Über alles die Liebe: Food,Sex,and Money in the Work of George Grosz

As early as 1917 Grosz wrote "darin, dass diese Epoche destruktiv nach unten segelt — bin ich der Anschauung unverruckbar" ("I remain convinced of the view that this epoch is sailing straight towards destruction"). By the end of the '20s he had come to believe that a new Dark Age of barbarism and irrationalism was overtaking German life. See Herbert Knust (ed.), George Grosz, Briefe 1913-1959 (Rembek, 1979; hereafter cited as Briefe), 57, 128, and Das Kunstblatt (March 1931), 79. For a good discussion of the central role of cultural pessimism within Dadaism see Christoph Eykman, Geschchtspessimismus in der deutschen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berne, 1970), 58-68.

By dedicating one of his early paintings to Oskar Panizza, Grosz deliberately sought to identify himself with anti-censorship movements within the Wilhelmine period. These are discussed in detail in two papers by Robin Lenman, " Art, Society, and the Law in Wilhelmine Germany: The Lex Heinze", Oxford German Studies, viii (1973 ), 86-113 and "Politics and Culture: The State and the Avant-Garde in Munich 1886-1914", in Richard J. Evans (ed.), Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany ( London, 1978), 90-111. For extracts from Grosz's two major trials see Lothar Fischer, George Grosz (Hamburg, 1976), 79-83, 96-101. See also the account by the lawyer who conducted Grosz's defence in Alfred Apfel, Behind the Scenes of German Justice (London, 1935). For a wider conspectus see also Jane Clapp, Art Censorship: A Chornology of Proscribed and Prescribed Art (Metuchen, New Jersey, 1972).

Beth Irwm Lewis , George Grosz: Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic ( Madison, 1971); Hans Hess , George Grosz (London, 1974); Uwe M. Schneede , George Grosz (Cologne , 1977 and London, 1979 (English version)). There is a small collectron of archival material in the Akademie der Kunste, West Berlin. For the post-1932 years the major source is the private family archive which until recently was in Princeton, New Jersey, jointly administered by Peter and Martin Grosz. This has recently passed to the Houghton Library at Harvard University. I am currently working on a longer study of Grosz which draws on this material.

Max Horkheimer in his foreword to Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950 (London, 1973), p. xi, points out that the Institute came into being "because, thanks to the support of Hermann Weil and the intervention of his son, Felix, a group of men, interested in social theory and from different scholarly backgrounds, came together with the belief that formulating the negative in the epoch of transition was more meaningful than academic careers. What united them was the critical approach to existing society". Felix Well's support of Grosz both in Germany and later in America can be seen as a supporting part of this critical endeavour.

Dix, for instance, played no part in the public debate over his painting "Der Schutzengraben" during 1923-25; see Lothar Fischer, Otto Dix: Ein Malerleben in Deutschland (Berlin, 1981), 50-51.

Martin Anderson Nexo, Dem jungen Morgen zu (Konstanz, 1926), 10, proudly claims: "Ich bin geborener revolutionarer Proletarier und habe nichts mit westeuropaischer Kultur zu schaffen" ("1 am a revolutionary proletarian by birth and have nothing to do with west-European culture").

In a reply to an FBI enquiry in 1955 Grosz wrote "Ich habe die Partei verlassen, nachdem ich 1922 das kommunistische Russland sah" ("I left the Party after seeing communist Russia in 1922") (Briefe, 489).

Briefe, 102, 105-8. Although Grosz was chairman of the Rote Gruppe of 1924, he played no part in the Communist organ Asso set up in 1928. His brief defence against attacks in Die Rote Fahne appeared in Prozektor, xiv (Moscow, 1928), reprinted in Uwe M. Schneede (ed.), Die Zwanziger Jahre: Manifeste und Dokumente deutscher Kunstler (Cologne, 1979), 153.

Istvan Deak, Weimar Germany's Left-Wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the Weltbuhne and its Circle (Berkeley, 1968), 43-44, makes the claim that "both Tucholsky and Grosz created disagreeable prototypes for some social groups in Germany and then forced all members into the moulds. Worse even, Tucholsky — and Grosz — saw all these prototypes uniformly as Prussian drill sergeants". This is patently untrue since it ignores the diversity of satirical targets in both men's work.

Kurt Tucholsky , Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Mary Gerold-Tucholsky and Fritz J. Raddatz , i (Hamburg , 1960), 1182 (hereafter cited as GW).

Briefe, 118.

Briefe, 122. Plate XI in Ecce Homo is entitled "Professor Freud gewidmet". For a later reference to Das Unbehagen in der Kultur see Briefe, 433.

This phrase appears in George Grosz, "Statt einer Biographie" ("Instead of a Biography"), first published in Der Gegner (The Opponent) in 1920 and later included in Die Kunst ist in Gefabr (Art is in Danger) (Berlin, 1925).

Diderot, Oeuvres romanesques, ed. by Henri Bénac, 490. Grosz sent a copy of this work to Schmalhausen in 1918, see Briefe, 76.

George Grosz , Über alles die Liebe (Berlin, 1930). I have used the Dover edition published in New York in 1971, which combines this volume and Die Gezeichneten.

Vera Figner was one of the authors published by the Malik Verlag. Tucholsky gave her volume Das Attentat auf den Zaren a very positive review in the Weltbuhne in 1926 (GW, ii, 479f.). In 1930 he reviewed her Nacht uber Russland jointly with Grosz's Über alles die Liebe and the German translation of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Towards this latter work he was extremely disparaging (GW, 11i, 626).

Briefe, 97, 123-6.

