James van Dyke
What would qualify as an act of resistance for a German artist in the first two years of Hitler’s dictatorship? That is the question that this essay, about two drawings made in 1934 by the famous painter Otto Dix, considers. It is prompted by the visibility of words like “resist” and “resistance” in the contemporary political culture, and by their frequent and sometimes imprecise or inflated use by art historians.1 It is based in the voluminous work of numerous historians who have sought to develop an analytical framework to distinguish between various forms of resistance (from aristocratic to Communist, for instance), on the one hand, and between resistance and other, lesser forms of nonconformist behavior in Nazi Germany, on the other. Thirty years ago, Detlef J.K. Peukert, to name one, established a useful scale of dissidence from “nonconformist behavior” through refusal and protest to resistance. While he acknowledged that the totalitarian aspirations of the Nazi regime politicized areas of behavior that would “normally lie below the threshold of police intervention,” he distinguished resistance from the rest.2 Resistance was reserved for “those forms of behavior which were rejections of the Nazi regime as a whole and were attempts, varying with the opportunities available to the individuals concerned, to help bring about the regime’s overthrow.”3 Ian Kershaw argued similarly when he distinguished between popular opposition and organized resistance, “in the narrow sense of the political underground or conspiracies against the regime.”4 It is important to maintain such analytical distinctions in art historical writing about the 1930s. Were the modern artists written about most by art historians engaged in resistance, as it is defined by such historians? Or did they dissent while others, today largely forgotten by art history, resisted?
The formation of Hitler’s government on January 30, 1933 and the events of the following weeks and months had disastrous effects on the career of Otto Dix, as they did for many prominent modern artists who had secured positions in state institutions since 1919. In April 1933, Dix was dismissed by new Nazi authorities in Saxony from his professorship because his pictures had allegedly weakened Germany’s military preparedness and because his political loyalty was doubtful. In May 1933, he complied with an official request to resign from the prestigious, representative Prussian Academy of the Arts, to which he had been admitted in 1931, though he stated for the record that he had never been a member of a political party. In September, War Cripples, which in 1920 had been shown in the First International Dada Fair, and Trench, the controversial monumental painting that had done much to establish Dix’s national and international reputation as an important artist, were dragged out of the storerooms of public art collections in Dresden and became centerpieces of “Degenerate Art,” one of many anti-modernist exhibitions organized in 1933 by local Party activists in German cities.5 The market for modern art in general and for Dix’s work in particular, always fragile and strongly suppressed by the world economic crisis since 1929, seems to have withered almost completely.6 By early 1934, the painter was in despair.7
The effects of these events on Dix’s productivity were predictably severe. The appointment to the Dresden academy in 1926 had emancipated the artist from the dictates of the market. He had certainly continued to show his work in private commercial galleries, but on his own terms. After the appointment, one of the first things that he had done was to cancel his exclusive contract with his long-time dealer Karl Nierendorf. Furthermore, in the seven years of his tenure Dix had been able to produce, among many other things, a set of extraordinarily labor-intensive, unmarketable, monumental works that reprised the themes of his scandalous avant-garde successes: the public attention generated by his large collage Barricade in 1920 and 1921, the police seizure of Woman Before a Mirror and ensuing obscenity trial in 1923 (Dix was acquitted), and the heated public debate over Trench in 1924. Conversely, the events in 1933 resulted in an almost total collapse in the number of paintings he completed. That year, Dix managed to finish only two portraits, one landscape, and one large allegory, The Seven Deadly Sins.8 The last has usually been described either as an immediate and robust critical response to the Nazi assumption of power in general, or as a caricature of several of Dix’s conservative colleagues in the academy and new art-political authorities in Dresden.9 It is only the earliest of several paintings that are generally viewed as evidence of Dix’s dissidence. Chief among them are The Triumph of Death of 1934, Jewish Cemetery in Randegg of 1935, Flanders of 1936, and the series of depictions of the popular Catholic Saint Christopher that he began to make in 1938.
Dix’s production as a painter temporarily collapsed during the first year of Hitler’s regime, but, like Paul Klee in Düsseldorf, he continued to draw in the face of acute political and professional crisis.10 The drawings that he had made since Hitler became Reich Chancellor—mostly self-portraits, portraits, and landscapes—were well represented in his important exhibition with the prominent painter Franz Lenk in Karl Nierendorf’s private gallery in Berlin in early 1935.11 Two of them, Ephraim the Dairyman (Der Senn Ephraim) and Joseph the Dairyman (Der Senn Joseph) are the subject of this essay (Figures 9.1 and 9.2). Though the scholarly focus on Dix’s ambitious paintings and prints is understandable, given his public professional self-definition and prevalent artistic hierarchies, it is rather surprising that these drawings have received no extended scholarly attention.12 On the one hand, Dix was a prolific draftsman, making thousands of drawings over the course of his career in the form of sketches and caricatures, preparatory studies, and independent works of art.13 This pair in particular exemplifies an important development in Dix’s technique in the late years of the Weimar Republic and early years of the Nazi dictatorship. On the other hand, the two drawings are not quite unique but certainly very unusual in Dix’s art, in terms of their subject matter.
