Peter Chametzky
On April 8, 1943, Elise and Otto Hampel, a working-class Berlin couple, were executed in Plötzensee Prison. Their capital offense had consisted of writing and leaving in public spaces some two hundred postcards bearing anti-Nazi messages. Previously not overtly political, the Hampels were compelled to their brave but futile act of resistance by the death of Elise’s brother in the war. The Hampels’ postcards, dating from 1940 to their arrest on October 20, 1942, are not believed to have had any effect in fomenting broader resistance to the Nazi regime. But, they alarmed the Gestapo, which collected the cards soon after they were deposited in stairwells, on benches, and in other public places. The sheer number of cards fostered suspicion that they were the work of a resistance cell, similar to the leaflets left in public spaces by the White Rose group in Munich. However, there is no evidence that the Hampels were part of any larger network, and none was presented at their trial.
The story would end there, meriting a paragraph in a chapter on internal German acts of resistance, had not art intervened and turned the Hampels into enduring symbols. Immediately after the war the Hampel file came into the possession of Johannes Becher, a communist poet and postwar organizer of the Kulturbund zur Demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands (Cultural Alliance for the Democratic Renewal of Germany). Becher passed it on to the writer Hans Fallada, with the suggestion that he turn it into a novel.1 After spending seven months in 1946 undergoing substance abuse treatment, Fallada (b. Rudolf Ditzen in 1911) wrote the over 500-page novel, Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Every Man Dies Alone) over the course of three months. In it, he told the story of Otto and Anna Quangel, based on the Hampels. In the novel, it is their son rather than a brother who dies in combat. Anna is devastated, Otto is characteristically withdrawn, reticent, until he finally announces that he has a plan to “do something.” Anna is expectant, excited, but then disappointed when her husband’s plan is to write and distribute … postcards: “‘Isn’t this thing that you’re wanting to do, isn’t it a bit small, Otto?’ He stopped rummaging, and still standing there stooped, he turned his head to his wife. ‘Whether it’s big or small, Anna,’ he said, ‘if they get wind of it, it’ll cost us our lives.…’”2
Otto’s fatalistic line and the Hampels’ fate testify to the Nazi state’s serious regard for the propaganda potential of postcards. It saw postcards as a valuable tool to spread its own imagery and messages, and as a means more easily to monitor correspondence.3 A 1940 SS policy advisory addressed the images on field postcards, cards sent by soldiers on active duty. “More and more extremely kitschy field postcards are turning up in shops … field postcards should be created picturing, for example, good looking racially acceptable girls and women from the area of operation, figures from German history, the leadership of the movement and military, or contemporary artworks.”4 By contemporary artworks, the SS meant those by painters and sculptors such as Adolf Ziegler and Hitler’s preferred sculptor of monumental nude figures, Arno Breker, whose works were shown annually from 1937 to 1944 in the grandiose Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition, hereafter GDK) in the Haus der deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) in Munich.5 These academically naturalistic works were to offer evidence that the “temple of art” had been “cleansed” of modernist “degeneracy” (Entartung), that is, of abstracting works by artists such as the modernist Willi Baumeister (1889–1955), who was represented by four paintings and a number of graphics in the 1937 Munich “Degenerate Art” exhibition. Ziegler, President of the Imperial Chamber of Fine Art, had been empowered by propaganda minister Goebbels to seize works of “degenerate art” from German museums. When he declared the “Degenerate Art” exhibition open, one day after the opening of the first GDK, he declared: “German Volk (folk), come and judge for yourselves!”6
On March 23, 1944 Baumeister wrote in his diary:
Called to the police station in Urach. 1) The state secret police have taken exception to the strange postcards that I regularly receive from Franz Krause. (I’ve already asked Krause not to send any more of these, since they’re conspicuous these days, and won’t be understood by outsiders. The cards are pasted fragments in the manner of photomontages.) I told the authorities that these are harmless cards done in jest, having to do with work at the Herberts Maltechnikum.7
The Herberts Maltechnikum was a research institute focused on historical painting techniques that operated from 1937 to 1944 in Kurt Herberts’s Wuppertal paint and lacquer factory. Baumeister’s friend, architect and designer Heinz Rasch, managed the institute, and recruited to it Baumeister, Krause, Georg Muche, Oskar Schlemmer, Hans and Lily Hildebrandt, and others. Their findings were published as Herberts’s own work in a series of books and, in exchange for this work, Herberts protected them from war duties.8
In 1941 Baumeister reworked postcards reproducing works by Ziegler into Dadaistic political and artistic satires, and shared them with friends, as I have written about rather extensively elsewhere.9 In Jokkmokmädchen (Maiden from Jokkmok, Figure 11.1), for instance, he altered a postcard reproducing a 1937 Ziegler painting depicting Terpsichore, the ancient Greek muse of dance and choral music. This painting had been shown in the 1937 GDK, a show that Baumeister visited along with the concurrent “Degenerate Art” exhibition. All of the text, except for Jokkmokmädchen, derives from one of the books on historical painting techniques produced at the Herberts’ Maltechnikum. In Baumeister’s collage, the preparation of a wall for fresco painting is conflated with preparing the nude figure for sex. Labeling her a maiden from the Lapland village of Jokkmok, Baumeister identified and mocked the supposed classical muse, in the context of Nazi racialized aesthetic policy, as a “Nordic” ideal of beauty. Jokkmok’s extreme northern location and Dadaistic name, exposes the absurdity of Ziegler’s concoction.10
Baumeister also created a startling and now celebrated doodle around the penis of Breker’s monumental relief sculpture, The Avenger, as reproduced in the September 1941 issue of a party-line art magazine (Figure 11.2).11 The reproduction is of the plaster version, shown in the 1941 GDK, of a never completed, ten-meter-tall bronze, intended as one of the intimidating decorations to be installed along the new north-south axis to be constructed as part of Albert Speer’s plan for the redesign of Berlin as Germania, capital of the Third Reich. A contemporary report on the 1941 GDK intoned: “Arno Breker has made it his task to embody symbolically in this series of reliefs the virtues and strengths of German values, so that this series of reliefs, work on which is much further advanced than the public realizes, will develop an epic both timeless and timely on the Germanic-German character.”12 The threatening Avenger, embodiment of “Germanic” virtues, strengths, and values, wields a sword, with which it will decapitate the snake. Baumeister’s defacement of the sculpture’s penis reminds us of the connection between snakes, decapitation, and castration anxiety. As Freud observed:
Figure 11.1: Willi Baumeister, Jokkmokmädchen (Maiden from Jokkmok), 1941, collage on a postcard of Adolf Ziegler, Terpsichore, 1937, 5.8 × 4.1 in., 14.9 × 10.5 cm. Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
To decapitate = to castrate.… The hair upon Medusa’s head is frequently represented in works of art in the form of snakes, and these once again are derived from the castration complex. It is a remarkable fact that, however frightening they may be in themselves, they nevertheless serve actually as a mitigation of the horror, for they replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of the horror. This is a confirmation of the technical rule according to which a multiplication of penis symbols signifies castration.13
