Barbara McCloskey
Anti-intellectualism and hostility to democracy now bear the stamp “made in America” thanks to our current regime and its open season on the role of public schools in promoting democratic values. Moments like this remind us that Hitler too had contempt for schools, teachers, and liberal education.2 But rather than dwell on our here and now, this essay instead explores the roots of the Hitler phenomenon in another perilous moment for education that occurred at a different time and under different circumstances, namely in Germany after the First World War. At that time, the country’s leaders and teachers across the political spectrum focused laser-like attention on schools and education of the young. The stakes were high and self-evident: control over young minds, how and what they learned and for what purpose, promised to shape the nature of the German Republic to come.
In his recent primer On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder speaks of the anticipatory obedience that made tyranny possible under past modern dictatorships and threatens to enable current ones.3 By 1933, the German education system had become one of the main engines of such obedience, fully implicated in Hitler’s rise to power.4 Knowing how our present relates to this ignominious past should be of concern to all, whether inside or outside academia and the teaching professions. Paraphrasing Snyder: history doesn’t repeat, but we certainly have to hope we can learn from it.
Given this volume’s focus on visual culture and resistance to oppression, my study of pedagogy in Weimar will deal specifically with Was Peterchens Freunde Erzählen (What Little Peter’s Friends Tell Him), a children’s fairy tale written by Hermynia Zur Mühlen and illustrated by George Grosz. Published during Christmas season in 1920 by Wieland Herzfelde’s Malik-Verlag, this work has thus far gone unremarked in the literature on Grosz.5 In addition, Zur Mühlen’s publishing career in 1920s Germany has only recently begun to attract significant scholarly notice. That notice still excludes serious analysis of her collaboration with Grosz amidst the volatile debates on education in early Weimar. Motivating factors for this neglect will be explored in the following; so too will reasons why this important collaboration warrants re-examination today.
The powerful entwinement of vanguard art and the values of the late nineteenth-century education reform movement form an important prehistory for the Zur Mühlen and Grosz project and for the debates on education that marked the early Weimar years. In 1912, Grosz arrived in Berlin a jaded product of the Prussian education system bent on establishing himself as a leading figure in the expressionist movement. As such he embraced expressionist valorizations of the untutored and childlike as a dissident counter to the stifling rigidity of the conventional training he received between 1909 and 1911 as a student at the Dresden art academy.6 In this way, the Prussian discipline of his schooling proved vital for Grosz’s self-realization as a modernist artist. He, like many in his circle, rebelled against it and styled himself as part of an artistic vanguard in doing so.
In truth, Grosz and his fellow artists were more of a rearguard—not a vanguard—for a reform movement that had long begun to challenge and transform the German education system.7 Since the turn of the century, rising birth rates and lower infant mortality contributed to Germany’s palpable Verjugendlichung (new youthfulness).8 This accelerating demographic shift fueled growing attention to matters of childhood socialization in the areas of psychology, education, labor practices, and politics. Important in the story of education reform were thinkers like Ellen Key and her Century of the Child (1900), which was translated from Swedish into German (Das Jahrhundert des Kindes) in 1902 and went through thirty-six German editions by 1926.9 Century of the Child is a quixotic blend of free love, secularism, eugenics, and health reform. Above all, Key denounced corporal punishment, rote memorization, and other Prussian models of education as “soul murder” designed to crush the spirit of the child. She advocated instead creative play and the value of active learning. In addition, she was a pacifist and internationalist who rejected the nationalization of school systems and decried the threat of future war.10
During the First World War, Key’s betrayed dream of a children’s utopia lived on as a touchstone of radical critique for Grosz and others of his artistic circle. This can be discerned most vividly in works such as Grosz’s Dorfschullehrer (Country Teacher), which appeared in his Kleine Grosz-Mappe (Small Grosz Portfolio) published by Herzfelde’s Malik-Verlag in 1917 (Figure 5.1).11 Using a childlike graphic style, Grosz indicts the country teacher as an absurd figure of authority. Holding his bible and switch, the teacher gazes heavenward to the higher truths he imparts to the little girl at his side. And we can see what these higher truths are, namely a nonsense jumble that includes a hot air balloon, a floating dog, and a pipe-smoking moon. Meanwhile, the innocent little girl is firmly cinched into her dress, literally buttoned up from head to toe. The image condemns Germany’s authoritarian wartime education system for its villainous distortion of the child’s body as well as her mind. Grosz went on to produce several such works that assailed the German monarchy, the church, and the schools as a triumvirate of oppression and vestiges of a contemptible old order. During the war, these sorts of images about children were circulated first and foremost among like-minded dissidents. After the war, Grosz ventured for the first time into producing works intended explicitly for children.
In addition to his work on Peterchens in 1920, Grosz also produced illustrations for a group of children’s poems written by Bruno Schönlank titled Sonniges Land (Sunny Land) and published by the Paul Cassirer Verlag that same year.12 Like Zur Mühlen, Grosz, and Herzfelde, Schönlank was radicalized by the war and joined the German Communist Party (KPD; Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) after its founding in 1918.13 Schönlank’s poems for Sonniges Land have the character of gentle nursery rhymes filled with expressionist nature imagery and the security of familial love.
