (2003), 102. See also George Cotkin

Frank, Bruno, 58

existentialism: and Jean-Paul Sartre, 101, 113, 114–​16,

Frankfurter, Alfred, 124

204n3; and Martin Heidegger, 116–​17, 207n58; and José Ortega y Gasset, 117–​18; in the United States, 102, 114–​16, 136; and Grosz’s art, 7, 8, 102, 103,

Frankfurt School for Social Research, 28, 97. See also Institute for Social Research Freedom Pavilion, 42–​43. See also World’s Fair

Index

241

Free German Art (exhibition, 1942), 66, 68. See also Museum of Modern Art Free Germany movement. See National Committee of Free Germany

globalism, xviii, 8, 48–​49, 83–​86, 154, 182; in art, 56, 72, 175 globalization, xi, xvi Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 26, 28, 66, 155

French Revolution, impact of on German history, 43, 128

Goodrich, Lloyd, 72

Freud, Sigmund, 28, 29, 42

Gorky, Arshile, 124

Freundlich, Otto, 151

Gottlieb, Adolf, 72, 124

Friedrich, Carl J., 160

Goya, Francisco, 1, 59, 71, 94–​95, 128, 155

Friedrich, Caspar David, 128

Graf, Oskar Maria, 44, 45, 153

Fry, Varian, 47, 55, 68

“the great controversy,” 151

Fulbright, J. W., U.S. Senator, 154

Great Depression, xvii, 2, 21, 34, 36, 50, 55, 62. See also

futurism, 110

world economic crisis Great German Art Exhibition, 11, 149

Galerie Mortizburg, Halle, 161

Greenberg, Clement, 4, 124, 160

Gallery Fischer auction (1939), 41, 175. See also Lucerne

Grimm’s fairy tales, 20, 170–​1; and Grosz’s art, 20, 41,

auction GDR (German Democratic Republic; Deutsche Demokratische Republik). See East Germany

Gropius, Walter, 4, 34–​35, 66, 191n85 Gropper, William, 18, 62, 64, 75, 77, 77fig.

Genauer, Emily, 125

Gross, Chaim, 142

Genet, Jean, 116

Groß, Clare (Grosz’s sister), 160

George, Manfred, 80

Groß, Marie Wilhelmine Louise (Grosz’s mother), 103,

Gerasimov, Aleksandr, 152 German American Bund, 33. See also Fritz Kuhn German-American Writers Association, 44 German Art of the Twentieth Century (exhibition, 1957),

150, 176–​7 7 Grosz, Eva, 2, 19, 29, 103, 120, 143, 146, 160, 169, 178, 179 Grosz, George: and “America,” 2, 135, 141; artistic

175. See also Werner Haftmann; Museum of Modern

training at the Dresden Academy, 20, 31; at the Art

Art

Students League, 2, 18, 51, 126, 160, 162, 169, 177;

German Communist Party (KPD), 88, 153. See also

and the Communist Party (KPD), xvi, xvii, 1, 2, 3, 5,

George Grosz: and the Communist Party (KPD)

11, 135, 146, 157, 163, 165, 177; trials of, xvi, 3, 184n3;

German Democratic Republic, founding of, 155

confiscation and destruction of his work and prop-

Germany: the “other” or “better” or “true,” 10, 28, 29,

erty in Nazi Germany, 3, 15, 28–​29; as “Cultural

33, 35, 47–​48, 54, 94, 98, 150; and defeat in WWI,

Bolshevist #1,” xvi, 29; loss of German citizenship,

1, 14, 47; remilitarization of, 18; and World War II,

3, 28–​29; as a persecuted modernist, 18, 21; as an

45, 46, 55; and debates on a post-Hitler order in, 29,

old master, 41–​42, 53, 56, 109; contributions to U.S

38, 45, 47–​48, 54, 88, 91, 94; denazification of, 100,

war bond drives, 64; and the grotesque in art, 20,

111, 120, 151; Allied bombing of, 201n97; defeat in

188n29; historiography on, xvi, 175; as a U.S. citizen,

WWII, 97; as a bulwark in the Cold War, 100. See

5, 32, 35, 41; misanthropy of, 5, 15, 16, 26, 33, 52,

also East Germany; West Germany

54, 57, 107, 114, 172, 176; struggle with depression,

Germany of Yesterday—​Germany of Tomorrow, 43. See also World’s Fair

242

76, 106, 145, 171; in East Germany, 218n96

92, 100; visit to Europe, 1951, 133, 160–​61, 174; visit to Europe, 1954, 143, 169–​74; return to Germany,

Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei), 3, 26, 80

1958, 179; death of, 5; and Dada, xvi, 1, 5, 8, 11, 78,

Giacometti, Alberto, 114, 115figs.