Snake heads proliferate in the Breker relief, with five of them oozing out of the rock beneath The Avenger’s feet. They are a symbolic concatenation of the “antisocial” elements the Nazis feared would contaminate, and ultimately castrate, the martially eroticized Aryan (male) body of the Volk. Breker’s figures suggest that erotic energies generated among men, and by images of idealized warriors, can and should be sadistically sublimated into violence against “acceptable” targets. Klaus Theweleit has identified one of the storm trooper’s problems, and its “solution”: “You should love men, but you are not allowed to be homosexual … the best thing is to obey and repress the contradictions.”14
The sword, a phallic symbol of state-regulated power, must castrate the “other”: the Jew, the homosexual, the Sinti, the Roma, the empowered New Woman, who is feared precisely as a potential castrator, a crippler of the male, Germanic, life-force, which must be avenged against the claimed transgressions of the “decadent” Weimar Republic era that preceded the Nazi takeover. The philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug has described the male body as depicted by Breker as “the body of a state-regulated self-control, of an imperialistic mechanism, simultaneously subordinate and superior.”15 Baumeister’s penis-nosed little man renders the threatening image ridiculous, taking a “degenerate” artist’s revenge on the system that has labeled him too as an “other.” In so doing it exposes and mocks the sculpture’s phallocentrism and the castration anxiety haunting this “armored body.”16
Figure 11.2: Willi Baumeister, Altered Avenger, pen and ink drawing on reproduction of Arno Breker, The Avenger, page 194 from article “Die Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung 1941, II,” Kunst dem Volk (Vienna), September 1941, Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
In 1989, in my first published analysis of these extraordinary but hitherto ignored pieces, I classified them as “oppositional works” in light of their limited circulation—in contrast to John Heartfield’s montages in the Arbeiter Illustrieter Zeitung (Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper, AIZ) which can be categorized as “resistance,” since like the Hampels’ cards, they circulated publicly; though unlike them, they were part of a broader, active resistance movement.17 Anthropologists such as James C. Scott and sociologists such as Jocelyn A. Hollander and Rachel L. Einwohner have done valuable work in documenting and characterizing a variety of activities, some of which might have no visibility or measurable effect in the public sphere, that could be categorized as “resistance.” As Hollander and Einwohner have written, “everything from revolutions (Goldstone, 1991; Scott, 1985; Skocpol, 1979) to hairstyles (Kuumba and Ahanaku, 1998; Weitz, 2001) has been described as resistance.”18 In historical studies of Nazi Germany, though, the term resistance (Widerstand) has generally been reserved for those who participated in some way as active agents in attempts to bring down or undermine the Hitler regime, or engaged in activities intended to hinder implementation of its policies. Thus, a private citizen not engaged in a resistance organization, who nonetheless hid Jews in her apartment, would count as a member of the resistance, in that this activity, in addition to being personally courageous and highly risky, sought to hinder the policy of deportation and elimination. The particularly high stakes at that time, as the Hampels and many others who were executed for their actions attests to, compels the need to maintain a distinction from those who risked less, whatever their level of internal opposition may have been.19
Our own historical moment in the United States, which one hopes is indeed momentary, of empowered and electorally confirmed nationalism, nativism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and demagoguery—and the threat of authoritarian rule—and the massive circulation through social media of altered imagery both attacking and supporting Trump and Trumpism, cannot help but recall the era in which Baumeister, Heartfield, and the Hampels created and circulated their images in opposition to Nazism.20 The fine distinctions drawn between levels of resistance in Nazi Germany are less relevant in the United States today. Symbolic forms of protest against Trumpian policies and plans, such as those discussed below, still have a chance to influence outcomes within our democratic, constitutional system, in distinction from in Nazi Germany, and so can be categorized as activities intended to and with potential to resist the current administration. Whether and how they might function effectively as such is discussed below.21
While social media posts can reach a vastly larger audience than postcards, like postcards, the format created by these corporate platforms prescribes the form and context of communication through them. As the last US election and its aftermath has shown, the network one addresses is also circumscribed, self-selecting, and often limited to those with similar views. David Castillo and William Egginton have asserted that in the present media environment, “we are entitled to our own facts, our own media-framed reality.” Writing prior to the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election, they presciently recalled that candidate Donald Trump, misinformed by his preferred television network about the outcome of the popular vote on the night of November 6, 2012, tweeted out a call for revolution against Barack Obama, since he believed what he was told and tweeted what he wanted to believe: that Obama had won only the electoral and not the popular vote.22 While Castillo and Egginton referred to cable news choices (Fox, CNN, MSNBC), the choices we make on social media, what and who we like, follow, and retweet, enroll us in what the sociologist Nick Couldy and media theorist Andreas Hepp have described as an updating for the digital, networked age of Norbert Elias’s concept of “figurations”: socially constructed groups that circulate “the shared meaning that the individuals involved produce through their interrelated social practice.”23 Figurations, they claim, have now evolved into data-driven “collectivities” in which “new norms of actions and reactions emerge … new entities for governments and civil society actors to deal with.”24 The first grand jury indictments against Russian individuals and organizations by the Special Counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, on February 16, 2018, asserted also that the individuals forming such collectivities, when they seek to influence political outcomes, may well be sponsored by hostile government entities. Within this online collectivity, and no doubt others, lurked actors playing fictional online roles designed to dupe and deceive as many others within it as possible. As the indictment states: “By 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators used their fictitious online personas to interfere with the U.S. presidential election.”25
In both Nazi Germany and Trump America, artists are trying to use the same techniques as those sponsored by authoritarian or would-be authoritarian governments. In Hitler’s Germany both sides employed postcards and montages, among other media. Under the “aspirational fascism” of Trump he acts as his own Twitter troll, while opponents retweet his belligerent comments as evidence against him.26 Like Heartfield’s montages and Baumeister’s postcards, contemporary oppositional social media posts often engage in satirical humor, reworking existing images, scaling them down, adding text and extrinsic elements to convey their creator’s point of view, and often mocking the subject of the original image. On Facebook one sees Trump dressed in a Nazi uniform, wearing a swastika armband, jutting out his chin, sporting a roseate Hitler mustache and posed in front of an appropriately traditional landscape painting, labeled “Twitler” (Figure 11.3). On Twitter, an amateur image-maker circulates grotesque images of Trump, with his mouth altered into an anus.27 Does the circulation of such images constitute resistance, oppositional work, or mere humorous venting? The Web has provided an important tool in popular uprisings against authoritarianism and neoliberalism, notably during the Arab Spring and by the Occupy Movement. But what happens with the move from the online link economy, the era of websites and blogs, to that of the “like economy”?28
Figure 11.3: Twitler, Facebook screenshot, September 7, 2017.