Figure 5.1: George Grosz, Der Dorfschullehrer (The Country Teacher) in Kleine Grosz-Mappe (Small Grosz Portfolio), 1917. Transfer lithograph, 8.25 × 5.5 in., 20.9 × 13.5 cm. Art © Estate of George Grosz / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Grosz provided five text illustrations for the volume, all of them loosely based on the contents of the poems they accompany. In one example, he depicts a jaunty Bavarian hiking with his dog through a provincial town dotted by houses nestled into rolling hills (Figure 5.2). Sunshine smiles down on the scene, a windmill catches the breeze on a distant hill, and a hot air balloon hovers amidst puffy clouds. Each of Grosz’s illustrations occupies its own page like a freestanding work of art in keeping with Cassirer’s tradition of luxury graphic portfolio publications. As we shall explore, Zur Mühlen and Grosz’s Was Peterchens Freunde Erzählen departs pointedly from Sonniges Land’s high art format and reassuring content.
Figure 5.2: George Grosz, untitled illustration in Bruno Schönlank, Sonniges Land (Sunny Land), Berlin: Paul Cassirer Verlag, 1920. Art © Estate of George Grosz / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
In Peterchens, Grosz’s images are no longer freestanding but appear embedded within the text where they serve to break up blocks of Gothic typeface; moreover, his drawings are closely calibrated to the tale’s contents. These are small but important differences that serve to enliven the text and make it more approachable, less onerous, and conducive to text-image discussions between parent and child. Grosz’s illustrations also depart from the spatially complex and whimsical style of his earlier Expressionist work. They conform instead to the harsh line and caustic simplicity for which his satiric illustrations increasingly became known at this time. Herzfelde printed Peterchens in a large folio format, intended for children to handle and read for themselves. Equally important, he set the price at seven marks, within the range of what a worker could afford.14
In light of the high-profile attention given to his more incendiary and politically driven paintings and drawings of the early Weimar years, it is perhaps small wonder that Grosz’s collaboration on Peterchens has received so little note. There are other reasons for this neglect, however. First, it is a volume for children and thus easily dismissed as “trivial” or “kiddie lit.” Second, Peterchens was authored by a woman, Zur Mühlen, who adopted a feminist perspective in many of her writings.15 Third, Zur Mühlen died in poverty and neglect near London in 1951, after which her literary estate was destroyed. Outside of various shorter notices, the first biography of Zur Mühlen appeared in 1997, and the only serious monograph on her to date was released in 2009.16 During the First World War, she broke with her Viennese aristocratic roots, put herself in touch with the socialist left and joined the KPD shortly after the war. A talented translator, she helped to establish an audience for Upton Sinclair’s writings in Germany. And despite a more generous contract offer from the Kurt Wolff Verlag, she chose instead to translate Sinclair’s work for Malik-Verlag in an effort to help Herzfelde’s radical publishing house get off the ground in its early years.17
Zur Mühlen also became a prolific author in her own right, known for her detective stories for girls and her proletarian revolutionary fairy tales. Peterchens is the first and most famous of these. Herzfelde issued it as volume one of his Märchen der Armen (Fairy Tales of the Poor) series in 1920 with text illustrations by Grosz.18 When the volume was reissued in 1924, Grosz supplied the color cover illustration discussed in detail below.19 This tale launched Zur Mühlen’s career and, true to both author and publisher’s internationalist commitments, was eventually translated into eight languages and distributed worldwide.20
So what is the story about? And how did it position Zur Mühlen, Grosz, Herzfelde, and their radicalized circle in debates on education in the new German Weimar Republic? Perhaps a more important and complex question is one of audience. For whom was this tale intended?
The work is indeed a fairy tale and in that sense takes its place quite pointedly in a literary tradition considered deeply Germanic, at least since the Brothers Grimm. Grimms’ fairy tales, with their combination of terror and teachable moments, were used since the early nineteenth century in German schools to impart values and socialize the young.21 In Peterchens, Zur Mühlen deliberately took that tradition and radicalized it.
Grosz’s cover illustration already tells us a lot (Figure 5.3). The inner oval bounds the central image and the title of the fairy tale. We as viewers look through this oval, as though through a keyhole, from a slightly elevated vantage point and down onto a scene that depicts a young, thin, and fragile looking boy. The child lies on a bed, back resting against a pillow, wearing a simple nightshirt. An unadorned blanket covers him up to his chest and the boy clutches a small bouquet of white snowbells in his right hand.
Little Peter looks with heavy-lidded eyes in the direction of several household objects, all of which seem to be leaning or running toward him. A matchbox springs through the air while a small stove runs on to his bedspread with one of its glowing trapdoors transformed into an open mouth. A pot teetering on top of the stove has eyes and a mouth, and its handle serves as a nose. A bottle that tips into the oval frame at the lower right also has facial features: a mouth, ears, and eyes appear on its neck. Its stopper doubles as a top hat. The frantic motion of the objects contrasts with the stillness of the young boy, who seems not at all startled to have these inanimate things come to life.