81, 82, 92, 109, 133, 160, 172, 173, 175, 179, 180; and

Gies, Ludwig, 152

expressionism, xvi, 5, 35, 106, 175; and Northern

Giotto, 21

Renaissance art, 5, 6, 70, 21–​22, 30, 53

Index

— ​Collages: Self Portrait as Clown and Variety Girl (1957), 8, 180, 181fig. —​Drawings and Lithographs: The Toads of Property (1921), xvi, xvfig.; Shut Up and Do Your Duty (1928), xvi, xvfig., 29, 44, 105; Art is Eternal (1936), 16, 16fig.; So Cain Killed Abel (1936), 17–​18, 17fig., 37, 62, 93,

—​Illustrations: contract for Esquire, 2; for Ben Hecht’s 1001 Afternoons in New York, 51–​52; for Sydney Baron’s One Whirl, 86–​90, 87fig., 88figs., 89fig.; in bildende kunst, 156–​57, 157fig., 159–​60, 159fig.; in Life magazine, 166–​69, 167fig., 168fig. —​Paintings: Eclipse of the Sun (1926), 11–​13, 13fig., 18,

94; Manifest Destiny (1936), 61–​62, 61fig.; No Let-Up

187n26, 12fig.; Polarity (1936), 22, 23fig.; Still Life

(1936), 104, 105fig.; Draped Dummy (1936), 20–​21,

with Mexican Hat and Mask (1936), 19, 19fig., 78;

20fig., 121–​2; Self-Portrait (1937), 22, 24fig.; Drapery

Remembering (1937), 22, 23fig., 25, 32, 70, 96, 103–​

Study, reproduced in Hans Sedlmayr’s Verlust der

04, 105; Myself and the Barroom Mirror (1937), 22,

Mitte (1948), 121, 128–​30, 129fig.

25fig., 70; Tramp (1937), 42; A Piece of My World II

—​Exhibitions: Images of Cultural Bolshevism (1933),

(The Last Battalion, 1938), 30–​31, 30fig., 34, 45–​46,

3, 185n7; An American Place Gallery (1935), 3;

47, 53, 59, 64, 70, 105, 111, 118; God of War (1940),

Degenerate Art (1937), 9–​10, 18, 19, 187n25; Carnegie

46–​47, 46fig.; I Woke Up One Night and I Saw a

International Exhibition of Paintings (1938),

Burning House (1942), 59–​61, 59fig., 69–​70; I, I Was

31–​32; Whitney Museum (1938), 32; Carnegie

Always Present (1942), 60fig., 61–​62, 76–​78, 105; The

International Exhibition of Paintings (1939), 45–​46;

Mighty One On a Little Outing Surprised by Two Poets

Walker Galleries (1939), 34–​35, 51; Art in Our Time

(1942), 64–​65, 65fig., 70, 112, 158; The Wanderer

(Museum of Modern Art, 1939), 41; World’s Fair,

(1943), 70, 71fig., 79; The Survivor (1944), 99–​100,

New York (1939), 42; Walker Galleries (1941), 51;

99fig., 105; Cain, or Hitler in Hell (1945), 7, 17, 57, 62,

Associated American Artists (1941), 52–​53, 69;

93–​97, 93fig., 98, 100, 105, 145–​46, 150, 158, 178;

Museum of Modern Art (1941), 52–​53, 69; Artists for

Peace I (1945), 103–​05, 104fig., 176; Peace II (1946),

Victory, (1942), 64; Whitney Museum (1942), 69–​

176–​7; Painter of the Hole I (1948), 112–​13, 113fig.,

70; We Challenge War Art (1943), 74–​78; Associated

114, 117, 121, 129; The Gray Man Dances (1949), 121–​

American Artists (1943), 70–​72, 81, 134; Painting

24, 123fig., 129–​30, 144, 168; Dallas Skyline (1952),

in the United States (Carnegie Museum, 1945), 99–​ 100; A Piece of My World in a World Without Peace

136 —​Photos of: in Berlin (1928), 22, 24fig.; at the Art

(1946), 104–​8, 109, 134, 135, 145, 158, 176; Advancing

Students League (1943), 62, 63fig.; painting Cain

American Art (1946), 109–​10; General German Art

(1943–​4 4), 94, 95fig.; on Fifth Avenue, New York

Exhibition, Dresden (1946), 149; Moderne deutsche

(1948), 124, 125fig.; on the cover of Der Spiegel (1954),

Kunst: ein Überblick (1947), 148; 150 Jahre soziale Strömungen in der Kunst (1947), 155; The Stick Men

172– ​73, 173fig. —​Portfolios: Gott mit uns (1920), 3, 184n3; Face of

(Associated American Artists, 1948), 124, 134, 136,

the Ruling Class (1921), 108; Ecce homo (1922), 3,

158, 176; Second German Art Exhibition, Dresden

165, 172, 184n3; Hintergrund (1928), 105, 184n3;

(1949), 158; Associated American Artists (1954),

Interregnum (1936), 16–​17, 61–​62, 64, 93, 105, 120,

142; Whitney Museum (1954), 142, 169, 175, 177;

158, 165–​66

USSR Academy of Arts in Moscow (1958), 176;

—​Published writings: “Man is Not Good—​But Rather

Revolutionary Art in Action (1958), 176; American

a Beast!” (1922), 128; “Among Other Things, A Word

National Exhibition, Moscow (1959), 176–​7 7

for German Tradition” (1931), 21; A Little Yes and a

—​Honors and Awards: Guggenheim fellowships

Big No (1946), 78, 79, 107–​9, 172; “Russlandreise”

(1937–​38), 18, 21, 51; Look magazine, “One of America’s Ten Best Painters” (1948), 124; American Academy of Arts and Letters (1954), 169; American Academy of Arts and Letters (1959), 179

(1953), 163–​64, 172; German translation of his autobiography (1954), 175–​76 —​Series: The Wanderers in NOTHINGNESS, 112–​13, 114, 116, 118, 123; The Stick Men, 102, 118–​2 4, 129,

Index

243

Grosz, George: Series (continued)

Hall, John, 134

42, 144

Händler, Georg, 161. See also Galerie Mortizburg

—​Set and Stage Designs: I Am a Camera (1955), 169; Bilderbogen aus Amerika, 169–​72, 170fig., 171fig. —​Statements and Letters: on the gullibility of the