Examining their technique, iconography, and the circumstances of their production, this essay argues that Ephraim the Dairyman and Joseph the Dairyman testify to the continuation of Dix’s ability, even at a time when most critics believed him long since to have lost his artistic vitality and radical edge, to produce critical, subversive pictures, despite his consistent refusal to commit himself to partisan politics and to the manufacture of the propaganda and tendentious art expected of Communist artists in particular. In particular, this essay intends to show that these two drawings undermined widespread stereotypes about Jews that played a fundamental role in Nazi ideology. Yet they are not unequivocal or agitational. They were not produced in the context of organized resistance, like John Heartfield’s collages for the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, Karl Schwesig’s print series on his torture at the hands of the SA, or more instrumental, ephemeral images that circulated in the underground press or were inscribed onto the walls of German cities.14 They are not even like George Grosz’s drawings of Nazi torture, a few of which found their way in 1936 into the print portfolio Interregnum, which he published while in New York exile.15 Hence, it is problematic to describe them as an art of resistance, if we follow the definitions of resistance advanced by Peukert and Kershaw. It is more accurate to argue that Ephraim the Dairyman and Joseph the Dairyman may have functioned as signs of individual non-conformity, dissent, or refusal in the first phase of Hitler’s dictatorship, even as they were ambiguous enough to be publicly exhibited and institutionally absorbed. They thus point to the complex, or at least unclear, reality of the first months and years of Hitler’s regime for an artist like Dix, and indicate the need for terminological precision.
Figure 9.1: Otto Dix, Der Senn Joseph (Joseph the Dairyman), 1934. Silverpoint and pencil on cardboard. 11.7 × 5.8 in., 32.2 × 24.8 cm. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Inv SZ Dix 12. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche Museen Berlin / Art Resource, NY. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
Figure 9.2: Otto Dix, Der Senn Ephraim (Ephraim the Dairyman), 1934. Silverpoint and pencil on primed paper. 11.7 × 6 in., 32.5 × 25 cm. Private Collection. Photo: Courtesy of Otto Dix Estate, Bevaix, Switzerland. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
Ephraim the Dairyman and Joseph the Dairyman are silverpoint drawings. This is an old, demanding technique, in which a metal wire or stylus is drawn across a sheet of paper prepared with an abrasive ground, that Dix first tried in 1931. He was perhaps encouraged by a colleague at the Dresden art academy, Kurt Wehlte, who specialized in research into artistic techniques and materials; in 1935, Wehlte published an article on silverpoint in the journal of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts.16 In any case, the technique became an important part of Dix’s output of works on paper in the 1930s. In 1933, at least twenty-nine silverpoint self-portraits, portraits, and landscapes constituted the bulk of his overall production. In 1934, that number grew to about forty-five drawings, including Joseph the Dairyman and Ephraim the Dairyman. Between 1931 and 1944, Dix made over two hundred silverpoint drawings.17 For this reason, recent books and exhibition catalogues on metalpoint techniques invariably mention him as one of its most important practitioners in the twentieth century.18
Dix’s silverpoints are much more loosely, energetically gestural than contemporaneous silverpoint drawings by Christian Schad, which, like fifteenth- and sixteenth-century examples, were built of lines so fine and tightly controlled that they are scarcely discernible to the naked eye.19 Nonetheless, it is not hard to understand the appeal of the crisply linear technique, which had been used for centuries to make durable drawings of extraordinary verisimilitude and subtle precision, to an artist associated with an uncompromising realism. Furthermore, the special demands of silverpoint were also clear. The stylus might glide with exhilarating, supple smoothness across the ground, according to the American artist John Storrs, another artist who adopted the technique in the 1920s, but once a line was made, it was difficult or impossible to erase (or to smudge).20 In this respect, silverpoint was akin to the translucent oil glazes of Northern Renaissance painting, another old, difficult technique to the revival of which Dix had contributed in the 1920s. It too could be used to produce pictures of uncommonly vivid verisimilitude and was resistant to alteration or correction. Using silverpoint thus supported the professor’s claim to consummate craftsmanship and artistic mastery even as accusations by National Socialists that Dix was “degenerate” or an “Art Bolshevist” were in the ascendant. It should come as no surprise that one of Dix’s largest silverpoints of 1933 was a self-portrait showing the artist with stylus and paper in hand (Figure 9.3). Dix depicted himself in a posture of sober yet defiant self-affirmation, reminding one of the self-portrait with palette and brush that Jacques-Louis David painted at an earlier historical moment of extreme political and professional crisis, the fall of Robespierre and the radical painter’s ensuing imprisonment.21
Dix’s silverpoints of the 1930s not only conveyed a message about his skill as a draftsman in general, but also contributed in particular to his ongoing critical artistic dialogue with the work of Old Masters whose names were frequently invoked in discussions of national identity and the essence of German art.22 Though metalpoints were made by artists all over Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the technique is closely associated with Northern Europe, and in particular with artists who later became canonical figures in Germany. Among them was Hans Baldung-Grien, to whose work “Hans Baldung Dix,” as George Grosz nicknamed his friend and colleague in 1934, felt a strong affinity.23 Indeed, since 1922 commentators and scholars had described Baldung-Grien as a powerfully imaginative, wildly expressive, vitally erotic, radically realistic, emphatically German artist, terms that could have been and were applied equally well to Dix.24 In late 1934, this view was reiterated in two publications. The first was an essay in the brochure that accompanied an exhibition at the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin, which wanted to “bring to life the treasures of the German people’s painting (dem deutschen Volk die Schätze seiner Malerei … lebendig werden zu lassen)”.25 The second was an article in Kunst der Nation, best known for its support of Expressionism as an authentically national, revolutionary art.26 While focused on Baldung-Grien’s painting, both also drew attention to his drawings. Baldung-Grien, they wrote, was second only to Albrecht Dürer in the number of drawings he had made, and he had been the first to see them as marketable works of art in their own right. The delicate lines of his silverpoints expressed an “affectionate devotion to the object” and testified to his “artisanal-artistic skill.” Large or small, they were “fully realized” works.27 His Karlsruhe Sketchbook, a pocket-sized codex made in the first half of the sixteenth century, equipped with a stylus, and filled with tiny silverpoint drawings, was a “delicacy [Köstlichkeit]”28 (Figure 9.4).
