What I saw made me loathe most of my fellow men… (p.80)

A Small Yes and a Big No is the autobiography of the German artist George Grosz (1893-1959). It was first published in German in 1946. The version I’ve got is copyrighted 1955 and I think this was a later edition, with additional material, namely a long chapter describing a farcical visit to revolutionary Russia in 1922 during which the keen young Communist George met Zinoviev, Lunacharsky, the impressive Trotsky and the obviously sick Lenin.

There have been several translations of the work. I’ve got the excellent 1982 one, by Arnold J. Pomerans, which is in clear and colloquial English.

Grosz and Neue Sachlichkeit

Grosz emerged after the First World War as a merciless satirist of post-war Germany in the harsh new style which became known as Neue Sachlichkeit or ‘New Objectivity’. His brutal cartoons and paintings emphasised the corruption, greed and sexual depravity of post-war Berlin, highlighting the immorality of war profiteers, counting their cash and paying ugly courtesans while the streets outside were littered with grotesquely damaged war veterans.

Grosz had played a lead role in the Berlin wing of the Dada movement (1917-20), though this was known only to a relatively small number of art cognoscenti.

It was the popular albums of drawings he published in the 1920s which brought him fame and notoriety. In 1921 his withering collection Gott mit uns (‘God with us’), a scathing satire on German society, led to the artist being accused of insulting the army. He was taken to court, convicted and fined 300 Marks and all copies of the collection ordered to be destroyed.

In 1923 Ecce Homo, a volume of 100 lithographs depicting the seething corruption that had grown out of hyper-inflation and the political turmoil of the early 1920s, prompted the authorities to arrest Grosz again and charge him with offending ‘the moral sensibility of the German public’. Most of the original drawings were destroyed and Grosz and the publishers handed large fines. In 1928 he was again prosecuted for blasphemy after publishing anticlerical drawings.

He was, in other words, a notorious social irritant. Surprisingly, he doesn’t describe any of these trials in this autobiography.

Politics

In the last months of 1918 Grosz joined the so-called Spartacist League just as it renamed itself the Communist Party of Germany. He was arrested during the Berlin Communist uprising in January 1919, but escaped, using fake identification documents. None of this is in the autobiography either, which only mentions the deaths of the movement’s leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, famous events in their own right.

Instead his autobiography, looking back from middle age in American, glosses over the fierce political engagement of the young communist Grosz as naive.

Soon I, too, was making political speeches, not out of any conviction, but because everyone was expected to add his pennyworth, and because I had not yet learned better. All my political pronouncements were a jumble of cheap progressive phrases I had picked up from others, and which seemed to pour like honey from my lips. No wonder that I was quite often taken in by my own nonsense, by all the noises, spluttering, the twittering and braying I gave tongue to. (p.91)

In 1922 Grosz travelled to Russia with the writer Martin Andersen Nexø, the idea being the latter would write a book which Grosz would illustrate. They took an unconventional route, travelling by fishing boat across the Baltic with the result that, upon their arrival in Murmansk, were promptly arrested as spies. After some dicey moments with some thuggish local officials, their credentials were finally authenticated, and they were allowed to travel on to Petersburg. Here they met Soviet leaders like Grigory Zinoviev, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and Vladimir Lenin, who Grosz cheerfully dismisses as that ‘manipulator of the masses’.

This adventure takes up the 20 pages of chapter 11, and Grosz uses it to make abundantly clear how unimpressed he was with the abject poverty and ignorance of Russian peasants, and of the bullying brutality of the commissars they met.

In 1923 Grosz ended his membership in the KPD (also not mentioned in the book), though he continued to be bitterly critical of the bourgeoisie, the rich and, of course, of the growing right-wing in Germany.

In 1932 Grosz accepted an invitation to teach at the Art Students League of New York and spent the summer doing just that. He had always fantasised about America and it lived up to all his dreams. At the end of the term he sailed back to Germany long enough to persuade his wife that they should emigrate to the promised land and, in January 1933, he set sail with her back to New York. He departed just a week before Hitler came to power.

For years after wards friends and colleagues praised him for being so shrewd and timely, but he always insisted it was an incredibly lucky coincidence.

In America, Grosz determined to make a clean break with his past, and tried to completely change his style and subject matter. This explains why:

1. The illustrations in this book (which are in black and white and on poor quality paper) are heavily skewed towards his post-German work. Of the 11 illustrations, only two are from the 1920s i.e. his best period. All the work which made him famous is absent from this book.
2. There is no precise or detailed mention of the Communist Party nor his membership of it in the book. The Cold War was just kicking off when he wrote it. This explains why he either glosses over his political beliefs or dismisses them as idle student gibberish.