HANL. See Hollywood Anti-Nazi League for the Defense of American Democracy Harper’s (magazine), 81, 125

German masses, 5, 15, 16, 26, 33, 48, 108; on the

Harper’s Bazaar (magazine), 115

“other” Germany, 29; on the superficiality and com-

Harris, Adolf, 134

mercialism of American culture, 5, 14, 51–​52, 56;

Harris, Jr., Leon, 102, 134–​41

on his “associative” approach to art, 78, 96, 99; on

Hart, George Overbury, 41

a “new humanity” in his art, 129–​30, 131, 143, 144,

Hart, Moss, 80

146, 177; on Hitler as his doppelgänger, 67–​68, 96;

Hartley, Marsden, 3, 10, 109, 162

as being “torn in two,” 71; on Thomas Mann, 26,

Hartung, Hans, 151, 152

172; on his “echt Deutsch” art, 58–​60, 68, 93, 178,

Haubrich, Josef, 147–​48

182

Hays, Mortimer, 87–​88

—​Watercolors: In the Park (1933), 41; Chef (1934), 41;

Hearst, William Randolph, 48, 52

Punishment (1934), 41; Attacked by the Stick Men

Heartfield, Gertrud, 160

(1947), 118, 119fig.; The Gray Man Dances (1948),

Heartfield, John, 3, 29, 151, 160, 161, 176

121–​22, 122fig.; The Invasion (1948), 118, 119fig.; Old

Hecht, Ben, 51–​52, 79–​80, 92, 98–​99, 100, 106,

and New (1952), 136; Shopping Center (1952), 136;

Heckel, Erich, 130, 158

Right Out of the Plains (1952), 136; The Growing City

Heidegger, Martin, 18, 112, 116–​17, 122, 207n58

(1952), 136; Dallas Broadway (1952), 136; A Dallas

Heiden, Konrad, 36–​37, 48, 191n92

Night (1952), 136; Streetcorner at Night (1952), 136;

Heilbut, Anthony, 5

In Front of the Hotel (1952), 136, 137fig., 140; Old

Herzfelde, Wieland, 15, 57, 90, 97, 111, 151; in Prague,

Negro Shacks (1952), 138–​39, 139fig., 141; A Glimpse

3; in New York, 80–​82, 153; in East Germany, 121,

Inside the Negro Section of Dallas (1952), 139–​41,

160; correspondence with Grosz, 3, 14, 16, 160; on

140fig.

Grosz’s art, 80–​82, 106–​7, 135

Grosz, Martin, 2, 19, 47

Hess, Rudolf, 87

Grosz, Peter, 2, 19, 47, 163

Hessische Post (periodical), 98

Groth, John, 75, 77, 132

Heute (periodical), 145

Grundig, Hans, 149, 176

Hindemith, Paul, 66

Grundig, Lea, 176

Hindenburg, General Paul von, 11

Grünewald, Matthias, 19, 127

Hirohito, Emperor of Japan, 62

Guggenheim, Peggy, 69, 174. See also Art of This

Hiroshima, 100, 107, 154

Century gallery Gugliemi, O. Louis, 110

Hirsch, Joseph, 132, 133, 142 Hitler, Adolf: appointment as Chancellor, 2, 11, 14; as

Guide for the Bedevilled, 92. See also Ben Hecht

an artist, 11–​1 4, 15, 17, 18, 36–​39, 48, 55, 67; mockery

Guilbaut, Serge, 72

of, 14–​15, 17; military service of, 13, 17; on modern

guilt: German, for Nazism, 7, 57, 91–​92, 100, 150–​51;

art, 9–​10, 11, 38, 40, 165; autobiographical manifesto

Allied, for persecution of Jews in Nazi occupied Europe, 80, 100; collective, in Germany after World War II, 97, 98, 100, 146 Gumperz, Julian, 28 Gwathmey, Robert, 110, 133

244

Haftmann, Werner, 174–​75

134, 143, 144, 146; Impressions of Dallas, 102–​3, 135–​

Index

of (Mein Kampf ), 9, 36; his World War I watercolor, Old Abbey at Messines, 11, 12fig., 13–​1 4 Hitler-Stalin pact (1939), 42, 45. See also Nazi-Soviet pact Hobson, Laura, 43

Hochschule für bildende Kunst, 149, 154. See also Heinrich Ehmsen Hofer, Karl, 31–​32, 31fig., 130, 148, 149, 152, 161, 217n82 Hollywood Anti-Nazi league (HANL), 189n50 Hollywood Ten, 111 Holtzhauer, Helmut, state commissioner for art affairs, East Germany, 164 Hoover, J. Edgar, 44, 58. See also Federal Bureau of Investigation Hopper, Edward, 124, 133 Horkheimer, Max, xv, xviii, 7, 28, 48, 90, 97, 131, 144. See also Dialectic of Enlightenment House of German Art, Munich, 11, 162 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 44–​45, 110–​11, 161 Howe, Quincy, 67. See also Central Broadcasting System (CBS)