Figure 5.3: George Grosz, cover illustration for Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Was Peterchens Freunde Erzählen (What Little Peter’s Friends Tell Him), 2nd edition, Berlin: Malik-Verlag, 1924. Art © Estate of George Grosz / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Little Peter, Zur Mühlen tells us, slipped on the ice one day and broke his leg. As a result, he must remain in bed all day, cold and alone until his mother returns each evening. She then lights the stove and tends to the boy’s needs. Unlike the indeterminate es war einmal (once upon a time) temporal and spatial structure of Grimms’ fairy tales, time and place are quite explicit here. The mother works in a factory and the lack of a father figure in the story points to the reality of urban, working class, postwar Germany. The tale underscores the true cost of a war in which the male population was decimated and women very often continued factory labor long after the war concluded. Little Peter is therefore a proletarian child, left cold and lonely during the day without companionship or toys. One day, a lump of coal begins to speak from within the wooden scuttle, followed by another and another. Their voices become louder as the lumps of coal talk among themselves, telling from whence they came and what they have seen.
The first of Grosz’s text illustrations appears where one piece of coal describes the terrible conditions of the mine (Figure 5.4). His image portrays the miners’ backbreaking work and their straining arms and torsos as they hew coal from the mine’s underground spaces and lift the heavy stones into a coal wagon. Above ground appear the factories, smoke stacks, and high-tension wires of the industries their labor fuels. The first lump of coal describes the miners’ long hours of sweat and toil in these cramped spaces, a torment they endure day in and day out just to feed their families. Another lump recounts how it witnessed an explosion and mine collapse that killed all the miners after they were ordered to continue their labor even though gas had been detected in the shaft. And yet another goes on to tell of the mine owner’s callous indifference to the plight of the dead workers’ families and his feasting in the face of this tragedy.
Figure 5.4: George Grosz, illustration for Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Was Peterchens Freunde Erzählen (What Little Peter’s Friends Tell Him), 1st edition, Berlin: Malik-Verlag, 1921. Art © Estate of George Grosz / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
As they recount these stories of exploitation one after another, Peter’s animated companions try to school him in why people are so dreadful to one another. A particularly smart lump of coal begins to tell Peter that there are two types of men in the world: the poor, on the one hand, and, on the other, the rich who make their wealth by exploiting the labor of the poor. One day, the matchbox comes to life and tries to tell Peter that “the system” is to blame, but Peter falls asleep when it begins to explain what the system is. And Peter becomes frustrated and cries later when the matchbox and glass jug launch into Marxist analysis and heated discussion about the evils of capitalism. To explain the boy’s tears, the iron pot finally intervenes and tells the other objects they are being too elitist in their efforts to instruct Peter in terms he can’t understand. On successive days, various things in Peter’s meager environment thus come to life and tell similar tales of exploitation, all the while trying to both entertain and educate him. However, when Peter’s mother comes home each night, all the objects fall silent. The story concludes when she returns to Little Peter on the final day of the tale with a bouquet of blossoming snowbells as a fitting herald of spring and hope for a better day.
Looking at Grosz’s cover illustration for Peterchens once again, we see that Peter’s response to his talking companions was clearly understood by Grosz, and presumably Zur Mühlen and Herzfelde as well, to be a crucial dimension of the tale. Remember that Peter is not ill, but lamed by an accident. In other words, his heavily lidded eyes do not register sickness, but rather that he is frankly bored, drowsy, and remarkably unphased by the boisterous objects that cavort around him. Indeed, despite their efforts to school him in lessons of class struggle and solidarity, our small protagonist seems altogether unreceptive to “what little Peter’s friends tell him.” In the end, we are made to puzzle over precisely what kind of radical fairy tale this is. Why does it deliberately undercut, even satirize, its own didactic function? What is its aim?
To return to the question of the intended audience for Peterchens, one was surely working-class children. By reading these tales, it might be hoped that poor and deprived youth would overcome feelings of class inferiority and realize their plight was not their own fault.22 Parents, on reading these tales to their children, might also acquire class consciousness and be moved by the tale’s repeated exhortations to solidarity and the power of collective action. But there was also a third audience for this volume and that was the Communist Party itself, and specifically its sluggish move toward addressing the issue of children, education, and education reform in its revolutionary program.
Indeed, concepts of childhood in general were few and far between in nineteenth-century Marxist theory. Marxist attention to children only began to emerge in response to bourgeois education reform and growing interest in child psychology and socialization from 1900 onward. Socialist feminist and theorist Clara Zetkin was one of the earliest voices on the left to address the issue of children and the need for a children’s literature. She maintained that alternative stories were called for in order to counter the powerful influence of a bourgeois literary tradition that promoted the values of “militarism, chauvinism, war, and religion” among the young. In 1905, Zetkin began to publish addenda in the socialist press with stories directed toward children. Their purpose was to foster instead the ideals of brotherhood, the solidarity of labor, and the basis of a socialist worldview. 23
Zetkin’s efforts confronted a Marxist orthodoxy that insisted on the value of bourgeois culture, its literature, and its traditions of “high art.” According to Marxist doctrine, that culture, including its liberatory Enlightenment values, was to be claimed as the rightful possession of the working class following the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie. In the meantime, exposing children and workers to high art helped to guard against the corrosive effects of a growing popular culture of film, advertising, and other mass cultural entertainments that threatened to distract workers from the ultimate goal of revolutionary struggle.