Figure 9.3: Otto Dix, Selbstbildnis als Zeichner (Self-Portrait Drawing), 1933. Silverpoint and pencil on primed paper. 12.8 × 18.6 in., 58.3 × 47.2 cm. Inv. SZ Dix 10. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche Museen Berlin / Jörg P. Anders / Art Resource, NY. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
It was an opportune moment for an artist like Dix to remind people of his long-standing engagement with the Old Masters of the national art-historical tradition, and to make and market drawings that emulated such widely admired things. Such work might well serve to support the claim to be a “prototype of a German painter in the best sense,” as Dix described himself in his letter of April 12, 1933 to Ludwig Justi, the national-conservative director of the Nationalgalerie who since 1919 had been instrumental in opening that most representative of German museums to modern art.29 Such drawings as Ephraim the Dairyman and Joseph the Dairyman were certainly produced in the context of an ever more pronounced critical and curatorial alignment of contemporary art and literature with national tradition and identity—perhaps most clearly articulated in the early 1930s by the reframing as “New Romantics” of certain artists formerly associated with the “New Objectivity.” Even Grosz, long associated with the Communist Party, asserted the value of German tradition in a prominent essay of 1931, rejecting the international cultural hegemony of Paris even as he reiterated his intransigently materialist, anti-authoritarian critique of capitalism and state power.30 References to national tradition after the First World War tend to be seen by modernist art history simply as reactionary, even proto-fascist cultural phenomena, but in the last years of the Weimar Republic this was not necessarily always the case.
Figure 9.4: Hans Baldung-Grien (1484–1545), Karlsruher Skizzenbuch (Sketchbook of Hans Baldung-Grien), fol. 58 recto. Münster Preacher Caspar Hedio, 1543. Silverpoint on primed paper. Inv.-Nr. VIII 1062. Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe. Photo: bpk / Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe / Art Resource, NY.
Ephraim the Dairyman and Joseph the Dairyman were not private pictures or working sketches, but rather were drawn on two almost identical sheets of paper that were close to the size of folios, hence somewhat larger than the typical sixteenth-century painted portraits to which they are compositionally related. Although by no means the largest drawings that Dix made in 1933 and 1934, they were much larger than the perforated sheets of the pocket-sized sketchbooks that Dix often had used through the 1920s. The two drawings had a certain physical presence. They were well suited for public display and sale at a time when Dix was overcoming his initial despair, had a few contacts within the cultural bureaucracy put into place by the National Socialist regime in Berlin, and was seeking to re-establish his career.31
Joseph and Ephraim, as Dix drew them, were neither beautifully ideal nor sublimely handsome, but rather interestingly picturesque, and the pair of drawings dwells on their disparate, highly individual, even crooked features. Joseph has a long and narrow face, Ephraim’s is wide and square. Joseph has a distinctively arched nose, Ephraim’s is straight. Joseph has a wispy mustache and stubble, Ephraim wears a full, curly beard. The hood of Joseph’s cloak or jacket hangs down his back, Ephraim’s is pulled up over his head. Joseph looks with contemplatively wide eyes into the distance with the hint of a furrowed brow, while Ephraim makes eye contact with the viewer, a smirking squint leaving crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. Yet even as the drawings accentuate the differences between the two men, Dix points to a commonality. The two sheets of paper are virtually identical in size and the conventional composition of the two busts is essentially the same. As the inscriptions at the top of the drawings indicate, the two men shared a trade. Assuming that they were real people whose rustic facial features and demeanors had caught Dix’s eye, they presumably lived in or near Randegg, the tiny village in southwestern Germany where Martha Dix’s ex-husband owned a castle. It was there that Dix and his family had retreated after his professional defeat in Dresden in 1933.
Ephraim the Dairyman and Joseph the Dairyman are significant not only because of their references to the art of centuries past, but also because of their representation of German people in the present. Until 1934, Dix’s attention as a caricaturist and portraitist had been entirely focused on the bodies, faces, and habitus of the denizens of Germany’s postwar cities. The urban focus of this body of drawn, painted, and printed work, though unsystematic, can be related, to a certain extent, to the photographic social documentary project of August Sander, in which Dix and his wife, Martha, themselves appeared.32 In 1934, however, Dix suddenly shifted, depicting for the first time two residents of the countryside. This rare departure certainly has to be understood as a direct material byproduct of Dix’s move from Dresden; he evidently drew what was in front of him after his move to the countryside, close to the Swiss border.33 However, drawings of such men, seen isolated from their environment, do not resemble the figures of Sander’s farmers, experiencing social modernization around 1900. They seem more closely related to the physiognomies of Erna Lendvai-Dircksen’s regionally rooted, seemingly timeless, racialized “face of the German folk,” though her photographs identified the sitters by trade and region rather than individual name (Figure 9.5).34 Dix had composed drawings similarly for years by the time he made this pair, isolating the busts of his sitters on an empty field. One cannot say if he had such photographs as Lendvai-Dircksen’s in mind when he drew the two dairymen in 1934. However, by then the conventions of such portraits, especially when depicting the faces of rural types, certainly could have appealed to viewers who thought in terms of blood-and-soil ideology, or others who wished to find favor with those who did.35
Figure 9.5: Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, Der Hulebauer, Rauhe Alb (Swabian Farmer). 1932, as published in Das Deutsche Volksgesicht (Face of the German Folk). Photo: Author.