In my opinion, the effectiveness of online oppositional imagery can be judged according to its ability to move beyond circulation within social media networks, to become weapons in social movements and to be granted legitimacy by becoming the focus of discourse in the press, the political world, and the public sphere beyond the “like economy.” The alleged Trump-supporting Russian conspirators realized the necessity for “real action” in the streets. In the February 16, 2017 indictment, a fictitious, Russian-created US Trump-supporter is quoted as writing in an email to a Florida Trump campaign official: “You know, simple yelling on the Internet is not enough. There should be real action. We organized rallies in New York before. Now we’re focusing on purple states such as Florida.”29
German media theorist Oliver Leistert has argued that the transition from links to likes, marks “a transition from rights to express opinions to the necessity to fit within an often changing and intransparent [sic] regime of codes of conduct, terms of services and ownership.”30 So, the ability to transcend these prescribed and monetized platforms is a key indicator of social and political efficacy, whether the move is into the streets, or onto media outlets that despite their self-selecting audiences, and over and against Trump’s constant claims that anything he does not like is “fake news,” are known to employ effective if not perfect vetting of their content, granting them legitimacy as purveyors of real news (e.g., The New York Times, NPR, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post). When social media posts become real news, including Trump’s tweets, they have moved beyond circulation to have the potential to affect policies and actions.
Baumeister’s creations were part of a small network of postal satirists active in Nazi Germany, including architect Franz Krause and artist Robert Michel. These artists had been exchanging satirical, creative, illustrated correspondence for years, and doubtlessly saw it as a convenient, time-tested outlet for their critical commentaries on Nazi policies. The images and text combinations they created were often subtle. Their subtlety not only somewhat veiled their dissent, but also contrasted with the vulgar clarity of Nazi propaganda and culture in general.
Baumeister’s and his friends’ postcards, like social media posts, circulated to a limited, self-selected “figuration,” to employ Elias’s term. On a much larger scale, this could also be argued of Heartfield’s famous photomontages for the AIZ—though at that time, frontpage AIZ images would have been visible to a diverse audience perusing the offerings at newsstands or in cafés. Whether they would have convinced casual observers in such contexts is as questionable as the influence exerted by today’s social media posts on those with opposing views. While it is certainly possible to friend people on Facebook with different political opinions, or to subscribe to publications with divergent political leanings, or to follow the Twitter account of anyone one wishes, the algorithms that suggest who or what we follow tend to reinforce who and what we already follow and think, and hence to ossify us into “collectivities.” Answerable to the internationalist Comintern rather than the German Communist Party, the AIZ’s target was “a mass leftist audience.”31 The collectivity of the AIZ’s “mass leftist audience” is in many ways analogous to today’s networked collectivities.32
As Sabine Kriebel has argued, humor, anchored in trauma, was central to Heartfield’s project and, at his best, achievement. She quotes an anonymous 1934 commentator in the AIZ that his works “inspire the friend and wound the foe and make laughter a devastating weapon.”33 She anchors Heartfield’s jokes within contemporaneous Marxist theories of humor’s potential political efficacy, including Georgy Lukács’ “holy hate”—the righteous mocking of collectivism’s opponents—Mikhail Bakhtin’s “revolutionary grotesque,” and Walter Benjamin’s regard for slapstick comedy and Mickey Mouse. She makes a strong case, though, that when Heartfield rejected heroic socialist realist propaganda, he most effectively and affectively deployed Anatolii Lunacharskii’s contemporary concept of the empowering effect of “revolutionary laughter.” Following ideas Lunacharskii published subsequent to his 1929 removal as Soviet People’s Commissar for Education, she sees “Heartfield’s acrid mockery as a process of transformation that empowers an otherwise beleaguered political subject.”34 Their humor was not primarily about creating a community (Bergson), or providing compensatory release of repressed urges (Freud), but served to harden the political resolve of their intended audience.
Heartfield’s August 10, 1933 AIZ frontpage montage, Instrument in God’s hand? Toy in Thyssen’s hand!, adapts George Grosz’s 1920 drawing, The Secret Emperor, to mock Hitler as a Hampelmann (a pull-string, jumping-jack figure) in the capitalist’s hand. The mobilization of homophobic tropes notwithstanding (as Kriebel states, having Thyssen pull on the string dangling between the Hitler figure’s hinged legs turns “child’s play into a hand job”35), such a montage is brilliant not only as a work of art and design, but also as empowering political satire, for their intended audience, the already radically anti-capitalist and anti-Nazi (and perhaps homophobic) readers of the AIZ. Under threat from Hitler, they see him belittled, and overpowered by another opponent, big capital, whose power and influence can be explained through more conventional Marxist analyses than can the demagogue’s. Broader efficacy as a political weapon, beyond the mass leftist audience, is harder to gage. As Kriebel subtly comments about Heartfield’s anti-Nazi montages:
… what I want to recover from these works and the moment of their making is both their tragic inadequacy and the urgency of the laughter they aim to provoke. Witnesses to a failed revolution, they ask their beholders to chuckle ruefully, at times rancorously, at the folly of power, and to uphold their moral superiority and communal fortitude as they undergo political demise and exile.36
So far as I know, no one has been put to death, or driven into hiding or exile, for their anti-Trump posts, tweets, gifs, or memes. Certainly there have been professional consequences for social media activity, as well as threats both real and virtual.37 Trump’s nativism and racism, while abhorrent, is not, so far as we know, genocidal—and in the first year of his presidency we did not experience a Reichstag fire. The German parliament building burned on February 27, 1933, an event widely believed to have been orchestrated by the Nazis themselves, and surely was then instrumentalized by them. It allowed the passage by the parliament of an act that effectively stripped itself of governmental power: on March 24 the Enabling Act granting Hitler broad, extra-constitutional powers, allowing the Nazi Party to impose the “coordination” (Gleichschaltung) of civil institutions into the Nazi state and into accord with its ideology. One of the first acts “enabled” was the dismissal of undesirable employees from government positions, including at universities and art academies. On March 29, for instance, orders were issued to fire Willi Baumeister from his professorship at the Frankfurt Staedel Art School, and he received his letter of termination on March 31.38 While many of Trump’s statements indicate that he would welcome such Gleichschaltung, the free, constitutionally protected press continues to function, and the judiciary has thus far preserved its independence (while attempts are being made to stock the judiciary with ideologically acceptable, if not legally qualified, jurists)39 and blocked a number of his initiatives, such as the Muslim travel ban and the rescinding of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy for undocumented immigrants who arrived as small children. Time will tell if these institutions, and the electorate, succeed in preserving our democracy. It will also take time to fully evaluate the role of digital anti- (and pro-) Trumpism in this struggle.