Gertrud Alexander, cultural editor of the KPD’s daily newspaper Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag), predictably condemned What Little Peter’s Friends Tell Him as little more than a trivial distraction after its release in late 1920. She curtly dismissed the utility of tales like Peterchens in forwarding the Party’s revolutionary aims: “If by these means class consciousness can be awakened and strengthened, which appears to be the point of these tales, and still more, if fairytales can at all fulfill this purpose, strikes us as doubtful.”24 She also condemned the character of Grosz’s illustrations as more suited to adults than children given their coarseness and lack of color and fantasy.
Alexander’s Marxist orthodoxy continued to exert influence in Party debates on the didactic role of culture in the early Weimar years. But the KPD soon recognized the need to undertake “systematic and intensive” education of its members and the broader masses as part of its organizational strategy.25 It also advocated Party intervention into the full range of popular culture and entertainment and set out institutional structures in 1921 to undertake this task at the local level.
Changing party attitudes can be gauged in 1923, when KPD education minister Edwin Hoernle came to a different conclusion regarding Peterchens. Unlike Alexander, he praised the work and advocated the creation of more such volumes:
In general we must learn how to tell stories again, those fantastic artless stories as they were heard in the weaving rooms of farmers and the homes of craftsmen in the pre-capitalist period. Here were reflected the thoughts and feelings of the masses most simply and therefore most clearly. Capitalism with its destruction of the family and mechanization of the working people has annihilated this old “folk art” of telling fairy tales. The proletariat will create new fairy tales in which workers’ struggles, their lives, and their ideas are reflected … and in place of the old and broken education communities, build new ones. It makes no sense to complain that we do not have suitable fairy tales for our children.26
Hoernle also heralded the incisiveness of Grosz’s radical illustrations. Not only did he deem them appropriate reflections of working class reality, but he also saw how they could shape class consciousness among proletarian children whose own drawings and writings derived from Grosz’s model:
If someone wants to know how strongly the great struggles and movements of our time are reflected in the heads of workers’ children, how strongly the worker child is already immersed in the lives of adults, he need only consider the drawings and poetry of our children. Inflation rises, and so do the number of images that have hunger and deprivation as their subject. And almost always the experience of hunger is rendered as an indictment of the rich. So eat the rich, so the proletarian—so live the rich, so the worker.… Images by George Grosz and other political illustrators were [thus] enthusiastically copied and varied.27
While Alexander had earlier questioned the appropriateness of Grosz’s illustrations for children, Hoernle instead praised the artist’s unflinching depictions of suffering, violence, and oppression. For him, the harshness of Grosz’s satiric illustrations for Malik-Verlag, the Party press, and other radical left venues of the period served an important revolutionary function. In Peterchens specifically, Grosz’s contributions to Zur Mühlen’s tale tacitly indicated that distinctions between the world of children and that of adults had altogether disappeared at the hands of a destructive capitalist system—a system that itself drew no such distinction when it came to exploiting the working class.28
In 1924, Herzfelde’s Malik-Verlag released a second edition of Peterchens, this time carrying on its cover the image of Little Peter and his animated friends discussed above (see Figure 5.3). In light of the anti-war demonstrations of that year, the reappearance of Zur Mühlen’s tale at this moment effectively linked the story’s message of international workers’ solidarity and hope for a better future to the struggle against Germany’s resurgent nationalism and militarism. The role of children’s socialization in Germany’s darkening political horizon at this moment was further plumbed in works such as John Heartfield’s photomontage of 1924 titled Nach zehn Jahren: Väter und Söhne (After Ten Years: Fathers and Sons). The image shows young boys in military uniform marching with toy weapons and mimicking the actions of their dead skeletal fathers. The work indicts the patriotic and militaristic socialization of the sons’ “children’s play” as nothing more than a calculated effort by the nationalist right to prepare the next generation for Germany’s war machine. Soon after Nach zehn Jahren appeared in Malik-Verlag’s storefront window, police ordered it removed in accord with the ban on public display of provocative war-related images that was instituted during the anti-war demonstrations of that year.29 When the pacifist Ernst Friedrich opened his Antiwar Museum in Berlin in 1925, he similarly addressed the role of education and socialization in acculturating Germany’s youth for yet another war. He did so by prominently displaying miniature tanks, soldiers, and other militarist children’s toys alongside First World War photographs of the war wounded and anti-war images produced by Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, and other prominent left-wing artists.30
For her part, Zur Mühlen continued to advance reform education thinking through translations she provided for leftist presses and publishing houses. In 1924, her German version of Floyd Dell’s Were You Ever a Child? appeared, as did her translation of Alexandra Kolontai’s “Golden Childhood.”31 With the publication of Peterchens, we see her, along with Grosz and Herzfelde, drawing on the lessons of the education reform movement in their effort to take “trivial” literature seriously and to adopt strategies of child-centered pedagogy. From when the volume first appeared in 1920, their collaboration also argued against an orthodox Party leadership on the value of play and “entertainment” and their allure not just for children, but also for adults in the era of a rapidly growing mass culture industry.