Throughout the book, from his earliest childhood, he reiterates his lifelong dreams about America, his love of Wild West cowboy stories, the fact he was nicknamed Leatherstocking for his love of the James Fenimore Cooper Mohican novels, and so on. This may well be true, but it has the net effect of making him seem like a good Republican all along, who only needed to sample the joys of capitalist New York before completely dropping all his schoolboy communism and becoming a fully paid up capitalist.

In this he reminds me of the famous composer Kurt Weill, who worked closely with Bertolt Brecht to create a series of fiercely left-wing musical pieces in Weimar Germany but, once he had fled to America, in 1935, also dropped all political involvement and sought to reinvent himself as a non-political composer of popular musicals.

Childhood

Given the notorious misanthropy of Grosz’s oeuvre the opening of the book comes as a surprise. The early chapters are a touching portrayal of life in the little Pomeranian town of Stolp where Grosz grew up, living close to nature and playing with the boys of his own age. I was very taken with his enthusiasms for comic books and adventure stories featuring Red Indians or soldiers, a taste which endured into adult life.

(Later there is a sad-comic account of his pilgrimage as an adult to the house of the legendary Karl May, author of the countless Westerns featuring the boys adventure hero, Old Shatterhand. Inevitably, the creator of this towering Western hero turns out to be a little old man shuffling round in carpet slippers.)

I was fascinated by the glimpses he gave of a provincial German childhood before the war, including the blood-curdling peep shows and ‘panoramas’ (i.e. models) of battlefields available at travelling fairs. A page is devoted to the once-in-a-lifetime arrival of Barnum and Bailey’s famous circus to the nearby town, complete with a wide range of ‘freaks’.

And there are evocative memories of watching the big trans-Europe express from Berlin to Petersburg stopping off at their provincial station to refuel, of glimpsing the rich people inside their luxury Pullman carriages, of being a small boy fantasising about their wonderful lives.

This background in pulp fiction, newspaper cartoons, collectible magazines, the provincialness of his life, all goes a long way to explaining the attitude of his work. His Dad looked after the local masonic Hall till he died when Grosz was 8, and his Mum became keeper of the local Hussars’ officers mess. It was not a comfortable middle-class family. There weren’t many books in the house (only as a student did he discover literature), little or no music of any kind, and his parents brought him up in a plain and devout Lutheran faith.

Plain, simple, no bullshit, no frills, no mystical hocus-pocus, young George grew up determined to depict life how he saw it – and he was unfortunate to live through some very ugly times.

The Academy

It’s all downhill from these childhood memories, as the very young (17) Grosz manages to get scholarships to attend stuffy art academy in Dresden (1909-11), then the School of Arts and Crafts in Berlin (1912-14).

The anecdotes from this period give a strong flavour for the lifeless academic teaching imposed by a load of bearded old men who forced their students to arrive precisely on time in order to spend eight hours a day meticulously drawing tatty old plaster casts of busts or classical statues.

He calls the teachers ‘caricatures, misfits and failures’ (p.29) and gives terrifying/comic descriptions of them, their imposing presences, their swearing and violence, their ultimate ineffectualness.

What really comes over is Grosz’s interest in characters, the more grotesque the better.

• Such as his friend Heini Blume who dreamed of travelling to Brazil solely on the basis of his stamp collection, because Brazilian stamps were the most colourful.
• The ex-soldier in the local pub who got drunk and talked about the war he fought in against the Herero people in South-West Africa, but whose real talent was flicking spent cigarette butts so that they stuck to the ceiling of the bar like stalactites.
• Herr Kuhling who Grosz roomed with in Dresden, and whose strapping buxom daughters haunted his dreams for years.

At art school Grosz describes the martinet Professor Müller, famous for his foul mouth: ‘That van Gogh is a right shit’ (p.53). He tracks down Professor Wehle who is slated to give ‘composition’ lessons, though he mostly locks his classroom door and drinks the days away. Grosz persists in seeing him and is given the task of painting ‘The Flood’ in the manner of Delacroix i.e. as a vast Romantic masterpiece – which he turns out to be unable to do. He remembers this failure because it taught him something about his talents.