While I have not documented Baumeister suffering any negative repercussions for his own creations, the 1944 diary entry quoted above does substantiate that his correspondence was being monitored, and that the potential for repercussions did exist. He and his friends’ Dadaistic interventions into Nazi visual culture had a long preparation in their careers. As early as 1912, Baumeister received an altered postcard from his best friend, future Bauhaus master Oskar Schlemmer, who had traveled from their native Stuttgart to Berlin (Figure 11.4). In Berlin, he apparently attended an exhibition of German Impressionists such as Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, and Wilhelm Trübner. Addressing the card to “H. Maler” (Mr. Painter) W. Baumeister, and punning on his last name’s connection to a common one for Swabian restaurants (Schlemmerkeller, Gourmand Cellar), he shuffled the artists’ names into new configurations, a surprising move even for the young Schlemmer, an artist not at all known in his mature practice to have embraced humor, let alone the power of chance. He created this card before Dada was born out of the ruins of the First World War, and before the supposed origins of Berlin Dada’s revolutionary development of photomontage through the exchange of altered postcards from the front on the part of Grosz and Heartfield; or, in a competing claim, Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch being inspired by studio photographers’ postcards into which soldiers could paste a photograph of their head onto an impressively uniformed, and intact, body.40 Andrés Zervigón has argued that the importance of Heartfield’s and George Grosz’s wartime cards resides in their status as precursors of the program for Berlin Dada montage, and the later AIZ works. None of the wartime cards are extant, so we have to accept on faith that amidst the massive exchange of governmentally encouraged postcard correspondence during the First World War, Grosz and Heartfield enacted the program later theorized by Heartfield’s Soviet friend, Sergei Tret’iakov, to use displacements, juxtapositions, and text to create politically “subversive images.”41 It would take Baumeister’s dismissal from his professorship at the Frankfurt Staedel Art School in March 1933 and exposure to “Great German Art” at the time that his own public creations were pilloried as “degenerate,” to compel him to a comparable practice.
Franz Krause and Baumeister had known each other since the early 1920s, when Krause studied architecture in Stuttgart, and their postcard correspondence began.42 During the Nazi period, Krause’s postcard play continued. An undated card from around 1942 that must have been sent, if at all, in an envelope, has on one side a collage featuring classical sculpture and a laughing woman, perhaps laughing at the Nazis’ revival of classicism (Figure 11.5 and 11.6). On the other side, rather than the classical profile view of Hitler printed on commercial stamps, Krause created a sketchy pencil drawing of a mustached face in frontal view, with right hair part but no eyes or mouth, presenting a Hitler devoid of his famous affect, and by remaining characterless and mute incapable of effect.
Figure 11.4: Oskar Schlemmer, Postcard to Willi Baumeister, 1912, collage, 4.1 × 5.8 in., 10.5 × 14.9 cm. Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.
Krause was monitored by the secret police from at latest 1939.43 In 1940 he was denounced by a party-member neighbor, who claimed to have witnessed Krause shouting on the street, after an air raid siren sounded, “Jetzt scheissen sich die Nazis die Hose voll” (“Now the Nazis are going to shit their pants”), and, after a two-second pause, “Gott sei Dank” (Thank God). In his written response to the SS, Krause neither denied nor confirmed the charge. Perhaps as a consequence, he was sent to Minsk on the Eastern Front to work on construction projects.44 A field postcard sent to Baumeister from Minsk has an illegible date on one side, while officially printed texts convey an anti-Soviet message on one side, and a warning to the sender not to include any information about the unit in which he is serving on the other (Figures 11.7 and 11.8).45 A stamp below the latter message informs us that the SS conveyed this post. On the other side Krause executed a bizarre drawing relating to his construction duties: no doubt fancifully suggesting a project to construct a tower that would enable “far viewing” (Fern seh) from Minsk to Stuttgart, represented by a pen and ink sketch of the central train station, designed by Paul Bonatz, with Baumeister’s residence on Gerokstraße on a nearby hill highlighted.
Figure 11.5: Franz Krause front of postcard to Willi Baumeister, c. 1942, collage and pen and ink, 5.8 × 4.1 in., 14.9 × 10.5 cm. Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.
Figure 11.6: Franz Krause back of postcard to Willi Baumeister, c. 1942, pencil, 4.1 × 5.8 in., 10.5 × 14.9 cm. Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.
Figure 11.7: Franz Krause, front of field postcard to Willi Baumeister, c. 1942, pen and ink and stamps, 4.1 × 5.8 in., 10.5 × 14.9 cm. Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.
Baumeister had been friends with the artist, designer, and architect Robert Michel (1897–1983), husband of Bauhaus artist Ella Bergmann-Michel, since his Frankfurt period (1928–33), when both were founding members of the ring neuer werbegestalter (Circle of New Advertising Designers).46 For New Year of 1933 Michel sent Baumeister a card riffing on the artist’s name: the text and images concern “a great Baumeister,” or architect, of antiquity. Michel portrayed himself on the other side as a horned painter of fanciful abstract creatures. In November 1936, Michel sent Baumeister and family a card with delicate curlicue drawings and a heart punctured by an arrow (Figure 11.9). The ironic text states: “In the attachments you are heartily thanked, on behalf of the office for art (Kunscht, written as if pronounced by a Swabian such as Baumeister) and morals, department I, room 376181. The objects involved in this process will be acquired by the local collection of degenerate art” (entartete Kunst). In that this card was written and sent while the “degenerate art” campaign was ongoing—and before the term had been given its broadest publicity through the 1937 exhibition, Michel’s seriously comic card touches on all of the edgy themes—art, politics, the art world and its discontents, private messages and public pronouncements—that postcards as well as social media implicate. We cannot know if Michel’s card was seen by anyone other than the Baumeister family. We also can’t know if it would have influenced their thinking, or implicated the sender and recipients. The text is subtle. But, as committed modernists, and prior members of progressive circles, these artists were used to and adept at in-group communications that often remained opaque to, or were ridiculed by, outsiders. During the Nazi period these communications assumed political dimensions and maintained group solidarity.