Grosz and Herzfelde were especially attuned to this issue given their leading roles in the German Dada movement and its critical and artistic engagement with mass media.32 In retrospect, Zur Mühlen’s Peterchens fairy tale of 1920 stands out as an early, important, and catalytic intervention against Party orthodoxy on the question of the trivial, entertainment, and revolutionary didacticism. And when Herzfelde’s publishing house reissued Peterchens in 1924, Grosz’s cover illustration of a bored Little Peter insisted all the more urgently on the need for stories that would not only compete with commercialized entertainments but also address children on their own terms and enable them to understand their world in the interest of changing it for the better.33
With the Weimar government’s decisive shift to the right after 1924, the country’s education reform movement was driven from the stage. Traditionalists condemned reform and active learning models as leftist propagandizing antithetical to “cultivation of the mind” and “the spiritual and moral purposes of education.”34 Fear of Marxist materialism, godless Bolshevism, and the reality of increasing secularism in German society further fueled demands for continued authoritarianism and religious control of the schools.35 With the passage of the Schund and Schmutz Gesetz (filth and trash law) in 1926—allegedly designed to protect children from harmful literature—Zur Mühlen’s Ali der Teppichweber (Ali, the Carpet Weaver), also published in Herzfelde’s Märchen der Armen series, faced censorship by the Hessen police. And, as testament to the broader European reach of political censorship during this period, a journalist was also jailed in Hungary for translating Peterchens into Hungarian.36
While Peterchens thus encountered repression from the right, the gentle hopefulness of Zur Mühlen’s fairy tale was also swept aside as vestiges of a naïve idealism now to be overcome as the KPD entered its more militant phase in the late Weimar years. In 1927, she was attacked by author and KPD cultural functionary Johannes R. Becher for lack of militancy.37 In 1930, KPD artist Heinrich Vogeler reinterpreted Peterchens, rendering Little Peter as a Young Pioneer leading his exploited object comrades in demonstration (Figure 5.5).38 Indeed, across the political spectrum, the notion of “youth” became thoroughly evacuated of its earlier reform movement associations with free play and innocence. As part of the Nazi program of national revolution, youth also lost its association with any future other than one dictated by militant commitment to party vision. On Hitler’s rise to power, Zur Mühlen made her way into exile and eventually settled in England, while Herzfelde fled to Prague.
Grosz ended up in New York where he assumed a teaching position at the Art Students’ League. He also witnessed from afar the unfolding catastrophe in the country and culture he had left behind. After the beginning of the Second World War, the American public too became more deeply aware of atrocities in the Third Reich, including the impact of Nazism on Germany’s educational system. An installation in Rockefeller Center sponsored by the Office of War Information in 1943 underscored that impact in vivid terms (Figure 5.6). Part of the installation addressed “The Militarization of Children.” It showed four small boys wearing gasmasks and carrying bayonets as they goose-step in military formation. The podium on which they march carries a quote from Robert Ley, leader of the Nazi labor front, on the ominous character of education in Hitler’s Germany: “We begin with the child when he is three years old. As soon as he begins to think, he gets a little flag put in his hand. Then follows the school, the Hitler Youth, the S.A., and military training. We don’t let him go until he dies, whether he likes it or not.”39
Figure 5.5: Heinrich Vogeler, illustration for Was Peterchens Freunde Erzählen (What Little Peter’s Friends Tell Him) in Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Es war einmal … und es wird sein: Märchen (Once Upon a Time … and What Will Be: Fairytales), Berlin: Verlag der Jugendinternationale, 1930.
Safely in American exile, Grosz took up the fairy tale genre once again. Not proletarian revolutionary fairy tales this time, but specifically Grimms’ fairy tales and their world of witches, spider webs, and vultures. He finished one of his Grimm-inspired paintings of this period, God of War, in 1940, not long after Hitler’s march into Poland (Figure 5.7). God of War depicts Mars adorned in feathered plumes giving the Nazi salute. An arm raised behind Mars echoes his gesture, as do the many hands that double as the cockade of his antique warrior’s helmet. Another figure, with his neck clamped in a wooden stockade, kneels before the god of war. A spider lurks at the center of its web above his head. His severed hands fold together in homage under a hovering swastika. A young boy, absorbed in the intricacies of a machine gun, crouches in the foreground of the composition, oblivious to the martial seductions of the war god behind him.
Figure 5.6: “Militarization of Children,” part of the exhibition Nature of the Enemy, Office of War Information (OWI), Rockefeller Plaza, New York, 1943. Photograph by Arthur S. Siegel, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
Though separated by close to twenty years and emerging from the very different contexts of revolution on the one hand and exile on the other, Grosz’s cover illustration for Peterchens and his painting God of War share a tantalizingly similar composition and content. In both, children quietly occupy the left lower corner of the image, while the right-hand side is filled with bluster and bombast—from talking stoves and leaping matchboxes in Grosz’s Peterchens cover of 1924 to the god of war and his frenzied Nazi salute in the painting of 1940. But the crux of these comparisons rests with the children. Little Peter looks toward the objects that have filled his long days with companionship and helped him to become conscious of class society and foster his hope for a better day. He indeed becomes bored and his heavy-lidded eyes suggest from his child’s point of view a mild rebuke to the turgidness of undiluted Marxist theory. In the 1940 painting, by contrast, the child turns away from the god of war, his bluster, and outdated regalia of antique helmet and sword. An exemplar of Hitler’s Party of Youth, he is the future and that future looks just like the past—the son will repeat the sins of the father in other words—only updated in attire and with the latest in military hardware. Unlike Peter with his drowsy skepticism, the child in God of War is wholly engrossed in, indeed seduced by, the weapon of destruction he examines.