Jähner, Horst, 175–​76 Janis, Sidney, 69 Jannasch, Dr., senator for education, Berlin, 169 Janson, H. W., 108–​9, 124, 198n43 Japan, 55, 56, 67, 72, 175; and the attack on Pearl Harbor, 56, 64, 77; and the anti-Comintern pact, 18; government sponsorship of art in, 50 Japanese American internment camps, in the United States, 58 Jewell, Edward Alden, 52, 69–​70, 71–​72 Jews: persecution of in Nazi Germany, xvi, 14, 15, 17, 32–​33, 43, 92; in Nazi occupied Europe, 29, 52, 66, 91; Hitler’s views on, 36; destruction of, 67, 79–​80, 93, 100, 197n21, 203n130; persecution of in East Germany, 163. See also anti-Semitism Johnson, Alvin, 27–​28, 49, 91, 169. See also New School for Social Research Jones, Joe, 18, 63

HUAC. See House Un-American Activities Committee

Julien Levy Gallery, New York, 69

Huelsenbeck, Richard, 28, 92, 118

Justice Department, U.S., 58

humanism, xvi, xviii, 7, 46, 49, 53, 57, 116, 155, 164; democratic, xvi, 21, 58; in art, 126, 130, 132–​34, 156,

Kaf ka, Franz, 112, 117

162; socialist, in the arts, 176

Kandinsky, Wassily, 9, 175

Hütt, Wolfgang, 176

Kant, Immanuel, 28 Kaufmann, Sydney, 133

IBM (International Business Machines), 43. See also World’s Fair

Kazin, Alfred, 160 Kennedy, Joseph P., 48, 52

ICA. See Institute of Contemporary Art

Kesten, Hermann, 160

Institute for Social Research, 28, 97. See also Frankfurt

Khrushchev, Nikita, Soviet Premier, 176, 177

Institute for Social Research

Kiesler, Frederick, 174

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 124–​26, 132

Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 40–​41

Institute of Modern Art. See Institute of Contemporary

Kitchen Debate, 177. See also American National

Art

Exhibition

Internationale Literatur (journal), 156

Klee, Paul, 9, 41, 151, 152, 174, 175

International Revolutionary Theater Union, Moscow,

Koestler, Arthur, 160

29. See also Erwin Piscator International Workers’ Aid, 163. See also Willi Münzenberg

Kokoschka, Oskar, 174 Kolbe, Georg, 149, 152 Kollwitz, Käthe, 9, 66, 149, 152, 155, 161, 176

Iron Curtain, 100, 153, 166–​68

Köln Kunstverein (Cologne Art Association), 147

Isherwood, Christopher, 169

König, Hannes, 159

isolationism: and the United States, 10, 28, 43, 44,

Kootz, Sam, 72

45, 48–​50, 56, 64, 72, 82; and the United States art

Korean War, 131, 135, 160

world, 68

Korowicz, Marek Stanislaw, 166–​69

Itten, Johannes, 130

KPD. See German Communist Party

Index

245

Kralik, Hans, 43

Lippmann, Walter, 14, 49–​50, 86, 90, 186n11

Kramer, Sr., Arthur, 137

Lipton, Seymour, 75

Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass, 1938), 32–​33. See

A Little Yes and a Big No, 107, 172. See also George

also Jews: persecution of in Nazi Germany

Grosz: Published writings

Kroll, Leon, 132

Look (magazine), 110, 124, 126

Kuhn, Fritz, 33

Lorre, Peter, 81, 91

Ku Klux Klan, 137–​38

Löwenstein, Prince Hubertus zu, 27–​28, 42, 47–​48.

Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands (Cultural Union for the Democratic Renewal of Germany), 148–​49, 153

See also American Guild for German Cultural Freedom Luce, Clare Boothe, 48

Kuniyoshi, Yasuo, 62, 110, 124, 132

Luce, Henry, 7, 49–​50, 56, 90, 100, 109

Das Kunstblatt (journal), 21. See also Paul Westheim

Lucerne auction, 41, 175. See also Gallery Fischer auc-

La Guardia, Fiorello, mayor of New York City, 43

Lüdecke, Heinz, 156

Lang, Fritz, 79

Lukács, Georg, 156

Lasky, Melvin J., 153, 160, 163, 214n33, 217n82

Luna and Loco, 118

Latouche, John, 169–​70

Lyons, Eugene, 200n72

tion

Laughton, Charles, 107, 111 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, in Nazi Germany (April 1933), 14

Magazine of Art, 45

Lea, Tom, 74

Mailer, Norman, 154

League of Nations, 48, 194n142, 196n1

Malerei im 20. Jahrhundert (exhibition, 1954), 174. See

Léger, Fernand, 53, 124

also Werner Haftmann

Lehmann-Haupt, Hellmut, 165–​66

Malik Verlag, 80. See also Wieland Herzfelde

Lehmbruck, Wilhelm, 9, 40–​41, 152, 175

Mann, Erika, 27, 28, 33, 45, 47–​48, 94

Lenin, Vladimir, 38, 39

Mann, Golo, 160

Lenya, Lotte, 35, 80

Mann, Heinrich, 27, 28, 91, 153

Leone, Leonard, 132

Mann, Katia, 26

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 28

Mann, Klaus, 27, 28, 33, 45, 47–​48, 49, 58, 70, 94

Leutze, Emanuel, 42

Mann, Thomas, xv, xviii, 6, 7, 10, 21, 35, 44, 53–​54,

Levi, Julian, 133

57, 66, 79, 80, 89–​90, 98, 113, 153, 178, 180–​2;