Figure 11.8: Franz Krause, back of field postcard to Willi Baumeister, c. 1942, pen and ink, 4.1 × 5.8 in., 10.5 × 14.9 cm. Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.
Figure 11.9: Robert Michel, Postcard to Willi Baumeister and Family, November 21, 1936, typed text and pen and ink, 4.1 × 5.8 in., 10.5 × 14.9 cm. Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
The political scientist and new media theorist Jodi Dean has argued that what matters in the current digital era is that images and ideas get repeated, circulate, and incite imitation. Dean has theorized that we have passed from the era of industrial capitalism to what she has labeled communicative capitalism. Her 2009 book Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism & Left Politics was formulated and written in the post–9/11, Bush era, prior to the massive proliferation of online social media and smartphones (the iPhone premiered in 2007). At that time blogs were the preferred platform for immediate personal attempts at intervention in the online public sphere. Despite this, Dean presciently observed:
… multiple opinions and divergent points of view express themselves in myriad intense exchanges, but this circulation of content in dense, intensive global communications networks actually relieves top-level actors (corporate, institutional, and governmental) from the obligation to answer.… Criticism doesn’t require an answer because it doesn’t stick as criticism.… So rather than responding to messages sent by left activists and critics, top-level actors counter with their own contributions to the circulating flow of communication—new slogans, images, deflections and attacks; staged meetings or rallies featuring supporters; impressive photo-ops that become themselves topics of chatter.… I refer to this democracy that talks without responding as communicative capitalism.47
A factor not yet present in that pre-Facebook-and-Twitter-dominated-era critique, but which strengthens rather than undermines the concept of communicative capitalism, is that the content we provide for current platforms, regardless of intended meaning, becomes monetized as data points. In a much more recent text, Dean writes: “In the words of the technology theorist Jaron Lanier, ‘ordinary people “share,” while elite network presences generate unprecedented fortunes.’”48 So, despite or perhaps because of Trump’s lies, Twitter loves him, since he provides content that circulates, gets repeated, and generates views. On Facebook, as Peter Dahlgren notes, “The click of the ‘like’ button sends signals out on to networks where the like-mindedness pre-structures considerable trust, and where this credibility becomes translated into a promotional asset for marketing.… One clicks to befriend people and ideas who are ‘like’ oneself, generating and cementing networks of like like-mindedness”.49 And, as the investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election reveals, those with which one associates online may well be fictitious entities.
Dean’s recent writing (see note 48) has become more sanguine than her 2009 book was on the potential for resistance within these networks in which, she says, “we live montage.” Adapting Walter Ong’s concept of “secondary orality,” highlighting the role of verbal communication in a culture dominated by print, Dean posits “secondary visuality,” which she defines as “the incorporation of images into mass practices of mediated social and personal communication.” Such incorporations annotate the image world we inhabit. Her ideas here derive from a thinker deeply embedded in the communicative culture of our other period of interest, Walter Benjamin. She addends to Benjamin’s theorizing of the work of art’s traditional “cult value” and modern “exhibition value,” its “circulation value.”50 For Dean, images, including selfies, have become authorless, unmoored from the individual to become instead the face of and in the crowd. She optimistically concludes her 2016 essay:
Political tactics adequate to this setting will find ways to seize and deploy the common in the service of a divisive egalitarian politics. Instead of repeating the individualist worry over being just another face in the crowd, they will champion the face as a crowd, recognizing the increasing force of collectivity and the common and the necessity of seizing for the many what is claimed by the few.
Dean’s valorization of selfie culture, grounded in scrutiny of her daughter’s Snapchat account, which, rather than glorifying, mocked her “real” self, and rather than asserting authorship, blurred identity, bears comparison with Benjamin’s defense of Mickey Mouse against Adorno and Horkheimer’s charge that the violence done to cartoon characters was the culture industry’s instrument to habituate the audience to violence that could and would also be turned on them. As Sabine Kriebel argues in making her case for Heartfield’s use of mass media tactics to provoke revolutionary laughter, Benjamin argued for “embodied laughter,” by which animated motion pictures’ opticality and tactility could revive rather than train the otherwise docile subject.51 In our era of “inflationary media,” when ever-increasing amounts of one’s time is spent in online environments, it remains necessary to maintain consciousness of our corporeal selves, which in the physical world provides our final refuge and remains our final weapon. A painless way to do so is through laughter, which shakes the body. At the same time, if we recognize and harness the tools that digitization provides it may be possible to move beyond the individual and to rally collectivities, again, as in Heartfield’s time, with the revolutionary power of laughter.
While I find Dean’s recent analysis somewhat optimistic, since the platforms that depend on mass content creation will doubtless morph into other entities that like biological beings are primarily motivated by their own survival and desire for profit, I would like to provide a couple of examples of recent artists who I think have used the Web to create effective secondary visuality, annotating our image world, and deployed in the street-level world, critically. Their creations have been employed for actions on the streets and have gained attention in the real press, so in my opinion have succeeded as resistance to Trumpism.
Two artists, whose works have leaped on the one hand from the physical to the virtual, and on the other, from the virtual to the physical, are Robin Bell and Mike Mitchell.52 Bell is the Washington, D.C. based artist who on May 15, 2017 projected onto the Trump International Hotel phrases referring to Trump’s possible unconstitutional use of the office of POTUS for personal gain (Figure 11.10). Audacious as this act was, and reminiscent of the projections of Krzysztof Wodiczko,53 the image gained international, and what publicists refer to as “earned” media attention through Bell’s sharing of it on Twitter, where it earned attention and distribution through USA Today, the BBC, NPR, and other real news outlets.54 Bell’s projections have continued, and he is able to respond quickly to the latest Trumpian outrage and project his message both in actual public space, and in the public commons provided by social media. On December 9, 2017, for instance, he and his projector returned to the Trump International and projected slogans reminding viewers of the continued plight of Puerto Rico, over two months after Hurricane Maria’s landfall on September 20.
Figure 11.10: Robin Bell, #Emoluments Welcome, projection on Trump International Hotel, Washington DC, May 15, 2017, as circulated on Twitter. Photo by Liz Gorman/bellvisuals.com.