The result of this conflict [between his Romantic ideals and his limited abilities] was caricature and distortion. The ‘greatness’ Professor Wehle sought, his exalted classical and religious ideals, were not in me, simply because they were not in my age. That age was one of cheap and arrogant pseudo-intellectual ideas, of prisms and science, of naive socialist faith in man’s perfectibility, of vulgar bowing before everything ugly and proletarian and, on the other hand, of the ravings of demagogues out to kick those who are down, and to destroy socialism, Christianity and humanity in the process. (p.50)

Grosz’s bitter misanthropy could hardly be more unlike the lofty spiritual ambitions of the Expressionist painters I’ve been reading about – Macke, Marc and Kandinsky – and he’s as withering about them as he is about the Impressionists or the more recent Fauves and Orphists. Kandinsky’s paintings he dismisses as ‘coloured foam and nacreous vapours’ (p.54).

Grosz knows himself and knows that he prefers ‘Protestant plainness’ to all the arty-farty spirituality in the world.

The First World War

Grosz describes himself getting to grips with Berlin in the early 1910s, with its astonishing nightlife, its great art galleries, theatres, its cabaret and bars. He had even begun to get paid work submitting caricatures and cartoons to the Berlin newspapers, and there’s an interesting little section on the development of German illustration art since the middle of the 19th century, giving names I’d never heard of (for example, Hermann Vogel-Plauen).

Coming from his poor, hard-headed and practical background, Grosz had no illusions about the importance of money.

Modern art is a kind of merchandise to be sold with shrewd publicity just like soap, towels and brushes. (p.85)

He liked selling his work and spending the proceeds on fine food and drink, especially drink – Berlin blonde ale and schnapps. He describes the low bars of Berlin and their colourful clientele, including a hilarious account of the first ‘jazz’ band in Berlin, a palm court trio at the Café Oranienburger Tor which simply acted berserk with no understanding of the new music whatsoever.

His career and social life were just beginning to pick up when – along came the First World War, which for Germany began on 1 August 1914 – and that was that.

As the geo-politicians stepped into the shoes of the humanists, the enlightened age that had begun with the Renaissance ground to a halt, and the age of the blind, ironclad ant, completely indifferent to the fate of individuals, the age of numbers without names and of robots without brains, came into being. (p.73)

Grosz volunteered, hoping this way to get away with a relatively short spell of service. The blurb on the back says the book includes an account of army life during the Great War but this isn’t really true. He bitterly conveys the impact of the war on him – with an especially angry depiction of life in a hospital ward full of disfigured soldiers half of whom have gone mad – but there’s none of the usual stuff in war memoirs about basic training, the officers or other men, and no description whatsoever of battle. Instead the war confirmed Grosz’s already low opinion of humanity.

For me war had none of the liberating effects it had on so many others, releasing their deep inhibitions and freeing them from the slavery of humdrum jobs. As long as men will continue to feel that way, they will never turn their backs on organised mass slaughter. (p.79)

Grosz was invalided out with sinusitis in 1915 and made his way back to Berlin where he began to make violently anti-war works, drawings and paintings attacking the social corruption of Germany (capitalists, prostitutes, the Prussian military caste, the middle class). The war is really the starting point for his brutally cynical view of human nature. In a famous passage from the book, he writes:

I drew men drunk, men vomiting, men with cursed fists cursing the moon, men playing cards on the coffins of the women they had murdered. I drew wine drinkers, beer drinkers, schnapps drinkers and a frantic man washing blood from his hands.

I drew lonely little men rushing insanely through empty streets. I drew a cross-section of a tenement building: behind one window a man belaboured his wife with a broom, behind another two people were making love, in a third a man was hanging from the cross-bars of the window, surrounded by buzzing flies.

I drew soldiers without noses; war-cripples with crab-like limbs of steel; two medical orderlies tying a violent infantryman up in a horse blanket; a one-armed soldier using his good hand to salute a heavily-bemedalled lady who had just passed him a biscuit; a colonel, his fly wide open, embracing a nurse; a hospital orderly emptying a bucket full of pieces of human flesh down a pit. I drew a skeleton dressed up as a recruit taking his medical. (p.80)

He is a people person. No fancy ideas – instead an endless parade of teeming, violently caricatured and repulsive humanity. Similarly the book isn’t very interested in big ideas or issues, whether the spiritualism of the Expressionists or whatever guff the war was being fought for.

His account is a steady succession of anecdotes about odd, interesting, sometimes hilarious people – for example Theodor Däublin, known as Fat Theo, the poet and author of some vast epic, but who is mainly described as an eater of epic proportions, the anecdote in question concerning the evening when Grosz’s wife set down a huge dish of spaghetti and a dish of bolognaise for a dinner party of eight people – only to watch Fat Theo pull both dishes towards him, and eat it all, laughing and talking all the time while the other diners watched him open-mouthed.