The thematic shift represented by these two Old-Masterly drawings, as well as their similarity to well-known conservative visual representations of the German people, brings to mind the pair of letters that Dix and Ludwig Justi exchanged in April 1933. Just as he did in the letter he wrote to the president of the Prussian Academy of Arts on the same day, Dix informed Justi that he had never been a member of or sympathized with any political party, but he then diverged from the other letter by ending, as mentioned earlier, with his claim to be an exemplary German artist “in the best sense.”36 Justi, whose politics and motivations had long been regarded with suspicion by some in Berlin’s modern art world, responded with a sharp critique of Dix’s scandalous Verist depictions of prostitutes and war, and an expression of his agreement with the Nazi rejection of them. On the other hand, he professed admiration for Dix’s recent portraiture. Though warning against opportunism, he hoped that the painter, a man from “the fourth estate [der vierte Stand]”—a reference in German to the working class—would contribute to the new regime’s transformation of the nation and people [Volk] with that kind of positive, powerful work.37
Dix never made common cause with the Nazi dictatorship, as Justi seemed to hope he would, though the painter was in contact with some officials in the regime’s first two years and did sell a landscape painting to the Ordensburg Sonthofen, a school in Bavaria for the training of Nazi Party leadership cadres, in 1941.38 Dix’s correspondence with Karl Nierendorf and his brother Josef rather makes clear how difficult and delicate the situation was for Dix in the years after Hitler’s rise to power; even when people liked his new work, it was very difficult to persuade them to buy it. That said, there is no doubt about the critical approval and institutional recognition that Dix enjoyed, relatively speaking, with landscape drawings and portraits such as Joseph the Dairyman and Ephraim the Dairyman. In August 1934, Josef Nierendorf told the artist that seven silverpoint landscapes on display in the Nierendorf brothers’ gallery in Cologne had awakened “very great interest,” though nothing had sold.39 In early 1935, the Nazi and SS press was intransigently opposed to Dix’s work, but critics in the mainstream and nationalist-modernist art press who chose to write about the exhibition in Karl Nierendorf’s Berlin gallery spoke highly of Dix’s recent drawings in their reviews.40 Without mentioning the portraits, one commentator perceived Dix’s silverpoints and pen-and-inks as especially clear evidence that the artist had “gathered his old strength,” praising the clear structure of his landscape drawings and proclaiming the beginning of a “new phase of hopeful creativity.”41 Another characterized the landscapes and portraits as a “highly unusual blending of contemporary psychology and the primeval power of Dürer’s contour lines [einer höchst eigentümlichen Verbindung heutiger Psychologie und der Urkraft Dürerischer Formenlinie].”42
Though the acquisition of a painting did not come into question, Joseph the Dairyman was bought in April 1935 by the Nationalgalerie under Eberhard Hanfstaengl, who had replaced Justi (and Justi’s first, short-lived successor, Aloys Schardt) as director in late 1933.43 Ephraim the Dairyman was acquired by a private collector two years later.44 Hanfstaengl was sympathetic to certain kinds of modern art and was committed to the defense of his museum against the depredations of Nazi militants. Eventually he too would be forced out of the Nationalgalerie and into retirement as a result of the radicalization of art policy that culminated in the exhibition “Degenerate Art” in 1937.45 Yet Dix’s drawing was not seized during the confiscation of thousands of art objects from public art museum collections that preceded and followed that decisive event. Like his silverpoint Dörflingen, which the Nationalgalerie acquired in late 1934, it has remained in the collection of the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin to this day.46 Even the most militant activists in the Nazi art world apparently could find nothing wrong with it, despite their visceral, unflagging hatred of Dix and the overt, confrontational social critique of his earlier Verism.
Dix was a Realist artist, much of whose work of the 1920s focused on one of the central themes of the male modernist tradition from Baudelaire and Manet to Seurat, Kirchner, Picasso, and Léger. Like them, he was fascinated by the figure of the prostitute, and, like them, he was deeply committed to the representation of the marginal, eroticized spaces of modern urban leisure and popular culture. Hence, it should come as no surprise that his first impulse in the face of his rapidly eroding position in Dresden was to move to another city. In the early summer of 1933, he mentioned to Hans Weidemann that he was thinking about moving back to Düsseldorf, where he had experienced considerable success in the early 1920s. Weidemann—a graduate of the increasingly modernized and increasingly modernist state art academy in Düsseldorf in the 1920s, a protégé of Goebbels, and one of the most prominent Nazis to publicly support certain forms of modern art—thought that this was a good idea. In the midst of a brief discussion of the current art-political situation, he remarked: “The West is indeed more fruitful. We might see each other again this fall in Düsseldorf. I saw excellent works by you at Nierendorf’s.”47 Two years later, Dix sought to find a small atelier in Berlin, which was only growing in importance as the center not only of the state but also of the art market.48 However, nothing came of these plans. In the end, Dix split his time. He spent summers in the country—first in Randegg and then, after a new house was finished in 1936, in the nearby village of Hemmenhofen—and winters in Dresden.
Dix deeply disliked village life. His reported description of Randegg and its environs in 1933 as a “[s]ickeningly beautiful [zum Kotzen schön]” paradise in which he felt banished may be apocryphal.49 However, Dix did express similar sentiments in two later letters. “There is nothing more stupid and intellectually sterile than life in the village,” he wrote in one, and stated in the other that it had been a big mistake for him to leave the city for the countryside, where he felt too exposed.50 This sense of superiority, anxiety, and alienation helps to explain the appearance of many of Dix’s townscapes of the mid–1930s. Randegg often appears at a distance, as though in a tourist’s picture postcard, or spreads out below the viewer, who seems to occupy the position of the lord of the castle. Human figures are tiny, if they are present at all. Though pretty or picturesque views, these pictures do not suggest that Dix was especially interested in the people who lived there, with the apparent exception of the two dairymen.
