Читаем Berlin полностью

America, however, was not the model for Berlin’s Dada artists. George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Wieland Herzfelde all joined the German Communist Party (KPD) shortly after its founding and trumpeted the Soviet Union as the nation of the future. In their own country they saw that social iniquities—symbolized by crippled war veterans scrambling in the gutter for cigar butts discarded by fat plutocrats—were more crassly evident than ever. To carry on revolutionary propaganda against the Weimar “pseudo-democracy” they founded the Malik-Verlag, which published politically inspired fiction and art books. Their initial production was a journal entitled Jedermann sein eigener Fussball (Everyone His Own Football). The first issue featured on its cover a satiric photomontage, “Who Is the Most Beautiful?” with the faces of Noske, Ludendorff, Erzberger, Ebert, and Scheidemann. The publishers distributed some 7,600 copies of their journal during a mock funeral procession through the streets of Berlin, a gesture that turned out to be quite apt, for the police immediately prohibited future numbers. Malik followed with a tract called “Die Pleite” (Bankruptcy), which contained a cartoon by Grosz showing President Ebert as a fat king being served a drink by a capitalist lackey. In the summer of 1920 the Malik circle organized Berlin’s First International Dada Fair in a local art gallery. Here the main target was traditional art and bourgeois cultural values. Grosz and Heartfield advertised the show with a placard reading “Art is Dead, Long Live the New Machine Art of Tatlin”—a pitch for Soviet constructivism as the artwork of the future. Visitors to the exhibition saw a calculatedly messy assemblage of paintings, prints, and posters parodying Great Art and the bourgeois social order that dutifully worshipped it. One of the posters read: “Dilettantes, Rise Up against Art!” The pièce de résistance was a dummy dressed in a military officer’s uniform with a pig’s head and a sign hanging from its crotch explaining: “In order to understand this work of art go on a daily twelve-hour exercise on the Tempelhof Field with full backpack and equipped for maneuvers.”

The First International Dada Fair, Berlin, 1920

For this and other insults to the military the Dada Fair organizers were taken to court. Grosz and Heartfield were fined 300 and 600 marks respectively. But it was not only the conservatives who were outraged. The Communists, whose ideals Grosz and company claimed to represent, were appalled by the Dadaists’ wholesale attack on traditional culture. Unlike these anti-artists, the Communists took the great art of the past seriously, believing it could be inspirational for the workers. Echoing Kaiser Wilhelm IIs condemnation of modern art, Gertrud Alexander, cultural editor of the KPD’s newspaper Die Rote Fahne, denounced Dada’s “tasteless new barbaric ‘paintings’,” adding: “The conscious fighter has no need, like Dada, to destroy artworks in order to free himself from ‘bourgeois attitudes,’ because he is not bourgeois. Those who can do no more than glue together silly kitsch like Dada, should keep their hands off art.”

Bertolt Brecht, who would himself later fall afoul of Communist Party guidelines on art, believed he understood why the Dadaists made imperfect Communists: they were animated less by reverence for the proletariat than by contempt for the bloated bourgeoisie. In a letter to Grosz regarding the latter’s satirical attack on the plutocracy, Das Gesicht der herrschenden Klasse (The Face of the Ruling Class), Brecht proposed that what made the painter “an enemy of the bourgeois was their physiognomy.” “You hate the bourgeoisie not because you are a proletarian but because you are an artist,” he told Grosz. The same, of course, could have been said of Brecht himself.

In mid-November 1923 the government of Chancellor Gustav Stresemann, which had taken office in August 1923, introduced a new currency, the Rentenmark, to replace the essentially worthless paper marks then in circulation. To buttress the new money, Germany took out a mortgage on itself, putting up all its rolling stock, gold reserves, and public real estate as backing. Hjalmar Schacht, a financial wizard who would later become Hitler’s chief banker, was appointed National Currency Commissioner to oversee the transition to the new system. At the same time, Stresemann ended the “passive resistance” policy in the Ruhr, which was draining away 40 million gold marks a day. These measures anchored the Rentenmark at the prewar mark’s dollar ratio of 4.2 to 1, a tremendous accomplishment.