Berlin Dada 1917-20

There had never been anything like Dada before. It was the art (or the philosophy) of the dustbin. (p.104)

It was during this period that he got involved with the Berlin wing of Dadaism, from 1917 to 1920. Again, his account of Dada (chapter 9) tends to focus on people and attitude, giving next to no detail about the timeline or works involved.

In those days we were all ‘Dadaists’. If that word meant anything at all it meant seething discontent, dissatisfaction and cynicism. Defeat and political ferment always give rise to that sort of movement. In a different age we might easily have become flagellants. (p.103)

In much the same style as he had described schoolboy adventures or student pranks, he now describes how he, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst and John Heartfield put on a cabaret which largely consisted of shouting filth and abuse at the audience. After all, they deserved it.

We ridiculed everything, for nothing was sacred, and we spat on everything, because that was what Dada was about. Dada was neither mysticism nor communism nor anarchism, all of which had some kind of programme or other. We were complete, pure nihilists, and our symbol was the vacuum, the void. (p.102)

If you look up Berlin Dada you come across all kind of scholarly articles pointing out how Schwitters invented a new form of collage, while Grosz and John Heartfield collaborated in the invention of photo-montage. None of that is mentioned here. Instead we have more stories – about Baader, the Dada-in-chief and author of the Dadacon, the greatest book of all time, which consisted of thousands of pages of cut-up newspaper articles. Grosz was the ‘Propagandada’, who came up with such catchy slogans as ‘Dada Dada über Alles’ which they had printed on small cards and littered all over Berlin. While Communists and Right-wing militias fought in the streets and inflation hit 1 million per cent, the Dadaists held a race between six typewriters and six sewing machines.

One of their rich backers (Grosz seems to have been lucky in his life with rich patrons) had a huge wine cellar, the barrels and racks arranged in rows which were so wide apart that the eccentric owner could ride a motorbike between them. Each of these passages was given a name, for example George Grosz Alley ran between the sherry caskets.

There is almost nothing about how they came up with the new forms of art or the political engagement of himself or his fellow Dadaists. Just lots of funny stories:

• about the occultist Dr Stadelman who invited them all to witness a midnight apparition which, despite all his best efforts, fails to come off
• the artist Ben Hecht who emigrated and went on to become Hollywood’s most successful scriptwriter
• about the leader of the Saxony Communist Revolution, Max Hoelz, a big brash natural leader of men who dwindled into insignificance
• about Bertolt Brecht’s love of fast cars
• about ‘Manners Fox’, the collector of erotica
• Joseph von Sternberg the film director who made Marlene Dietrich an international star
• about the wealthy Dr Felix Weil who founded the Frankfurt Institute for Social research which went on to have a vast influence on the development of Western Marxism and cultural studies

And so on.

Berlin Dada ended around 1920 but the crisis in Berlin never really ended and Grosz continued painting his bitter paintings and drawing his satirical drawings, selling them to newspapers, to wealthy patrons, or binding them into themed collections like Ecce Homo, which were promptly banned and cost him a small fortune in fines. There is nothing, nothing at all in this account about the various court cases he was involved in because of Ecce Homo or Gott mit uns.

Sample works

• Suicide (1916)
• The lovesick man (1916)
• Daum marries her pedantic automaton George in May 1920, John Heartfield is very glad of it,
• Drawing from Ecce Homo (1923)
• Circe (1927)

There’s quite a lot more gossip and stories about his Berlin circle, before he finally reaches the rise of the Nazis in chapter 13. To quote Indiana Jones, ‘Nazis? I hate those guys.’ And so does Grosz. Readers up to this point have been made quite aware of Grosz’s very low opinion of human beings, especially when seen as a mass or crowd. Hitler catered to precisely the kind of mass hysteria Grosz loathed.

The masses were once again clamouring for blood, no doubt to seal their own subjection, albeit they put it in different words. The vicarious pleasures of fear, subservience, humiliation and bondage affected almost an entire nation at the dawn of the so-called new age. (p.175)

But it’s typical of the book that he barely mentions the Nazis or Hitler by name (the index – characteristically – is solely of names, of people, and gives Hitler precisely 10 mentions).

In fact, in a surprise move, the chapter which ought to cover the ‘rise of the Nazis’ is nothing of the sort: Grosz makes the unexpected (and slightly Dada?) decision to cover the entire topic by using a fairy tale or fable. It describes a freethinking artist named Schultze who goes to live in the idyllic countryside near the Baltic but finds himself increasingly intimidated by the local peasants and workers, as they fall under the spell of rabble-rousing right wingers. It’s actually quite a hypnotic little tale, which gives an atmospheric sense of an artists colony or village on the remote coast of Germany,and a claustrophobic sense of the somehow unstoppable rise of violence and thuggery.