However, Randegg was a more interesting and unusual place than Dix’s letters and pictures make it out to be. Like several other villages in the region, it had been the home of a sizeable Jewish community for several centuries.51 The first Jews settled in the village around 1656, and the population grew steadily until the nineteenth century. By 1825, somewhat more than forty percent of Randegg’s population—289 of 713 residents—was Jewish; the number peaked at 351 in 1849. After that, it gradually declined, largely as a result of emigration to the United States. Yet in 1925 seventy-nine Jews still lived in Randegg (about 8.2 percent of the total population), and sixty-two remained in 1933. Through the years, numerous Jewish businesses had existed in the town, and a school, ritual bath, and rabbi had provided for the community’s spiritual needs. In 1810, a masonry synagogue replaced an earlier wooden structure in the center of the village, where it stood until its destruction—against the mayor’s will—in November 1938. The Jewish cemetery was just outside of town, built on a hillside across a broad, shallow valley from the castle, from which it could be seen. The group of drawings and the Romantic painting that Dix made of the cemetery from 1934 to 1935 suggest precisely that point of view, while his well-known painting rotates it about ninety degrees (Figures 9.6 and 9.7). Dix never depicted the unassuming synagogue nestled into the center of the village; the only religious architecture one discerns in his drawings, watercolors, and paintings of Randegg are the steeples of a chapel and the village church. However, the Jewish cemetery certainly must have appealed to the old sense of a dialectic of life and death that he had derived from his intensive reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy since about 1912. A similar view of things can be seen both in his wartime depictions of flora and fauna on the battlefield, and in his postwar print cycle, Death and Resurrection. Furthermore, to depict a Jewish cemetery after 1933 was inevitably to comment on the old history of German anti-Semitism and its newest form, the Nazi dictatorship’s ever intensifying persecution of Germany’s Jewish population.52
What has been overlooked by scholars who have written about Dix in the early 1930s is that he may have commented on the presence and situation of Jews in the southern German countryside in another way as well, namely in the inscriptions across the tops of Joseph the Dairyman and Ephraim the Dairyman. These recall those found in Northern Renaissance portraits, thus emphasizing yet again Dix’s engagement with the Old Masters. At the same time, they put emphasis on the names of the two men, which are written in a form of block lettering unlike the cursive used for their trade. And it is this accentuation of these specific names that insinuates the existence of a relationship between these two individuals and the Jewish community with which Dix was, presumably quite unexpectedly, brought into contact by his move.
Figure 9.6: Otto Dix, Der Judenfriedhof von Randegg (The Jewish Cemetery of Randegg), 1934. Silverpoint. 19.1 × 21 in., 48.6 × 53.2 cm. Kunstmuseum Albstadt (Stiftung Sammlung Walther Groz) Inv. Nr. SWG 76/574, Photo: Courtesy Kunstmuseum Albstadt. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
Circumspection is certainly warranted, inasmuch as published records of Randegg’s Jewish residents in 1933 and 1938 mention farmers and several horse and livestock traders, but no dairymen, strictly speaking. Furthermore, they do not include any adult men named Joseph or Ephraim.53 Nonetheless, the fact that Dix’s only two lifelike portraits of what appear to be residents of Randegg or its environs employ these specific names is crucial to the argument here, and shifts one sharply away from the various aspects of the drawings that indicate Dix’s absorption with and by national tradition. Joseph, the name of three important men in the Bible, was not unusual. It had been used by Jews, referring to the famous Joseph of the Old Testament, since the Middle Ages. It had become increasingly popular among German Gentiles since the Church had begun officially to recognize the Virgin Mary’s husband in the seventeenth century: “Since the eighteenth century, Josef has surpassed the once prevalent Johannes, and today ‘Sepp’ is much more common in the countryside.”54 Ephraim, however, was different. Biblically, Ephraim was one of the two sons of the famous Joseph of the Old Testament, and eventually became the patriarch of one of the (eventually ten lost) tribes of Israel. The name began to be used in Germany after the Reformation, apparently largely in the German Jewish community. One thinks of Veitel Heine Ephraim, the eighteenth-century court jeweler, banker, chairman of the Jewish community in Berlin, and owner of an eponymous palace there. One might also mention Ephraim Moshe Lilien, the Zionist artist who moved to Germany from Poland in 1899. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a rare example of a Gentile with the name.55 Hence, it was perhaps no coincidence that the Nationalgalerie acquired Dix’s drawing of a man named Joseph rather than one named Ephraim. The latter would have been far more likely than the former to indicate Jewish identity, or to be perceived as a sign of the widespread diffusion and continued presence of Jewish culture in Germany.
Figure 9.7: Otto Dix, Judenfriedhof in Randegg im Winter mit Hohenstoffeln (The Jewish Cemetery in Randegg in the Winter with the Hohenstoffeln), 1935, oil on panel, 23.6 × 31.5 in., 60 × 80 cm. Inv. Nr. Nl 919. Saarlandmuseum Saarbrücken, Stiftung Saarländischer Kulturbesitz. Photo: Tom Gundelwein. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
In the world represented by anti-Semitic caricatures in the German illustrated press during the Weimar Republic, things were clear and transparent. There, a set of physiognomic features and expressive gestures unequivocally marked the Jewish body. In the countryside as it was imagined in such images, Jews only appeared as the alien exploiters and decadent foes of honest German, Gentile peasants and yeomen. They were shown buying real estate, driving hard bargains, and being driven away (Figures 9.8 and 9.9). Joseph the Dairyman and Ephraim the Dairyman, on the other hand, may hint at a more complicated reality than the one propagated by blood-and-soil ideologues. They seem to ask if and how one could really tell the difference between Jews and Gentiles. In the 1920s, the painter had incorporated stereotypical elements into his portraits of Jewish people.56 At about the same time, he had been surprised to discover that a client with “swastiklerish” (hakenkreuzlerischen) features and the appearance of a “Protestant pastor” was a Zionist Jew.57 Yet the features of Joseph and Ephraim are highly individualized. The drawings contain no traces of anti-Semitic stereotypes, such as hooked noses, full lips, and heavily lidded dark eyes. Hence, it is impossible to tell if the names of the two men depicted in them indicate that they were in fact Jewish dairymen or rather perhaps the sons of Gentiles who, living among a large Jewish community, had become accustomed to and fond of such names. The effect is similar to Dix’s painting of Jewish gravestones that were as much a part of the German landscape as the old oak trees that grew next to them.