Fluid movement between the physical and virtual, with each having its virtues, characterizes Bell’s work. When he projects onto the Trump International Hotel at 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, the 1899 Old Post Office and Clock Tower, Bell employs site specificity to pinpoint, mock, and critique one specific locus of his and his followers’ general ire. His work calls out Trump’s transgression of norms and probably of laws on the skin of the thick, Romanesque-revival walls of the former post office that Trump’s business conglomerate now leases from the government of which he is at the head.55 Social media affords this real-world imagery the potential for vast dissemination. Any laughter elicited somatically registers discontent and displeasure at this state of affairs, and pleasure in its clever exposure.
Movement between the physical and virtual, in the other direction, also characterizes Mitchell’s work. Mitchell is the Texas-based graphic designer who created the “
45” logo. He rotated the number associated with Trump’s presidency, the forty-fifth, forty-five degrees, and by employing a red circle and diagonal and black sans serif typeface, echoed but did not replicate the design of the Nazi swastika. Distributed online for easy printing for use in demonstrations, it became an object put into practice, often in DIY versions, on the streets in demonstrations across the country (Figure 11.11). The image’s effectiveness and fluidity attracted attention in both the mainstream and the art press.56 Nazi Germany’s connection to Trump’s USA is not referenced through specific people, policies, or programs, but through logos and imagery. Trump’s status as “45” identifies him more specifically, subtly, and appropriately than images such as “Twitler,” the broad humor and blatant analogy of which has the potential to trivialize Nazi crimes in comparison to those of which Trump has been accused. Mitchell’s logo, in action, calls attention not to crimes but to the power of mobilized and mobile images, in Nazi Germany and now. These may move through the post, over virtual networks, or into the streets, to compel obedience or incite terror. They can provoke or support resistance, or, at the least, provide the cold comfort of gallows humor in private, and physical presence and camaraderie in public, as oppositional work in defiance of political repression.
Figure 11.11: Mike Mitchell, “ 45” on the Street, 2017, as reproduced in Brian Boucher, “Meet the Artist Whose Swastika-Inspired Anti-Trump Logo Has Gone Viral Across the Country,” artnet.com News, August 22, 2017. Courtesy artnet.com News and Mike Mitchell.
In Nazi Germany, and in exile, John Heartfield publicly and courageously created and circulated anti-Nazi montages. No saint, his work sometimes trafficked in stereotypical and deceptive imagery. His work qualifies as resistance. Baumeister, Krause, and Michel worked in Nazi Germany, Krause for the Nazi military. To survive, they needed to make accommodations to the system that rejected them as artists. Their private correspondence and Baumeister’s audacious doodle confirm that they maintained both individual oppositional attitudes, and group solidarity. This served them well at the time, and for posterity. Today’s anti-Trump posters and tweeters do the same. And some of their creations rise to the level of resistance, the bar for which is still set at a lower level than in Nazi Germany.
1On Fallada, his damaged and tortured later life, ambiguous position in Nazi Germany, and the genesis of the novel through Becher, see Geoff Wilkes, “Afterword” to Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone (1947), trans. Michael Hofmann (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2009). This edition also reproduces cards by the Quangels, preserved in their Gestapo file, and documents relating to their case. Thanks to Johan Ahr for calling the novel to my attention. For more on Becher and his role in the Kulturbund, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, In A Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 72–106. The Hampels’ Wikipedia article reproduces one of the cards: https://en.wikipedia.org/
2Fallada, 132, see also Wilkes, 522. The story’s enduring dramatic appeal is attested to by the fact that Fallada’s novel was adapted into a 1962 West German television movie, a 1969–70 three-part East German television series, a 1976 West German film, various adaptations for the stage, and the 2016 film Alone in Berlin, directed by Vincent Peréz and starring Emma Thompson, Brendan Gleeson, and Daniel Brühl.
3On the massive production of art postcards in Nazi Germany, see Frank Wagner and Gudrun Linke, “Mächtige Körper: Staatsskulptur und Herrschaftsarchitektur,” Inszenierung der Macht: Ästhetische Faszination im Faschismus, ed. idem, (Berlin: D. Nishen, 1991), 72.
4Report on the “Kitschification” (Verkitschung) of Field Postcards,” 28 February 1940, Meldungen aus dem Reich: Auswahl aus den Geheimen Lageberichten des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS 1939–1944, ed. Heinz Boberach (Berlin: Luchterhand, 1965), 52–3.
5The Central Institute for Art History in Munich, in cooperation with the German Historical Museum and the House of Art (successor to the House of German Art, and housed in the same, Nazi-commissioned neoclassical Munich building), has created a comprehensive online documentation of the GDK exhibitions, featuring page-by-page reproductions of the catalogues, floor plans, and photo albums with installation photographs. See, http://www.gdk-research.de/
6“Deutsches Volk, komm und urteil selbst!,” “Zieglers Rede zur Eröffnung der Ausstellung ‘Entartete Kunst’ 1937,” in Die ’Kunststadt’ München, 1937: Nationalsozialismus und ‘Entartete Kunst’, ed. Peter-Klaus Schuster (Munich: Prestel, 1987), 218.
7Diary of Willi Baumeister, March 23, 1944, unpublished folio, Archiv Baumeister, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, 471. Urach is a village in the Swabian Alps to which Baumeister moved his family to escape the bombing of Stuttgart.
8See Inventur—Art in Germany, 1943–55, ed. Lynette Roth with Ilke Voermann (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 44–5, 109–18; Alexandra Dern, Modulation und Patina: Willi Baumeister, Oskar Schlemmer und Franz Krause (Münster: Museum für Lackkunst, 2004); Kurt Herberts, Modulation und Patina: Ein Dokument aus dem Wuppertaler Arbeitskreis um Willi Baumeister, Oskar Schlemmer, Franz Krause, 1937–1944 (Stuttgart: G. Hatje, 1989); Schlemmer, Baumeister, Krause, Wuppertal 1937–1944 (Wuppertal: von der Heydt Museum, 1979); Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art, and the Chemical Industry (London: Reaktion, 2005), 193–208, contrasts the Wuppertal activities with the collaboration of most of the German chemical industry.
9Peter Chametzky, “Marginal Comments, Oppositional Work: Willi Baumeister’s Confrontation with Nazi Art,” Willi Baumeister: Zeichnungen, Gouachen, Collagen, ed. Ulrike Gauss (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie & Edition Cantz, 1989), 251–72; Peter Chametzky, “The Post-History of Willi Baumeister’s anti-Nazi Postcards,” Visual Resources XVII, no. 4 (2001), 459–80; Peter Chametzky, Objects as History in Twentieth-Century German Art: Beckmann to Beuys, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 94–103, 117–35; Peter Chametzky, “Postcards on the Edge in Nazi Germany,” Carte postale et creation, eds Isabel Ewig, Emmanuel Guigon, Line Herbert-Arnold (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris Sorbonne, forthcoming 2018).