Figure 5.7: George Grosz, God of War, 1940. Oil on canvas, 3ft. 11 in. × 2 ft. 11.5 in., 119.5 × 90 cm. Art © Estate of George Grosz / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Art history has devoted the lion’s share of its attention to progressive educational institutions like the Bauhaus. But it and schools like it lent themselves more readily to consolidating forces of capitalism and technocracy in Weimar, and ultimately collapsed in the face of Nazi tyranny. From their considerably more marginal vantage point, Zur Mühlen, Grosz, Herzfelde, and others of their radical circle fared no better, and in fact far worse in their effort to resist oppression. To explore this Zur Mühlen-Grosz collaboration is therefore to engage the counterfactual “what if?” of the road not taken. What if their hope for a better social order through education, one free of exploitation, nationalism, and war, had actually had a hearing? In addition, there is the issue of Little Peter’s boredom and impatience with “authority”—in his case, that of precocious household objects and undiluted Marxist theory. The boy’s rebuke of authority bespoke Zur Mühlen, Grosz, and Herzfelde’s call for self-reflection, skepticism, and re-evaluation of assumptions prevalent not only in bourgeois society, but also within a radical-left party to which they all subscribed. These “critical thinking skills,” as we teachers like to call them, were indeed praiseworthy educational values desperately needed but repressed in Germany’s too fragile democracy, and ultimately eliminated by National Socialism. If this sort of radical vision seems hopelessly naïve and outdated to us today then we may be in bigger trouble than we think.
1I want to thank Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Libby Otto for organizing the German Studies Association session in 2017 where I delivered this paper. My thinking on this topic has benefited significantly from their comments and those of session and audience participants. Thanks too to Cherilyn Lacy of Hartwick College for inviting me to present an early version of this essay in 2016 as part of her NEH speaker series on War and Social Change.
2For Hitler’s negative attitude toward organized school systems and preference for youth groups as instruments of forging national and racial identity in the Third Reich, see Lisa Pine, Education in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2010), 1–4.
3Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017).
4Fritz Ringer was among the first to explore the role of intellectuals and Germany’s education system in fostering a culture of pessimism and conformity conducive to the rise of Nazism. See Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969).
5The impress date for the first edition of Peterchens is 1921, though reviews of it began to appear in late 1920.
6For Grosz’s reflections on his academy training, see George Grosz: An Autobiography, trans. Nora Hodges (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 46–64. First published in 1946.
7On the nationalist authoritarianism of the German imperial educational system, its control by church and state, and its public schools that reflected class and confessional divisions, see Lisa Pine, 8ff. On the challenge to that order by Germany’s organized education reform movement founded in 1908, see Marjorie Lamberti, The Politics of Education: Teachers and School Reform in Weimar Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 11ff.
8Peter D. Stachura, The Weimar Republic and the Younger Proletariat (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 14.
9The volume also appeared in English in 1909 and was translated into some thirteen other languages. See Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor, Growing by Design, 1900–2000: Century of the Child (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 249, note 3.
10Ellen Key, Century of the Child (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1909), 9th printing. See Chapter V, “Soul Murder in the Schools,” 203–32. Key opens her text with the emblem of the new century as a “small naked child, descending upon the earth, but drawing himself back in terror at the sight of a world bristling with weapons” and exploitive materialism. See Key, 1–2.
11I discuss this work and the circumstances of its publication in Barbara McCloskey, George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918–1936 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 41–2.
12Bruno Schönlank, Sonniges Land: Kindergedichte (Berlin: Paul Cassirer Verlag, 1920).
13Jon Clark and Wilfried van der Will, “Bruno Schönlank” in Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 23 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2007): https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/
14See Frank Schulz, “Ein Märchenbuch für Arbeiterkinder,” Der Gegner 5 (1920–1), 166–7. According to Schulz: “Der Preis des Buches (7 Mark) macht den Kauf dieses Weihnachtsgeschenkes für seinen Sohn jedem Arbeiter möglich.” Quoted in Ailsa Wallace, Hermynia Zur Mühlen: The Guises of Socialist Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 34.
15The female-centered notion of revolution that Zur Mühlen developed in her writings of this period could well be described as feminist, though she did not identify herself as such. On this issue, see Lynda J. King, “From the Crown to the Hammer and Sickle: The Life and Works of Austrian Interwar Writer Hermynia Zur Mühlen,” Women in German Yearbook, 4 (1988), 125–54.
16Manfred Altner, Hermynia Zur Mühlen (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997), and Ailsa Wallace, Hermynia Zur Mühlen: The Guises of Socialist Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Her autobiographical note appeared in “Selbstbiographie,” Das Wort 2 (1937), 184–5.