Figure 9.8: Eduard Thöny, “Das künftige Oberland” (“The Future Heights”), Simplicissimus 24, no. 22, August 26, 1919. Photo: Courtesy Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek Weimar / Hans Zimmermann.
Figure 9.9: “Tiroler Aufstand 1921 (Frei nach Defregger)” (“Tyrolean Rebellion 1921 [Loosely after Defregger]”), Kladderadatsch, October 30, 1921. Photo: Courtesy Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg.
To blur boundaries in such a way, and to articulate such doubt about Jewish difference, did not constitute resistance, if that is understood to require work in the political underground or conspiratorial activity aiming to overthrow Hitler’s dictatorship.58 That would have been out of character for Dix, who had always refused partisan commitment, despite his willingness to work with Communist friends and to exhibit pictures in left-wing exhibitions in the 1920s. Moreover, in late 1934 and early 1935, the unresolved situation, though still very difficult, does not seem to have appeared to be quite as bleak to Dix as it had in 1933. There was interest in his recent work; no one seems to have been wishing him dead or imprisoned at that point, and consequently his letters to the dealer Karl Nierendorf began to show traces of hope and optimism.59 Yet the subversion of Nazi anti-Semitism would not have been surprising. Dix did not only emulate Old Masters such as Baldung-Grien. Like Grosz, who in 1918 had painted a picture that invoked Heinrich Heine’s famous satirical poem, “Germany, A Winter’s Tale,” Dix once or twice also referred in 1935 to the writings of that radical, Romantic, Jewish poet of the nineteenth century, whose work had been censored and who had spent the last decades of his life in exile.60 Seen in this light, the making of two unusual drawings of striking yet ambiguous figures in a traditional yet challenging technique and unobjectionable Old-Masterly, putatively national style is very unlikely to have simply been an act of opportunism, resignation, or even affirmation, though one can neither discount the uncertainties and the pressures that Dix faced nor forget that they were pictures that sold in the art market of the 1930s. Neither was their making an act of organized resistance. However, they were significant as briefly public inscriptions of the artist’s individual dissent. Viewed with attention, they may make visible a criticism of a cornerstone of Nazi ideology, just as the next wave of anti-Semitic agitation and violence was beginning to gather momentum.61
1For instance, at the 2018 annual conference of the College Art Association, Molly Nesbit read a paper entitled “Duchamp’s Resistance” in a session entitled “Avant-Gardes and Varieties of Fascism.” Yet in her paper, she never stated that Duchamp joined the Résistance, unlike some of his friends and associates, in particular Mary Douglas. He engaged instead in a series of withdrawals that might be described as non-conformist acts or acts of refusal, but not as resistance in any strong sense.
2Detlev J.K. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life, transl. Richard Deveson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 83.
3Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, 84.
4Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria, 1933–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 3.
5Christoph Zuschlag, “Entartete Kunst”: Ausstellungsstrategien im Nazi-Deutschland (Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1995).
6Many have written about the political events of 1933, the Nazi dictatorship, and their effects on Dix’s work and career. Publications by leading scholars are, for example: Dietrich Schubert, Otto Dix mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, 7th edition (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2008 [1980]); Lothar Fischer, Otto Dix: Ein Malerleben in Deutchland (Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1981); Birgit Schwarz, “‘Das zeitlose Grauen der Welt packen’: Methodenkritische Überlegungen zu den ‘Widerstandsbildern’ der dreißiger Jahre,” in Otto Dix (1891–1969): Bilder Bibel und andere christliche Themen, exh. cat. (Albstadt: Städtische Galerie, 1995), 41–62; Rainer Beck, “‘Flucht ist immer falsch’—Inneres Exil als Emigration: Otto Dix im ‘Dritten Reich,’” in Otto Dix in Chemnitz, ed. Thomas Bauer-Friedrich and Ingrid Mössinger, exh. cat. Kunstsammlung Chemnitz (Munich: Hirmer, 2011), 15–30 (originally published in Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte, 34 [2009]: 149–78); and Olaf Peters, Otto Dix—Der unerschrockene Blick: Eine Biographie (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2013).
7See, for instance, Dix’s letter to I.B. Neumann, written shortly after his dismissal from the Dresden art academy and quoted in Schubert, Otto Dix, 110.
8Fritz Löffler, Otto Dix (1891–1969): Oeuvre der Gemälde (Recklinghausen: Verlag Aurel Bongers, 1981), 44–6.
9Heidrun Ehrke-Rotermund, “Camoufliertes Malen im ‘Dritten Reich’: Otto Dix zwischen Widerstand und Innerer Emigration,” Exilforschung 12 (1994), 126–55; Schwarz, “‘Das zeitlose Grauen der Welt packen’”; Dietrich Schubert, “Otto Dix: 1933—‘Die Sieben Todsünden,’” in Architektur im Museum, 1977–2012: Festschrift Winfried Nerdinger, ed. Uwe Kiessler (Munich: Technische Universität, 2012), 232–45; Birgit Schwarz, “‘Long life (occasionally) tendency in art!’: Dix and the Dialectics of Modernism,” in Otto Dix and the New Objectivity, exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 62–71; and James A. van Dyke, “Otto Dix’s Folk Culture,” in Ibid., 84–97.