10The hands holding plastering tools are probably Baumeister’s, and can be seen in Kurt Herberts, The Complete Book of Artists’ Techniques (New York: Praeger, 1958), 271, 277.
11“Die Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung 1941, II,” Kunst dem Volk (Vienna) 12 no. 9 (September 1941), 1–40. Baumeister drew on the Breker reproduction on page 12. See Chametzky, 2010, 117–32.
12Werner Rittich, “Neue Deutsche Plastik. Zu den Werken der Bildhauerkunst in der ‘Grossen Deutschen Kunstaustellung 1941,’” Die Kunst im Deutschen Reich 5 no. 8–9 (August–September 1941), 259.
13Sigmund Freud, “Medusa’s Head,” (1922) in Collected Papers 5, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1950), 105.
14Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien II (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1980), 334.
15Wolfgang Fritz Haug, “Ästhetik der Normalität/Vor-stellung und Vorbild. Die Faschisierung des männlichen Akts bei Arno Breker,” in Wagner and Linke, 97.
16In Chametzky, 2010, I follow a suggestion made by Anthony Julius and advance the idea that the bow-tie-wearing-penis-nosed-wiry-haired little man is, in fact, Baumeister’s self-portrait as Jewish stereotype. See Anthony Julius, Transgressions of Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 171–4, where he states: “The penis becomes a long nose, the face a Jewish caricature that mocks the Nazis’ deepest, most fantastical fears about the emasculating effect of Jewish power.” See also Angela Stercken, “Der Rächer mit neueum Kopf. Arno Brekers Akte,” Sprachformen des Körpers in Kunst und Wissenschaft, ed. Gabriele Genge (Tübingen: A. Francke, 2000), 75–94, and Toby Clark, Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 11.
17In Chametzky, 1989, as now, I’ve drawn on the differentiation made by the historian Walther Hofer between resistance (as in “the resistance”) and oppositional or resistant activities or attitudes, to label Baumeister’s creations “oppositional works,” rather than resistance. “Among other things,” Hofer wrote, “there’s an ongoing discussion of the terms resistance (Widerstand), opposition (Opposition), counter-work (Gegenarbeit) and resistant (Resistenz, as in immune from infection).… This proliferation of terms, from resistance to opposition to resistant, could broaden perspectives beyond the active resistance, to include other forms of dissent to National Socialism. This requires, though, that sharper lines of distinction be drawn between resistance and the more broadly claimed positions of oppositional or resistant activities or attitudes, in order to promote better understanding of the concept of resistance.” Chametzky, 1989, 267, and Walter Hofer, “Diskussion zur Geschichte des Widerstands,” in Der Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus, eds Jürgen Schädeke and Peter Steinbach (Munich: Piper, 1985), 1120. See also, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Widerstand statt Anpassung: Deutsche Kunst im Widerstand gegen den Faschismus 1933–1945 (Berlin: Elefanten, 1980).
18Jocelyn A. Hollander and Rachel L. Einwohner, “Conceptualizing Resistance,” Sociological Forum 19:4 (2004), 534.
19See note 17. In addition to the Hampels, a Munich realtor, Benno Neuberger, was also put to death for creating anti-Nazi postcards, which he deposited unaddressed in a mailbox. See Leslie, 203–4, and Paul Mattick, “Postcards,” available at: http://www.ganahl.info/
20One of the most widely disseminated warnings about the threat of an authoritarian end to United States democracy, drawing parallels between the rise and coming to power in the 1920s and 1930s of European Fascism and the current situation in the US, has come from the Yale historian of Central and Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust, Timothy Snyder, in his 2017 bestseller, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Snyder posted his twenty lessons on Facebook, and, according to the Yale News in March 2017, it was quickly shared over 17,000 times. https://news.yale.edu/
21It is also worth noting that in 1968 the Federal Republic of Germany adopted into its Basic Law (Grundgesetz), as Article 20 clause 4, “the right to resist any person seeking to abolish this constitutional order, if no other remedy is available.” It leaves open what form that resistance might take, and how to determine the unavailability of any other remedy. See, Deutsche Bundestag, Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, print version, last amended on December 23, 2014, trans. Christian Tomuschat, David P. Currin, Donald P. Kommers in cooperation with the Language Service of the German Bundestag, 27. See also, Jutta Limbach, “Georg Elsers Attentat im Lichte des legalisierten Widerstandsrechts,” in Georg Elser – Ein Attentäter als Vorbild, eds Achim Rogoss, Eike Hemmer, Edgar Zimmer (Bremen: Temen, 2006), 105–10.
22David R. Castillo and William Egginton, Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 5, 73. This predicts Trump’s repeated denials of the reality of his own loss of the popular vote in 2016.
23Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, The Mediated Construction of Reality (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017), 63.
24Couldry and Hepp, 136.
25Sheera Frankel and Katie Benner, “To Stir Discord in 2016, Russians Turned Most Often to Facebook,” The New York Times, Sunday, February 17, 2018, 1. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/
26The term “aspirational fascism” derives from the political scientist William Connolly’s Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy Under Trumpism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017), and was brought to my attention by Juliet Koss. One could and should also analyze the use of altered imagery and clever slogans to propagate the authoritarian ideologies that the artists discussed here oppose. For Nazi Germany, see, for instance, the dust jacket of the anti-Semitic book by Carl Neumann, Curt Belling, and Hans-Walther Betz, Film- “Kunst” Film-Kohn Film-Korruption Ein Streifzug durch vier Filmjahrzent (Film-“Art” Film-Cohen Film Corruption: an excursion through four decades of films; Berlin: H. Scherping, 1937), which presents a montage of “Jewish” movie moguls surrounded by female faces and flesh, reproduced in Stephanie Barron, “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991), 184. An analogous image in the present is that of Hilary Clinton’s head silhouetted against a wall of one-hundred dollar bills, and flanked by a red star of David with “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” inscribed in it, retweeted by Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, and then removed when it was called out for its anti-Semitism. Available at The Jerusalem Post: http://www.jpost.com/
27Posted by chelsanity and shown and discussed by Sabine Kriebel, “‘Benuetzte Foto Als Waffe’: John Heartfield in the Digital Age,” paper delivered on the panel, “Cultures of Resistance to Political Oppression,” from which this anthology derives, at the German Studies Association annual meeting, October 2017.