17Wallace, 25.
18Others in the Märchen der Armen series include: Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Ali, der Teppichweber, illustrated by John Heartfield (1923); Eugen Lewin-Dorsch, Die Dollarmännchen, illustrated by Heinrich Maria Davringhausen (1923); and Maria Szucisch, Silavus, illustrated by Otto Schmalhausen (1923). Two of the chapters that make up Peterchens were also published individually in the journal of the Communist Youth International, Der junge Genosse in 1921: “Was die Kohle erzählt,” Der junge Genosse 1 (1921), 4–6; and “Was die Bettdecke erzählt,” Der junge Genosse 10 (1921), 4–6.
19The 1920 edition contained six drawings by Grosz. The second edition of 1924 included the color cover in addition to five drawings and six vignettes by Grosz. See Frank Hermann, Der Malik-Verlag 1916–1947: Eine Bibliographie (Kiel: Neuer Malik-Verlag, 1989), 106.
20Translations of Peterchens appeared in Russian: Cto rasskazyvali Pete ego druz’ja (Charkov: Put’prosvescenija, 1923) and Cto rasskazyvali Petiny ego druz’ja, trans. E.M. Levina (Charkov: Proletarij, 1925); Japanese: Chiisai piitaa, trans. Hayashi Fusao (Tokyo: Gyoseikaku, 1927); Chinese: edition translated from Japanese by Lu Xun appeared in 1929 under the title Xiao Bide [in Lu Xun, Collected Works, 20 vols (Xianggang: Jian we shu ju, 1959), 237–40]; Esperanto: Kion rakontas la amikoj de Pecjo (Leipzig: Eldona Fako kooperativa, 1928); French: Ce que racontent les amis de Pierrot, trans. from Esperanto by M. Boubon (Saumur: L’École émancipée, 1930); Spanish: Lo que cuentan los amigos de Perico, trans. Piedad de Salas (Madrid: Editorial Cenit, 1931); and Serbo-Croat: Sta pricaju Pertrovi prijatelji (Zagreb: Mladost, 1957). Zur Mühlen’s work was also published in the United States: Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Fairy Tales for Workers’ Children, trans. Ida Dailes (Chicago: Daily Worker, 1925), but this volume does not contain Peterchens. Her Fairy Tales for Workers’ Children did, however, inspire Helen Kay’s Battle in the Barnyard: Stories and Pictures for Workers’ Children (New York: Workers Library, 1932), the first American authored children’s book published by a Communist Press. On this and the history of radical children’s literature in the US, see Julia L. Mickenberg, Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 51.
21Jack Zipes, ed., Fairy Tales and Fables from the Weimar Days (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 9–11. See also Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (New York: Methuen, 1979), 1–39, on the role of the fairy tale as an instrument of bourgeois socialization.
22On the use of emotions in the socialist education of children, see Sabine Hake, The Proletarian Dream: Socialism, Culture, and Emotion in Germany, 1863–1933 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 270–87.
23Clara Zetkin, “Sozialdemokratie und Volkserziehung” (1906) in Manfred Altner, ed., Das proletarische Kinderbuch: Dokumente zur Geschichte der sozialistischen deutschen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1988), 89–91.
24Gertrud Alexander, “Literatur des Malikverlags,” Die Rote Fahne (18 December 1920): “Ob auf diese Weise das Klassenbewußtsein geweckt und gestärkt werden kann, was wohl der Zweck dieser Märchen ist, und noch mehr, ob Märchen überhaupt einen solchen Zweck haben dürfen, erscheint uns zweifelhaft.… Auch die Illustrationen sind nicht dem kindlichen Gesichtskreis, dem Verlangen des Kinderauges angepaßt. Sie sind derb und auch ohne Phantasie und Farbe und trotz ihrer naiven Manier wirken sie unkindlich, so daß auch aus diesem Grunde das Buch mehr rein Bilderbuch für Erwachsene als für Kinder ist.” As noted by Zipes, Georg Lukács took an even more condemnatory view of fairy tales as “having initiated irrationalism and a literature of flight and fancy in the German tradition.” See Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell, 39.
25“Leitsätze zur Bildungsarbeit der KPD, Entwurf des Reichsbildungsausschusses (1921/22),” in Altner, Das proletarische Kinderbuch, 99–105; reprinted from Die Arbeit, 1921/22, nr. 5.
26Edwin Hoernle, “Spiele und Märchen,” in Die Arbeit in den kommunistischen Kindergruppen (Vienna, 1923), reprinted in Altner, Das proletarische Kinderbuch, 107–14. “Überhaupt müssen wir wieder lernen, Geschichten zu erzählen, jene phantastischen, kunstlosen Geschichten, wie sie in der vorkapitalistischen Zeit in den Spinnstuben der Bauern und in den Handwerkerwohnungen gehört wurden. Hier spiegelt sich das Denken und Sinnen der Massen am einfachsten und deshalb am klarsten. Der Kapitalismus mit seiner Zerstörung der Familie und seiner Mechanisierung des arbeitenden menschen hat diese alte, Volkskunst des Märchenerzählens vernichtet. Das Proletariat wird die neuen Märchen, in denen sich sein Kampf, sein Leben, seine Ideale spiegeln … und an Stelle der zerbrochenen alten neue Erziehungsgemeinschaften aufbaut. Es hat keinen Sinn, darüber zu klagen, daß wir keine passenden Märchen für unsere Kinder haben.”