Levine, Jack, 124, 132, 177

Grosz’s encounters with, 26, 107, 172; as leader

Lewenthal, Reeves, 52, 62–​63, 94, 98, 99, 102, 134–​35,

of the German exile community in the United

143, 169, 177. See also Associated American Artists

States, 26–​28; and social democracy, 26–​27, 29,

liberalism, in the American art world of the Cold War,

57, 90, 195n145; on a one world order, 48–​49, 58,

132, 135 Life (magazine), 7, 49, 96, 103, 166–​9; on Grosz’s art,

246

MacLeish, Archibald, 62, 197n12

202n112; on U.S. xenophobia, 58; and the World’s Fair, New York, 42–​4 4; and the world peace move-

41; on Hitler as an artist, 14; and combat art, 73–​78;

ment, 154–​5; in East Germany, 155. Writings and

and the liberation of the camps, 97; on denazi-

addresses: Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918),

fication, 100; on existentialism, 115; on Abstract

26; “Appeal to Reason” (1930), 26, 37; “I Accuse the

Expressionism, 124, 126; on the world peace move-

Hitler Regime” (1937), 27; “That Man is My Brother”

ment, 154

(“Bruder Hitler,” 1939), 36–​38, 48, 94, 96–​97, 150;

Lindbergh, Charles, 48, 52

“Germany and the Germans” (1945), 100; Doktor

Lindner, Elizabeth, 120

Faustus (1947), 150–​51, 173

Index

Marxism, and existentialism, 115

Munkácsy, Mihály (Munkacshy), 133, 210n124

Masson, André, 4, 47, 53, 68

Museum of Modern Art, New York, 47, 50, 69, 124–​

Matisse, Henri, 40, 175

26, 132, 142, 175. Exhibitions: German Painting and

Mauer, Otto, 128

Sculpture (1931), 40; Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism

McBride, Henry, 143

(1936), 40; Bauhaus, 1919–​1928 (1938), 34–​35, 40,

McCarthy, Joseph, U.S. Senator, 131

191n85; Picasso retrospective (1939), 35; Art in Our

McCarthyism, 142, 177

Time (1939), 38–​42, 45, 66, 175; of Grosz’s art (1941),

McCausland, Elizabeth, 34–​35

52–​53; Free German Art (1942), 66, 68; Airways

Mehring, Walter, 2, 34, 107, 120, 153, 160

to Peace: An Exhibition for Geography of the Future

Meidner, Ludwig, 81

(1943), 83–​86, 83fig., 84figs., 85fig.; German Art of the

Mein Kampf, 9, 36. See also Adolf Hitler

Twentieth Century (1957), 175

Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit (exhibition, 1950), 130

Münter, Gabriele, 130

Menzel, Adolf, 70, 155, 161

Münzenberg, Willi, 163

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 67, 124. Exhibi-

Mussolini, Benito, Prime Minister of Italy, 62

tions: Life exhibit of combat art (1943), 73–​74; Advancing American Art (1946), 109–​10; American Painting

Nagasaki, 100, 107, 154

Today—​1950 (1950), 132; Artists for Victory (1942), 64

Nast, Thomas, 42

Michelangelo, 21

Nation (journal), 43

Mies Van Der Rohe, Ludwig, 4, 66

Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland (National

Miró, Joan, 126 Möckel, Birgit, 6

Committee of Free Germany, NKFD), 88–​91 National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP,

modernism, in art, 125–​26, 127; histories of, xvi, 4, 5,

Nazi Party), 184n4; Hitler’s founding role in, 17; vil-

40; as democratic freedom, xviii, 40–​41, 42, 51, 56,

ification of Grosz, xvi–​x vii, 3, 28–​29; and the Röhm

127, 166; as persecuted, 105, 127, 151; reception of in

putsch, 15; cultural policy, 10–​11

postwar Germany, 147–​8; in existentialist theory, 117, 128; Cold War denunciation of in the United

NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 174, 218n108

States, 131, 132, 142, 144; in East Germany, 152, 156,

Nazi-Soviet Pact, 42, 45. See also Hitler-Stalin pact

161, 176

Nerlinger, Oskar, 161

Moll, Oskar, 152

Neue Jugend (journal), 82

Molotov, Vyacheslav, 87

Neue Sachlichkeit, 11, 21, 30, 40, 109. See also New

MoMA. See Museum of Modern Art

Objectivity

Der Monat (periodical), 160, 163–​64, 172

Neues Deutschland (periodical), 157–​58, 161

Mondrian, Piet, 53

Das Neue Tage-Buch (journal), 37–​38

Monk, Egon, 171

Die neue Zeitung (periodical), 158

Morgenthau Plan, for postwar Germany, 91, 202n120

Neumann, Franz L., 160

Morley, Grace McCann, 77. See also San Francisco

Neven DuMont, Mark, 103

Museum of Art Mortimer, Raymond, 124 Moscow show trials, 16, 45, 120

New Deal, 44, 50, 86, 110, 132 New Frontiers in American Painting (exhibition, 1943), 72. See also Sam Kootz

Muhlen, Norbert, 160

New Leader (periodical), 153

Mühsam, Erich, 26

Newman, Barnett, 72

Münchner Zeitung (periodical), 98

New Masses (journal), 90, 107–​108

Muni, Paul, 80

New Objectivity, 11, 21, 30, 40, 109. See also Neue

Munich Agreement (or Accords), 30, 49

Sachlichkeit

Index

247

New Republic (magazine), 50–​51 New School for Social Research, 27, 28, 29, 36, 49, 169; Dramatic Workshop of, 29, 79; Studio Theater of, 81. See also Alvin Johnson

Official Military Government of the United States (OMGUS), in Germany, 146, 158, 160 OMGUS. See Official Military Government of the United States