28Carolin Gerlitz and Anne Helmond, “The Like Economy: Social Buttons and the Data-Intensive Web,” New Media and Society 15 no. 8 (2013), 1348–65. Cited in Oliver Leistert, “The Revolution Will Not Be Liked: On the Systemic Constraints of Corporate Media Platforms for Protests,” in Critical Perspectives on Social Media and Protest: Between Control and Emancipation, ed. Leistert and Lina Dencik (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 20.
29“Read the Special Counsel’s Indictment Against the Internet Research Agency and Others,” The New York Times, February 16, 2018, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/
30Leistert, 20.
31Sabine Kriebel, Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 47–8.
32Castillo and Egginton go much farther back in their analysis and analogies, linking two periods of rapid change in communication technology, which they call “inflationary media”: the digital revolution of our time, and the early modern period’s development of moveable type, a vibrant print culture, urban mass theater, and illusionistic perspectival painting, which already provoked “a crisis of reality.” Castillo and Egginton, 1.
33Kriebel, 178.
34Kriebel, 184.
35Kriebel, 168. It is figure 72 and the Grosz 75 in Kriebel.
36Kriebel,187. It should also be remembered that despite their “tragic inadequacy,” Heartfield’s sharp satires were among those works that in spring 1934 ignited a diplomatic confrontation between Germany and Czechoslovakia, when they were shown in Prague in the Association Mánes’s First International Caricature and Humor Exhibition in Prague. See Keith Holz, Modern German Art for Thirties Paris, Prague, and London: Resistance & Acquiescence in a Democratic Public Sphere (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 84–97; and Badischer Kunstverein, 117–18. Thanks to Andrés Zervigón for a reminder about this affair. Holz provides a bracing coda to this controversy, reminding us that simply protecting artistic freedom, as the Association Mánes attempted, “failed to acknowledge art’s contingency in political processes,” and “the necessity of supporting political struggles that would create political conditions to enable artistic as well as other freedoms” (95).
37And, the activity may actually be falsified, see Chris Quintana, “A Case of Mistaken Identity Spurs Hateful Messages for a Sikh Professor,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 20, 2017, available at: https://www.chronicle.com/
38On the “grounds” for and timing of his dismissal, see Chametzky, 2010, 116–17.
39Jonah Engel Bromwich and Niraj Chokshi, “Trump Judicial Nominee Attracts Scorn After Flopping in Hearing,” The New York Times, December 15, 2017, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/
40Elizabeth Otto, “Real Men Wear Uniforms: Photomontage, Postcards, and Military Visual Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Germany,” Contemporaneity 2, no. 1 (2012), available at: http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/
41Andrés Mario Zervigón, John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 44. See also Kriebel, 85, and for Tret’iakov’s 1936 text, “John Heartfield montiert,” see Eckhard Siepmann, Montage: John Heartfield vom Club Dada zur Arbeiter-Illustrierten Zeitung (Berlin: Elefanten, 1977), 168–75.
42For an overview, see See Gerda Breuer, “‘Willi Baumeyster. Was M8 die Kunst?’ Postkarten an Willi Baumeister,” in Franz Krause, 1897–1979: Architekt, Künstler, Poet, eds Breuer and Pia Mingels (Cologne: Wienand, 2014),132–5.
43Gestapo Akte RW 58 Nr. 34041 über Franz Krause (1897–1979), Landesarchiv Nordrheim- Westfalen, Duisburg. See also Fabrice Laurich, Franz Krause (1897–1979) (Mémoire de Master 2: UFR Histoire de l’Architecture et de l’Art Contemporain, 2013), 42–4. My thanks to Isabelle Ewig for sharing this thorough thesis with me, and to M. Laurich for friendly assistance.
44Krause served in the military 1939–1945, but Heinz Rasch was often able to arrange furloughs for him, during which time he participated in research at the Maltechnikum. While this work had no military applications, Herberts’s business was actively involved in producing paints and lacquers for military use, whereby the Maltechnikum could also be represented as part of the war effort, and thus keep Baumeister, Schlemmer, et al. protected from other war-related duties.
45I estimate its date at or around April 16, 1943.
46For more on Ella Bergmann-Michel, see Jennifer Kapczynski’s essay in this volume. For a short summary of the ring, see Jeremy Aynsley, Graphic Design in Germany, 1890–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 156–62. For a more comprehensive view of its political aspirations, see Maud Lavin, “Photomontage, Mass Culture, and Modernity: Utopianism in the Circle of New Advertising Designers,” in Montage and Modern Life, 1919–1942 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 36–59. One of the stated reasons for Baumeister’s dismissal from his professorship in 1933 was his membership in Frankfurt’s October Group, to which Michel and other ring members also belonged. The October Group was an association of artists, designers, and critics in Frankfurt committed to increasing knowledge of innovations in design in the Soviet Union. See Chametzky, 2010, 112, 116.
47Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism & Left Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 21–2.
48Jodi Dean, “Faces as Commons: The Secondary Visuality of Communicative Capitalism,” onlineopen.org, December 31, 2016.
49Peter Dahlgren, The Political Web: Media, Participation and Alternative Democracy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 61.
50Dean’s Benjamin reference is to Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–52.
51Kriebel, 209–10.
52Other examples could include the collective Intelligent Mischief, and its “Black Body Survival Guide,” or “The Other Border Wall Proposals” project. These were presented, along with other interventions, on February 23, 2018, at the College Art Association Annual Meeting, in the session “Evasive Articulation in the Age of ‘Fake News’: Thinking about the Relationship between Art and Truth during the Trump Era,” organized by Aja Mujinga Sherrard and Shiloh R. Krupar.
The former was presented (with other examples) by Krupar and Sarah Kanouse, the latter by Jennifer Meridian. See http://www.intelligentmischief.com/ and http://jennifermeridianstudio.com/
53In 1989, for instance, when the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. gave in to conservative pressure and cancelled its showing of the retrospective exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, Wodiczko projected some of the photographs from the censored exhibition on the façade of the museum. This precursor and others to Bell’s work is also noted by Stephanie Eckardt, “‘Pay Trump Bribes Here’ On the Trump Hotel Is Not the First time Artists Have Projected Their Protest,” W, May 16, 2017, available at: https://www.wmagazine.com/
54See Parry Headrick, “Distinguishing paid, owned, earned, traded, and shared media,” Ragan’s PR Daily, posted May 22, 2013, available at: https://www.prdaily.com/
55According to Wikipedia, The Trump Organization signed a sixty-year lease with the GSA in 2012. https://en.wikipedia.org/
56See Brian Boucher, “Meet the Artist Whose Swastika-Inspired Anti-Trump Logo Has Gone Viral Across the Country,” artnet.com News, August 22, 2017, available at: https://news.artnet.com/