Briefe, 128. For Grosz's comments on German views of Americanism in the '20s see his autobiography Ein kleines Ja und ein grosses Nein (Reinbek, 1974), 219.

GW, i, 363.

GW, i, 376.-

Briefe, 125.

Ein kleines Ja , ch. 1.

Grosz's letters and diaries regularly give full details of meals. See Briefe, 109 for a typical description of a gourmet meal in Avignon with his patron Henri Falk.

These figures are taken from Uwe M. Schneede, George Grosz (London, 1979), 141.

Briefe, 32.

Ein kleines Ja, 123-4.

Ibid., 124-8.

Die Dreigroschenoper in B. Brecht, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt, 1967), ii, 458. All of Brecht's works constantly stress the fundamental role of food within materialism; his final library contained a copy of C. F. Rumohr's manual Geist der Kochkunst (Stuttgart, 1832).

Ein kleines Ja, 123.

Ein kleines Ja, 116-17.

Briefe, 45.

Briefe, 86.

Briefe, 97-98.

Briefe, 147-8.

For further comments on Piscator's theatre and bourgeois support of potentially subversive art see Ein kleines Ja, 122.

A similar drawing on the theme of the repression of sexuality within the family was published by Grosz in Simplicissimus on 29 March 1926. Entitled "Der Lenz ist da" ("Spring is here"), the drawing shows stout paterfamilias with clinging wife and teenage daughter and the caption runs "Nee, nee, Emilje, mich bringste nich mehr in'n Zoo — da gommste uff falsch Gedanken" ("No, no, Emily, we're not going to the zoo again — that gives you wrong ideas").

Simplicissimus: 180 Satirical Drawings from the Famous German Weekly, ed. by Stanley Appelbaum (New York, 1975), p. ix.

See Ann Taylor Allen , "Sex and Satire in Wilhelmine Germany: Simplicissimus and Family Life", Journal of European Studies , vii (1977), 19-40.

Op. cit. (ref. 37), 46.

The public prosecution of Ecce Homo, which was reported in Das Tagebuch on 23 February 1924, 240-8, hinged on the assumption that art should not reproduce the whole of life but must observe certain limits. Grosz denied that such limits existed for the artist. He was attacked for over-emphasizing the sexuality of his characters through his drawing of genitals, and his drawing of Rudi Schlichter was taken exception to on the grounds that it showed "die ganze Perversitat, auf die irgendem Mensch verfallen kann" ("the total perversion which anyone can fall into"). Grosz argued in defence first, that his art represented nature as he saw it, and second, that his work served a moral and educational purpose by heightening the contrast between an idealized and a realistic view of society. For a wider discussion of censorship within the Weimar period see Dieter Breuer. Geschichte der literarischen Zensur in Deutschland (Heidelberg, 1982), 219-29.

Briefe, 76.

Briefe, 58.

This work, a mixture of collage, drawing and watercolour, carried an English title "Daum marries her pedantic automaton George, in May 1920, John Heartfield is very glad of it". It is reproduced in Schneede (English version, see ref. 3), 63. The Dada manifesto of 1919 had also called lightheartedly for "sofortige Regelung aller Sexualbeziehungen im international dadaistischen Sinne durch Errichtung einer dadaistischen Geschlechtszentrale" ("immediate regulation of all sexual relations in an international dadaist spirit by the establishment of a dadaist sex headquarters") (Franz Schonauer, "Die Partei und die Schone Literatur: Kommunistische Literaturpolitik in der Wermarer Republik", in Wolfgang Rothe (ed.), Die deutsche Literatur in der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart, 1974), 118).

Briefe, 139-40.

GW, 11, 1225.

T.H. Van de Velde , Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique (1928; 2nd edn, London, 1965), ch. 1.

T.H. Van de Velde , Sex Hostility in Marriage (London, 1931 ), 77.

Magnus Hirschfeld and Berndt Götz , Das erotische Weltbild ( Hellerau, 1929), 53. Tucholsky gives Hirschfeld a consistently bad press in the Weltbuhne, as in 1920 when he defends him against a public attack in Munich at the same time as he denounces his work as "eine ziemlich uble Mischung von kitschiger Sentimentalitat, falscher Romantik und einer Schein-Wissenschaftlichkeit" ("a fairly unpleasant mixture of soppy sentimentality, false romanticism and pseudoscientism") (GW, 1, 745-6).

See Ein kleines Ja (ref. 18), 185-6. Benjamin published his long essay on Fuchs in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in October 1937.

Eduard Fuchs, Geschichte der erotischen Kunst (Munich, n.d.). The book contains the inscription "Dieses Werk darf nur an Wissenschaftler, Sammler und Bibliotheken abgegeben werden" ("this book may only be distributed to scholars, collectors and libraries"). The reference to Beardsley is on p. 125.

Fischer, op. cit. (ref. 5), 102.

In 1949 Grosz made this severe comment on her: "Eine milde gute Frau, hat aber eigentlich nur ein 'erfundenes' Armeleute-Edelballett hinterlassen" ("a good and gentle woman, who in fact has left us only an imaginary ballet performed by the 'noble' poor").

Briefe, 128-9.

George Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde , Die Kunst ist in Gefabr ( Berlin, 1925), 7-8.

Ein kleines Ja (see ref. 18), 122.

J.-P. Sartre , Situations II (Paris, 1948), 74.

Briefe, 253. Grosz frequently refers to Goya with admiration, and there are striking similarities between both men's pessimistic vision. For a stimulating recent study of Goya see Fred Licht, Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art (London, 1980).