Newspeak, 120, 121. See also George Orwell

One Whirl (1944), 82, 86–​90. See also Sydney Baron

Newsweek (magazine), 97

One World (1943), 82–​83, 86. See also Wendell Willkie

New Yorker Magazine, 78–​79, 81, 107

one world (order), xviii, 7, 8, 57, 82–​83, 86, 100, 102,

New Yorker Staatszeitung und Herold (periodical), 32, 47–​48 New York Post, 62 New York Times: on degenerate art, 11, 18; on Nazi Germany, 14; on Grosz, 18, 32, 52, 69, 71–​72; on

103, 107, 109, 144, 175, 177, 180. See also globalism “Operation Talk Back,” 158. See also General Lucius D. Clay Oranienburg, 26. See also concentration and death camps, Nazi

World War II, 56, 86, 88, 90, 91; on abstract art, 72;

Orcagna, 21

on postwar Germany, 131, 152, 161, 163

Orlow, N., 161

Night of the Long Knives (June 1934), 15, 17. See also Röhm putsch Nixon, Richard, Vice President of the United States, 177

Ortega y Gasset, José, 117–​18, 127 Orwell, George, 120–​21, 144, 160 The Other Germany (1940), 47–​48. See also Erika Mann; Klaus Mann

NKFD. See Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland

OWI. See Office of War Information

Nolde, Emil, 18, 40, 66, 148

Ozenfant, Amédée, 53

Northern Renaissance art: and the work of Grosz, 5, 6, 19, 21–​22, 30, 53; and the writings of Hans Sedlmayr,

Palestine Pavilion, 43. See also World’s Fair

128; and East German socialist realism, 164

Palm, Horst, 157–​58

NSDAP. See National Socialist German Workers Party

Panofsky, Erwin, 217n82

nuclear warfare: and the US annihilation of Hiroshima

Paris peace conference (1919), 1

and Nagasaki, 100, 101, 107, 154; and the build up of

Parker, Dorothy, 154

the Soviet arsenal, 131, 153

Parsons, Robert, 134. See also Associated American

Nuremberg Laws, 15, 43, 51,

Artists

Nuremberg Party Rally, 15

Partisan Review (journal), 116, 118, 124, 153

Nuremberg trials, 108, 111, 120, 145

Paul, Wolfgang, 145–​46, 178

Nyson, Benedict, 11, 18

peace movement. See world peace movement Pearl Harbor, Japanese attack on, 56, 57–​58, 63, 64,

occupation zones of postwar Germany: British, 149, 153; Soviet, 120, 146–​49, 155; western, 147–​8; U.S, 149, 153, 158; French, 149 Office of Facts and Figures, U.S. government, 62, 197n12 Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs, U.S. government, 109. See also Advancing American Art Office of Strategic Services, U.S. government Foreign Nationalities Branch of, 90 Office of War Information (OWI), U.S. government, 62, 63, 73, 98, 197n12

248

Index

67, 77 Pearl Harbor (ca. 1942), 77, 77fig. See also William Gropper Pechstein, Max, 149, 152, 154, 161, 176 Pepper, Claude, U.S. Senator, 154 Pétain, Marshal Henri-Philippe, premier of occupied France, 87 Peter, Anneliese, 103, 160 Picasso, Pablo, 99, 117, 124, 126, 142, 175, 176; retrospective of at the Museum of Modern Art (1939), 35; and the world peace movement, 154; Grosz’s views on, 99, 126

Pieck, Wilhelm, president of the German Democratic Republic, 155

Röhm, Ernst, 15. See also Night of the Long Knives Röhm putsch, 15, 17

Pierre Matisse Gallery, 68, 114

Rönnebeck, Arnold, 70

Piscator, Erwin, xvi, 29, 35, 44, 57, 79, 80, 91, 171

Roosevelt, Franklin D., president of the United States,

Pollock, Friedrich, 28

44–​45, 49, 50, 57, 58, 82, 85, 87, 113; on the refugee

Pollock, Jackson, 4, 124, 126, 162, 177

crisis, 32, 43; on art and democracy, 41; on U.S. iso-

Poor, Henry Varnum, 62–​63, 132

lationism, 72–​73; Grosz’s support for, 49, 93; at the

pop art, 180

Casablanca conference, 89; at the Yalta conference,

Popular Front: of the Comintern, 33, 154; of the SED, 148

97; death of, 97 Rose, Billy, 80

Prendergast, Maurice, 41

Rosenberg, Harold, 102

The Private Life of the Master Race, 80–​81. See also

Rothko, Mark, 4, 72, 162

Bertolt Brecht proletarian revolutionary art, 156–​57, 176

Rowan, Edward, director of the United States Treasury Department Section of Fine Arts, 62

Proletkult, 164

Rowohlt, 172

Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), 195n154

Russell, Bertrand, 160

Puma, Fernando, 74–​78, 105

“Russlandreise,” 163–​64. See also George Grosz: writ-

PWAP. See Public Works of Art Project racism: in the United States, 44, 49, 74, 103, 197n12;

ings SA. See Sturmabteilung

in Dallas, 135–​41, 144, 211n141. See also anti-Semi-

Said, Edward, xvi, 6

tism

Saint-Gaudens, Homer, 31

Radio in the American Sector (RIAS), 160

Sample, Paul, 74

Radio Free Europe, 166

Sandberg, Herbert, 155

Reader’s Digest, 79

Sandler, Irving, 4

Reality: A Journal of Artist’s Opinions, 133

Sandler, Marc, 129–​30, 131

Reality group, 133–​34, 162

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 77

refugee crisis, 32, 33–​34, 43, 47, 190n70, 190n71,

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 101, 103, 112, 113, 114, 115–​16, 160,