Then again, why should he give dates or scholarly analysis – he’s not a historian. In fact, considering that he was one of the inventors of Berlin Dada, it’s maybe to be wondered that there are any facts or coherent narrative at all.

America the beautiful

The last 60 or so pages (pp.180-240) describe Grosz’s emigration to New York and his struggles to make a go of it in the new world.

It was pure fluke that he was invited to teach at a New York summer school in 1932 but being there was a dream come true for Grosz who, ever since he was a boy, had fantasised about America. He returned to Germany in the winter of 1932 just long enough to persuade his wife to accompany him back, leaving the country just weeks before the Nazis came to power. He was on their wanted list. He reports that a week or so after Hitler gained power (30 January 1933) the Gestapo came to ransack his flat and studio. Grosz would without a doubt have been arrested, at best beaten up, maybe sent to an early concentration camp, in all probability ended up dead.

These last chapters give a frank account of how difficult he found it to make a new life in America. He abandoned all his political pretensions and wanted to become a good honest American illustrator, drawing shiny new appliances or light-hearted jokes for up-market magazines, whatever would make money, but found it very difficult, both to adopt an American style, and to get any work from the fiercely competitive New York magazines, Vogue, Esquire, the New Yorker.

There’s a long anecdote about an over-excited trip to Hollywood where, like so many émigrés before and since, he dreams of making a fortune – but gets no work.

Various friends and contacts help him out (there are even more anecdotes about colourful individuals and late night carousing) but it’s only when he opens his own private art school that he finally hits pay dirt. New York is full of rich ladies who would simply love to learn to paint and are happy to pay nice Mr Grosz to help them.

In the closing sections Grosz goes out of his way to distance himself from his left-wing past. He now loves money. He loves the rich. They are so much more interesting than the poor. He focuses on individuals, the quirkier the better, like the rich old lady who attends his class with her chauffeur, who she gets to open each paint tube and squeeze the paint onto the palette she daintily holds in her white-gloved hand.

One day Salvador Dalí turns up at Grosz’s life model class and spends a few hours drawing the model’s foot. Grosz goes for lunch with him and the redoubtable Gala, two visionary artists who have escaped mad Europe to the land of freedom and fridges.

The final chapter turns into a roll call of the famous people he’s met: John dos Passos, Thomas Mann (who he had a notable argument with, Mann and his wife insisting the guttersnipe Hitler would only last six months, Grosz angrily saying they underestimated the stupidity of the Germans and that Hitler would be there ten years or more [12, as it turned out]), the urbane Surrealist patron and collector Edward James, Giorgio de Chirico notable for his big nose, and so on.

When I read this as a student I was disappointed at the complete absence of a) fierce Marxist analysis or in fact any social analysis to match the incandescent anger of his paintings b) any real insight into the motivation behind either Dada or the 1920s works.

Now, thirty years later, I read it as the candid story of an actual human being man, a real character with flaws and shortcomings as obvious as his gifts. Looking back he thinks of his firebrand youth as naive spouting. Looking back he sees Berlin Dada as a series of escapades and jokes. Looking back he sees mass madness in the rush to war and then the pointlessness of revolutionary rhetoric, underneath all of which lies a horrifying Will to Bully and Humiliate, no matter what cause it’s done for.

So instead of all that, looking back he prefers to record the positives: his fondness for individuals, for people who rose above the rabble and pack, and he records moments of comedy, candour and warmth which counter-balance the hateful times.

And lastly he pays fitting tribute to America, the one country that stood really free of the madness that drowned Europe, Russia and China in tsunamis of human blood, where the rich had chauffeurs and pet poodles, where writers drank and chatted late into the night, where you had to fight hard to find work but if you did, were well rewarded, and found yourself on the verandah of a holiday home in Cape Cod, smoking a cigar alongside John dos Passos, looking out over the moonlight on the shimmering sea.

After such a long strange trip you feel he has made his contribution to society, staked a place in art history, and earned his contentment. The final mood reminds me of a poem by another wartime exile to America, the English poet W.H. Auden, describing life ‘on the circuit’ of American universities, flying from one campus to the next to lecture and sign autographs.

Another morning comes: I see,
Dwindling below me on the plane,
The roofs of one more audience
I shall not see again.

God bless the lot of them, although
I don’t remember which was which:
God bless the U.S.A., so large,
So friendly, and so rich.

---

Related links

• A Small Yes and a Big No on Amazon
• From Weimar to Wall Street 1918-1929 (1993)
• Kandinsky by Hajo Düchting (1993)