10Wolfgang Kersten, ed., Paul Klee als Zeichner, 1921–1933, exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, 1985); Pamela Kort, ed., Paul Klee 1933, exh. cat. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2003).
11Christina von Elm, “Otto Dix und Franz Lenk—‘Zwei deutsche Maler’: Geschichte und Hintergründe der Lanschaftsausstellung von 1935,” Wissenschaftliches Jahrbuch (Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen) (1999), 30–67.
12They are only mentioned in Elm, “Otto Dix und Franz Lenk—‘zwei deutsche Maler,’” 31, 49–50.
13Ulrike Lorenz, Otto Dix: Das Werkverzeichnis der Zeichnungen und Pastelle, 8 vols. (Bonn: VDG, 2003).
14Relatively little attention has been paid to the ephemeral imagery of various resistance groups in Nazi Germany, with the exception of the White Rose’s use of flyers and graffiti in Munich in 1942 and 1943. For a few further examples of Communist graffiti and stickers, and discussions of images made for the underground Communist press, see: Karl-Ludwig Hofmann, “Antifaschistische Kunst in Deutschland: Bilder, Dokumente, Kommentare,” in Widerstand statt Anpassung: Deutsche Kunst im Widerstand gegen den Faschismus, 1933–1945, exh. cat. (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1980), 34–77, esp. 40–6; Peter Ludwigs: Malerei, Grafik, Dokumente, exh. cat. (Düsseldorf: Stadtmuseum, 1982), 17–18, 27–31; Allan Merson, Communist Resistance in Nazi Germany (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), 65, 104, 241.
15On Grosz and Schwesig, see: Karl Schwesig, Schlegelkeller (Düsseldorf: Galerie Remmert und Barth, 1983); Annette Baumeister, “Verfolgung und Widerstand, 1933–1945,” in Karl Schwesig: Leben und Werk (Berlin: Fröhlich und Kaufmann, 1984), 61–75; Alexander Dückers, George Grosz: The Graphic Work. Das druckgaphische Werk. A Catalogue Raisonné (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1995); and James A. van Dyke, “Torture and Masculinity in George Grosz’s Interregnum,” New German Critique 119, vol. 40, no. 2 (2013), 137–65.
16Kurt Wehlte, “Silberstift,” Die Kunstkammer 10 (August 1935), 20–2. On Dix’s presumable contact with Wehlte, see Bruce Weber, “Modern and Contemporary Drawing in Metalpoint,” in Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns, eds Stacy Sell and Hugo Chapman, exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 229.
17Weber, “Modern and Contemporary Drawing in Metalpoint,” 229.
18In addition to Sell and Chapman, eds, Drawing in Silver and Gold, see Thea Burns, The Luminous Trace: Drawing and Writing in Metalpoint (London: Archetype, 2012), 170.
19See, for instance, Schad’s Liebende Knaben (1929), in the collection of the Museen der Stadt Aschaffenburg and reproduced in Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann, eds, New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919–1933, exh. cat. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Munich: Prestel, 2015), 282.
20Weber, “Modern and Contemporary Drawing in Metalpoint,” 228.
21On David’s painting, see T.J. Clark, “The Look of Self-Portraiture,” in Self Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary, eds Anthony Bond and Joanna Woodall, exh. cat. (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2005), 57–65.
22On this affinity in general, see Birgit Schwarz, “‘Kunsthistoriker sagen Grünewald …’ Das Altdeutsche bei Otto Dix in den zwanziger Jahren,” Jahrbuch der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen in Baden-Württemberg 28 (1991), 143–63.
23George Grosz, Briefe, 1913–1959, ed. Herbert Knust (Reinbek bei Hamburg; Rowohlt, 1979), 202, 324. See also Schwarz, “Das Altdeutsche bei Otto Dix,” 143, 146.
24See, for example, Hermann Schmitz, Hans Baldung gen. Grien (Künstler-Monographien, 113) (Bielefeld und Leipzig: Velhagen & Klasing, 1922); and Hans Curjel, Hans Baldung Grien (München: O.C. Recht, 1923). In 1934, the prominent critic Bruno E. Werner asserted an identity between the work of Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, Albrecht Altdorfer, and Hans Holbein d.J. and that of Barlach, Nolde, Lehmbruck, Kolbe, Klee, Feininger, Marc, Macke, Beckmann, and Dix (he did not, admittedly, discuss Baldung-Grien): “Wir sehen das Revolutionäre, Protestierende, wie wir ihm mit pamphletischen Zügen im 14. Jahrhundert, in der Reformationszeit und am Anfang des 17. Jahrhunderts begegnet sind, welches das Häßlich-Unmenschliche, ja Grauenvolle, das Radikal- Realistische zum Thema nimmt, um den Dualismus in der Welt zwischen der ursprünglichen göttlichen Idee und dem tatsächlichen menschlichen Sein erschütternd ins Bewußtsein zu rufen.” See Bruno E. Werner, Vom bleibenden Gesicht der deutschen Kunst (Berlin: Verlag die Runde, 1934), 125–6.
25H. Möhle, introduction to Hans Baldung Grien 1484/1485 bis 1545: Gedächtnisausstellung zur 450. Wiederkehr seines Geburtsjahres, exh. cat. Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum (Berlin: Ausstellungssaal der Generalverwaltung der Staatlichen Museen, November 1934), 8. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are mine.
26Hermann Hieber, “Hans Baldung, gen. Grien,” Kunst der Nation 2, Nr. 23 (December 1, 1934), 5.
