Morning Comrades!
Today’s email is a little special, the paying subscribers to this newsletter received this on Thursday and I wanted to show you what you get for that, in addition to a never expiring discount code for any and all Black Lodges drops - there’s something coming soon again. Also, I do want to share this essay with you all as I find the subject matter, the art and the questions this work poses extremely relevant 100 years after they took place.
Before all of that, yes, a new playlist for a new week- fuck knows what happened here but it’s brilliant. So many incredible rabbit holes last week from funk, disco and whatever is between that from the Middle East and North Africa, some amazing jazz and ambient / electronic tunes, some techno actually mixed with loads new guitar heavy jams, this one is all over the place and I love it all. Enjoy!
John Heartfield and Wieland Herzfelde.
By no means can I cover their significance in one email, entire books can and have been written about them and their work and those barely scratch the surface. This email comes in two parts, one, an introduction to John Heartfield’s art and its significance for you to explore and be inspired by and second, his brother’s work as a writer, publisher and communist.
With the centennial of Dadaism upon us and history seemingly repeating itself, so much of their and their circles work have been on my mind these last few weeks and as I am revisiting and learning more and more about it all, the more significant I am finding to share this with you.
Now, at this point I am sure you are asking yourself who the hell these two are seeing that the public discourse and the subsequent awareness of them has all but disappeared. Essentially, these two were at the core of the artistic anti-imperial, anti-fascist and proto-communist movement in Germany, starting in WW1, they were a major contributing power to the German Revolutions of 1918-19 and ended up being in the top 5 of the Nazi’s most wanted list by the 1930s. John Heartfield, who had changed his German name to an English version in protest of the German Empire’s anti-British propaganda prior to 1914 essentially created the process of photomontages as political weapons and propaganda and his influence is still profound today.
In 1917, Heartfield became a member of Berlin Club Dada. Heartfield would later become active in the Dada movement, helping to organise the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe (First International Dada Fair) in Berlin in 1920. Dadaists were provocateurs who disrupted public art gatherings and ridiculed the participants. They labeled traditional art trivial and bourgeois.
In January 1918, Heartfield joined the newly founded German Communist Party. In 1919, Heartfield was dismissed from the Reichswehr film service because of his support for the strike that followed the assassination of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. With George Grosz, he founded Die Pleite, a satirical magazine, famous till today.
Heartfield met Bertolt Brecht in 1924, and became a member of a circle of German artists that included Brecht, Erwin Piscator, Hannah Höch, and a host of others, all to this day at the core of the German Resistance to everything that made Germany as brutally German as it was, and to a degree still is. He mainly worked for two publications: the daily Die Rote Fahne ( The Red Flag ) and the weekly Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung ( The Workers Illustrated ), the latter of which published the works for which Heartfield is best remembered. His political montages regularly appeared on the cover of the communist magazine AIZ from 1930 to 1938, with a weekly circulation as many as 500,000 copies at its height.
Heartfield lived in Berlin until April 1933 when the Nazi Party took power. On Good Friday, the SS broke into his apartment, but he escaped by jumping from his balcony and hiding in a trash bin. He fled Germany by walking over the Sudeten Mountains to Czechoslovakia. He eventually rose to number five on the Gestapo's most-wanted list.
In 1938, given the imminent German occupation of Czechoslovakia, he was forced once again to flee from the Nazis, this time to England. He was interned as an enemy alien, and his health began to deteriorate. Afterward, he lived in Hampstead, London. His brother Wieland was refused a British residency permit in 1939 and instead left for the United States with his family. Like his brother, who had managed to flee to the US before the War, he ended up in Communist East Germany where he died in 1968. So much for his bibliography.
Again, I could spend days writing about the significance of his work and this should hopefully serve as enough inspiration to start digging into it all. I promise you will not be disappointed.
His brother’s work as a writer and publisher is actually what inspired me to write this and expand his musings into our century. Specifically, a text that appeared in 1921, in the paper “Der Gegner” “The Enemy” entitled, Society, Artists and Communism is one of the finest pieces of critical thought in regards to the above. I sadly haven’t to this day found a translated version but I find so important that one day I will translate it, as it is exceptionally relevant to myself, my own perception as an artist and the roles we play in communism. It is also insanely honest, only in the way an artist can be about their work and role - it’s not flattering in the least but necessary. It’s around 2000 words in length and thus I will not copy and paste it here but paraphrase a few lines and open them up for discussion.
Essentially, Herzfelde argued that irrespective of the class in which the artist was born into and irrespective of the fact that their productive work was and will be exploited similar to that of the working class, the artist themselves could not ever be a communist but only work towards becoming a communist.
I’ll let that sink in for a moment, it’s taken me 2 years to really think about it, on and off but have a think.
“The social conditions for most artists are essentially the same- they hope, desperately, for nothing but fame, riches and a colourful life. Insofar, financial support from their families exists, an “artists life”, one of extravagance and not work will exist and actual work will only become a reality once said financial security ceases”. - WH
Obviously, the social and economic conditions of the 1920s Germany are different to the ones today, on the surface at the very least and I would argue that whilst the democratization and the total control of modern day capitalism in our world today has enabled a greater access to said artist life, the principles within class structures, organisations and the work towards communism remain the same.
One of the most brilliant analysis’ of this text is about art itself. Essentially, Herzfelde argues that under capitalism, all art is the art of the ruling classes as they determine the means of production for all that is consumed in the artist sphere. Irrespective of the artist’s ideology, the production and distribution of all art is dependent on the goodwill of the ruling classes. Now, that obviously rang true 100 years ago- all anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalistic art forums that we have known since the mid 1960s did not exist, even in Dadaist Berlin of the 1920s, back then but what about now?
We have the squats, the independent, self-organised world of delinquents and have had that for well over 50 years - and yes, art can and does exist outside of the ruling class’ favour. More importantly, we have the internet, albeit not anymore. 20 some years ago, the initial concept thereof was partly that, the dissemination and distribution of art & knowledge without the gatekeeping of the ruling classes - with the advent of Web2.0 and the masters we have now, Google/Meta etc - this is done and over with. Fact is though, artists, like all other people have to eat, pay rent and so on - so if we take art completely outside of the capitalistic realm, what to do, and then more importantly, even so, art then still competes on an individual level against other art for survival.
That obviously begs the question if art is actually needed, in the same way that the construction of housing and baking of bread is needed. Herzfelde here also has very clear ideas, ones that I agree with.
Whilst he argues that due to the 1000s of years under which artists have existed, their constant need to appeal to the ruling classes for patronage, that the artist themselves have more to prove than, for example, the coal miner, in regards to the politicization towards communism, it is vital to acknowledge the power visuals, texts and songs have in the mobilization and support of the working classes. Essentially, art can and does tell stories, which he concludes, plays a role in supporting the workers in their struggle for self-determination.
The entire text is truly critical and weary of artists as a group, or class yet the second half deals with the role of the artist under communism, as well as during the progression towards that goal. I find myself agreeing with a lot of the criticism he imposes on himself and his brother as both writers and artists but all of that obviously doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Art and the artist exist in a perceived and self-perceiving reality and thus constantly changing and subject to change. I’ll end this with another paraphrase of this text, hoping that these musings are food for thought and more discussion.