27Edwin Hoernle, Die Arbeit in den kommunistischen Kindergruppen (Vienna 1923). “Wenn jemand wissen will, wie stark die großen Kämpfe und Bewegungen unserer Zeit sich in den Köpfen der Arbeiterkinder widerspiegeln, wie stark schon das Arbeiterkind mitten drin steht in dem Leben der Erwachsenen, so braucht er nur die Zeichnungen und Gedichte unserer Kinder zu betrachten. Die Teuerung steigt, auch die Zahl der bilder steigt, die den Hunger und die Entbehrung zum Gegenstand haben. Und fast immer wird das Erlebnis des Hungers zugleich als Anklage gestaltet gegen die Reichen. So ißt der Reiche, so der Proletarier—so wohnt der Reiche, so der Arbeiter … Bilder von George Grosz und anderen politischen Zeichnern wurden begeistert nachgezeichnet und variiert.” Cited in Altner, Das proletarische Kinderbuch, 482.
28For a similar understanding of the implicit rhetorical function of Grosz’s “adult” illustrations for Peterchens, see Altner, Das proletarische Kinderbuch, 481.
29For more on this, see my George Grosz and the Communist Party, 116.
30Tommy Spree, Das Anti-Kriegs Museum (Berlin: Buchdruckerei Erich Pröh, n.d.), 11–18. Ernst Friedrich also edited Proletarischer Kindergarten: Ein Märchen- und Lesebuch für Groß und Klein (Berlin: Buchverlag der Arbeiter-Kunst-Ausstellung, Christmas 1921), with illustrations by Kollwitz, Karl Holtz, Otto Nagel, and others.
31Floyd Dell, Warst du je ein Kind? (Leipzig: Verlagsanstalt für proletarische Freidenker, 1924); first published in English: Were You Ever a Child? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1919). For Zur Mühlen’s translation of Kolontai, see A. Kolontai, “Goldene Kindheit,” Sozialistische Republik (March 17, 1924). Zur Mühlen also published her own essay on children: “Kinder,” Die Rote Fahne: 28 July 1922. Zur Mühlen maintained her serious interest in children and their education and upbringing throughout the Weimar years. On this, see Wallace, 28.
32For further information on Grosz and Herzfelde’s debates with the KPD over the value of Dada in Communist revolution and the related struggle over Grosz’s satiric illustrations for the Party press, see my George Grosz and the Communist Party, 48–103. According to Altner, Zur Mühlen expressed her hostility toward American capitalism, including the targeting of children by consumer culture, through her commitment to providing German audiences with translations of writings by Upton Sinclair and other American leftists. These works served as critical counter-examples to the growing specter of commercialized Amerikanismus in Weimar Germany. On the child as a figure of consumerism see Daniel Thomas Cook, “Children as Consumers: History and Historiography,” 283–95, in Paula S. Fass, ed., The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World (London: Routledge, 2013).
33The relationship of the German Communist left to the education reform movement is a complex and underexplored one. For an important exception, see Sabine Andressen, Sozialistische Kindheitskonzepte: Politische Einflüsse auf die Erziehung (Munich: Ernst Reinhardt Verlag, 2006). Andressen (p. 9ff) discusses the confrontation between the Rousseauist orientation of bourgeois reform pedagogy that looked on childhood as a period free of politics and calls for educating children for political engagement that became increasingly more prevalent on the left in the early Weimar years.
34Lamberti, 158.
35Lamberti, 185.
36Wallace, 40.
37Johannes R. Becher, “Bürgerliche und proletarisch-revolutionäre Literatur in Deutschland,” Publizistik I, reprinted in volume 15 of his Gesammelte Werke (Berlin: Aufbau, 1977), 624–6. Cited in King, 126, 150, note 6.Given there are no “heroes” in Peterchens, the tale might also have run afoul of Hoernle’s prescriptions of the later Weimar years as expressed in his Grundfragen proletarischer Erziehung of 1929. There, Hoernle insisted on the need to create proletarian heroes to counter those of bourgeois literature: “Die kommunistische Erziehungsbewegung muß neue Heldentypen schaffen, Heldentypen aus dem revolutionären Kampf der unterdrückten und ausgebeuteten Klassen und Rassen alle Zeiter und Länder” (citation here from the 1973 Fischer Taschenbuchverlag reprint, p.100). See also Walter Benjamin’s response to Hoernle’s book and his reflections on Hoernle’s critique of the “pseudorevolutionary” character of reform education: Walter Benjamin, “A Communist Pedagogy,” 273–5. In Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2. 1927–34, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999).
38Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Es war einmal … und es wird sein: Märchen (Berlin: Verlag der Jugendinternationale, 1930). Illustrated by Heinrich Vogeler.
39Ley established the Adolf Hitler Schools in 1937 with Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach. These were Germany’s first purely party organized schools devoted to training boys twelve years and older to be future Nazi political leaders. See Pine, 79–80.