191n77 regionalism, in art, 68, 72, 109, 198n43 Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture), 40

204n3 Saturday Evening Post, 73, 79. See also Norman Rockwell

Reichstag fire, 3, 15

Schapiro, Meyer, 124, 208n97, 217n82

Remarque, Erich Maria, 42

Scharoun, Hans, 179

Revolutionary Art in Action (exhibition, 1958), 176. See

Scheibe, Richard, 149, 152

also Verband bildender Künstler

Schiaparelli, Else, 69

Rewald, John, 108

Schiller, Friedrich, 26, 28

Rhineland, remilitarization of, 15

Schlesinger, Arthur, 132. See also The Vital Center

RIAS. See Radio in the American Sector

Schlichter, Rudolf, 126–​27, 130, 135, 141, 176

Rivera, Diego, 142, 176

Schmalhausen, Lotte, 103, 160, 179

Roberts, Owen, United States Supreme Court Justice,

Schmalhausen, Otto, 99–​100, 103, 117, 121, 136, 160,

154

162–​63, 179

Robeson, Paul, 120

Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl, 149, 152

Robinson, Edward G., 80

Schoenberg, Arnold, 66, 79, 80

Rockwell, Norman, 73, 75, 79

Schreiber, George, 97

Index

249

Schultze-Naumberg, Paul, 21

ance with western powers, 121, 155, 177; one world

Schutze, Jim, 138

order visions of, 7, 8, 90, 175; and socialist realism,

Schutzverband bildende Künstler (Protective Union of

38, 110, 126, 152–​53, 156, 161, 164, 165–​66, 176; at

Pictorial Artists). See also Hannes König Schutzverband deutscher Autoren (Association of German Authors), 153 Schutzverband deutscher Schriftsteller im Exil (Association of German Writers in Exile), 45 Schuylenburg, Princess Helga Maria von (Princess Löwenstein), 27, 35 Schwarzschild, Leopold, 37–​38, 45

153–​54, 160; and nuclear armament, 131, 153; and the Cold War, 100, 102, 109, 120, 135, 153, 158, 163. See also Soviet occupation zone, of Germany Soviet Writer’s Congress (1934), 152 Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland (SMAD, Soviet Military Administration in Germany), 148–​49

Schwitters, Kurt, 151

Soyer, Raphael, 132, 133–​34, 162

Second German Art Exhibition. See 2. Deutsche

Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), 148,

Kunstausstellung SED. See Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands Sedlmayr, Hans, 127–​31, 133, 156, 208n97, 209n106

157, 158, 161, 162, 163, 164, 215n49 Special Committee on Un-American Activities, 44. See also House Un-American Activities Committee

Seligmann, Kurt, 53

Speicher, Eugene, 62, 132

Sennhauser, John, 132

Spengler, Oswald, 46, 127

Seurat, Georges, 128

Der Spiegel (magazine), 172–​74

Seven Seas Bookstore, 80. See also Wieland Herzfelde

Spiro, Eugen, 43

SFMoMA. See San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

SS St. Louis, 43, 193n120. See also refugee crisis

Shahn, Ben, 110, 124, 132, 197n12

Stalin, Joseph, 16, 64, 89, 97, 164, 176

Sheeler, Charles, 133

Stalinallee uprising, East Berlin, 1953, 164

Shirer, William L., 92, 118

Stalingrad, 72

Sintenis, Renée, 152

State Department, U.S., 47, 86, 90, 109–​10, 113

Slansky, Rudolf, 163

State Fair of Texas, 141

SMAD. See Sowjetische Militäradministration in

State Museum of Modern Western Art, Moscow, 152

Deutschland

Steinbeck, John, 63

Smith, David, 124

Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 117

Smith-Connally Act (1943), 82

Stevenson, Adlai, 135, 138

Soby, James Thrall, 68, 124

Stewart, Donald Ogden, 189n50

social democracy, 29, 53, 91, 148; in America, 195n145.

Stieglitz, Alfred, 3

See also Thomas Mann, and social democracy socialist realism: in Soviet art, 152, 153; in east German art, 152–​53, 155, 158, 159, 164, 176, 177

Stonard, John-Paul, 175 Stout, Rex, 91–​92 Strecker, Paul, 152

Social Justice (journal), 44. See also Father Coughlin

Streit, Clarence, 48, 56

The Society for the Prevention of World War III, 91.

Strempel, Horst, 155, 161

See also Rex Stout Soviet Academy of Arts, 152. See also Aleksandr Gerasimov

Strock, George, 73, 74fig., 95–​96 Studio Theater of the New School for Social Research, 80–​81

Soviet occupation zone, of Germany, 120, 146–​49, 155

Sturmabteilung (SA, Brownshirts), 15, 39

Soviet Union, xvi, xviii, 26, 38, 45, 82, 85, 86, 88, 111,

Sudetenland, annexation of, 30

121, 145, 149, 167–​68, 172, 177; and anti-fascist alli-

250

the World’s Fair, 42; and the world peace movement,

Index

Sullivan, Pegeen, 70–​72, 105, 107, 134–​35, 143

Sunday Union and Republican, Springfield, Mass., 34. See also Elizabeth McCausland surrealism, 4, 5, 40, 50–​51, 68–​70, 72, 110, 113, 115, 126, 127, 149, 152 Sweeney, James Johnson, 124 Swift, Jonathan, 1

United World Federalists, 154. See also world peace movement University in Exile, 27–​28. See also New School for Social Research U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (1943), 86. See also Walter Lippmann USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). See Soviet

Tägliche Rundschau (periodical), 161. See also N. Orlow

Union

Tanguy, Yves, 53, 68 Taylor, Francis Henry, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 124

Valentin, Curt, 40, 107, 192n106 Van der Weyden, Rogier, 19

Tchelitchew, Pavel, 53

Van Doren, Mark, 92

Theater Union, New York, 79. See also Bertolt Brecht

Verband bildender Künstler (Association of Pictorial

They Will Not Conquer (ca. 1943), 76–​7 7, 76fig. See also Fernando Puma

Artists), 176 Veterans of Foreign Wars, 142

Third German Art Exhibition (1953), 164

Viereck, Peter, 94, 194n137

Thomas, Norman, 48

Viertel, Berthold, 80, 89, 107

Thompson, Dorothy, 48, 91

View (journal), 113

Thrall, Victor, 75

The Vital Center (1949), 132. See also Arthur

Tillich, Paul, 90–​91

Schlesinger

Time (magazine), 13, 14, 34, 97, 100, 115, 153

Vogue (magazine), 115

Tojo, Hideki, General of the Japanese Imperial Army, 87

Völkischer Beobachter (periodical), xvi–​x vii, 184n4

Toller, Ernst, 28, 35, 36, 107

volksnähe art, 152, 159. See also socialist realism, in East

Toscanini, Arturo, 58 totalitarianism, 16, 58, 118, 120–​21, 153, 165–​66, 187n23 Treaty of Versailles, 14, 15, 47, 91

German art Von Molo, Walter, 98, 150, 151 Von Stauffenberg, Colonel Claus, 93, 145 Von Wicht, John, 132

Tribune for Free German Literature and Art in America, 80. See also Wieland Herzfelde

Walker, Maynard, 51. See also Walker Galleries

Troekes, Heinz, 152

Walker Galleries, New York, 34–​35, 51, 53

Troost, Paul Ludwig, 11

Wallace, Henry, Vice President of the United States,

Truman, Harry, President of the United States, 97, 110 Truman Doctrine, 120 Tussaud, Madame (Marie), 117–​18, 121

86, 210n117 Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010), 181. See also Wendy Brown Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne, 147

Uhlmann, Hans, 152

Walter, Bruno, 58

Union Now (1939), 48. See also Clarence Streit

war bond drives, United States, 64, 73

united nations, during World War II, 72, 83, 199n44

War Department, U.S., 62–​64, 73, 75, 85

United Nations, 154, 166; founding of, 97

Warsaw Pact, 218n108

United States: immigration policy of, 32, 47,

Watkins, Franklin, 124, 133

190nn70,73; as the “arsenal of democracy,” 57; xenophobia in, 57–​58, 65–​66, 68, 92. See also isolationism: and the United States

Watson, Thomas J., president of IBM, 43. See also World’s Fair Weber, Max, 75, 124, 142

Index

251

We Challenge War Art (exhibition, 1943), 75–​78, 105.

Wilson, Woodrow, President of the United States,

See also Fernando Puma

194n142, 196n1

We Fight Back (radio series), 80. See also Manfred

Wilsonianism, 48, 49–​50, 194n142, 196n1

George; Ernst Josef Aufricht

The Wind (1937), 31–​32, 31fig. See also Karl Hofer

Weil, Felix, 28, 35, 48, 53, 90, 97, 141

Winter, Fritz, 175

Weill, Kurt, 80, 169

Wittfogel, Karl, 28

Weimar in Exile, 106, 174

Wolfradt, Willi, 172

Wells, H. G., 48

Wols, 175

Wereschagin, Basil, (Weretschagin) 133, 210n124

Works Progress Administration (WPA), 41

Werfel, Franz, 66, 80

World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace,

West Germany (Federal Republic of Germany,

154. See also world peace movement

Bundesrepublik Deutschland): founding of,

world economic crisis, xvii, 2, 21, 34, 36, 50, 55, 62. See

127; Cold War cultural politics in, 146, 149, 164,

also Great Depression

170–​1; the art world in, 127, 162, 164, 174–​75, 179;

World’s Fair, New York (1939), 38, 42–​43, 69

responses to Grosz and his art in, 146, 170–​9; and

world government, 49, 154

Thomas Mann’s visit to East Germany, 155

World Jewish Congress, 66–​67, 91, 100, 197n21

Westheim, Paul, 21

world peace movement, 153–​54, 160

“We Will Never Die” (1943), 80. See also Ben Hecht

WPA. See Works Progress Administration

Wheeler, Monroe, 83

Wronkow, Ludwig, 44, 80

White, Arnott, 96 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 32, 62,

Yalta Conference, 1945, 97

69, 72, 132, 142, 169, 175, 177 Wiechert, Ernst, 120

Die Zeit (periodical), 147, 172

Willkie, Wendell, 49–​50, 82–​90, 109, 144

Zhdanov, Andrei, Communist Party secretary, 152

Wilson, Edmund, 107

Zhdanovshchina, 152

Wilson, Sol, 132

Zimmermann, Max, 152 Zweig, Stefan, 21, 42



252

Index

DESIGNER Nicole Hayward TEXT Scala DISPLAY Knockout COMPOSITOR BookMatters, Berkeley PREPRESS Embassy Graphics PRINTER AND BINDER QuaLibre