27Möhle, Hans Baldung Grien, 8.
28Hieber, “Hans Baldung, gen. Grien,” 5.
29Dix to Ludwig Justi, 12 April 1933, reprinted in Dix, Briefe, 866–7.
30George Grosz, “Unter anderem ein Wort für deutsche Tradition,” Das Kunstblatt 15, no. 3 (1931), reprinted in Künstlerschriften der 20er Jahre: Dokumente und Manifeste aus der Weimarer Republik, ed. Uwe M. Schneede, 3rd edition (Cologne: DuMont, 1986), 327–30. On Grosz’s relationship to the German Communist Party, and break with it in 1932, see Barbara McCloskey, George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
31Aside from his close ties to Lenk, Dix was in touch with Hans Weidemann, one of the leading figures of the group of young National Socialists who vociferously promoted Expressionism as the authentic artistic counterpart to the national revolution. In 1934, when Weidemann was shunted aside from his most influential positions in the course of the sharp debate over modern art between Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg, Nierendorf lamented that he (and presumably Dix) had lost one of their “strongest supports.” In an undated letter to Martha Dix, Dix mentioned that he knew Weidemann and Hans Hinkel, another high-ranking figure in the Nazi cultural administration. See Weidemann to Dix, 14 July 1933, Deutsches Kunstarchiv, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg, Nachlass Dix, I, C–782 (hereafter cited as GNM, DKA, Nl Dix); Karl Nierendorf to Dix, 26 March 1934, Archive of the Galerie Nierendorf, Berlin; and Dix, Briefe, 120.
32August Sander, Citizens of the Twentieth Century: Portrait Photographs, 1892–1952, ed. Gunther Sander, transl. Linda Keller, 4th printing (Cambridge, MS.: MIT Press, 1997 [1986]), 150, 160, 327.
33Dix does not seem to have returned to related subjects until between 1939 and 1943, when he made two portraits of anonymous “bearded farmers” and a number of sketches of men and women harvesting. See Lorenz, Otto Dix: Werkverzeichnis der Zeichnungen, vol. 4, 1554 and vol. 5, 2280–5.
34See, for instance, Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, Das Deutsche Volksgesicht (Berlin: Kulturelle Verlagsgesellschaft, 1932). Two very brief discussions of her work and thinking are found in Daniel H. Magilow, The Photography of Crisis: The Photo Essays of Weimar Germany (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 94; and Pepper Stetler, Stop Reading! Look! Modern Vision and the Weimar Photographic Book (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 187.
35Noting the prevalence of landscapes, interiors, and “rustic peasant faces” in the exhibition “Die Auslese,” organized and promoted by Alfred Rosenberg in November 1934, Elm suggests that Dix’s two drawings of dairymen and their display in early 1935 are evidence of opportunism. See Elm, “Otto Dix und Franz Lenk,” 49.
36Dix to Ludwig Justi, 12 April 1933, reprinted in Dix, Briefe, 866–7.
37Ludwig Justi to Dix, 26 April 1933, GNM, DKA, Nl Dix, Otto, I, C 54. Justi’s letter is reproduced in full in Olaf Peters, Neue Sachlichkeit und Nationalsozialismus: Affirmation und Kritik, 1931–1947 (Berlin: Reimer, 1998), 85.
38Dix to Ernst Bursche, 27 December 1941, reprinted in Dix, Briefe, 506. Dix asked Bursche to be discrete about this, clearly and justifiably concerned that he and others could get into trouble if the news got out.
39Josef Nierendorf to Dix, 23 August 1934, Archive of the Galerie Nierendorf, Berlin.
40According to Nierendorf, critics writing for Berlin’s mainstream daily newspapers were waiting to see what was written in the Nazi Party’s newspapers. However, Nierendorf reported that the latter were refusing to publish anything. See Karl Nierendorf to Dix, 16 February 1935, archive of the Galerie Nierendorf, Berlin. For discussions of the critical reception that did develop, see Lothar Fischer, Otto Dix: Ein Malerleben in Deutschland (Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1981), 103; Peters, Neue Sachlichkeit und Nationalsozialismus, 131–2; and Elm, “Otto Dix und Franz Lenk,” 50–4.
41Fritz Hellwag, “Otto Dix, Bilder aus dem Hegau. Zur Ausstellung in der Galerie Nierendorf in Berlin,” Die Kunst 71, no. 9 (June 1935), 272–7, esp. 274–6.
42F. Paul, “Dix und Lenk. Gemeinschafts-Ausstellung in Berlin bei Nierendorf,” Kunst der Nation 3, no. 3 (1 February 1935), 3. “F. Paul” was the pseudonym of Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, one of Dix’s oldest and strongest public supporters since 1919.
43Lorenz, Otto Dix: Das Werkverzeichnis der Zeichnungen, vol. 4, 1551.
44Lorenz, Otto Dix: Das Werkverzeichnis der Zeichnungen, vol. 4, 1552.
45Jörn Grabowski, “Eberhard Hanfstaengl als Direktor der Nationalgalerie: zu ausgewählten Aspekten seiner Tätigkeit zwischen 1933 und 1937,” Jahrbuch Preussischer Kulturbesitz 33 (1996), 327–42.
46On the acquisition of the landscape, see the correspondence, dating from September to October 1934, in the archive of the Galerie Nierendorf, Berlin.
47“Es ist Recht so, daß sie nach Düsseldorf übersiedeln wollen. Der Westen ist doch fruchtbarer. Es kann möglich sein, daß wir uns im Herbst in D.dorf wiedersehen. Bei Nierendorf sah ich ausgezeichnete Arbeiten von Ihnen.” Weidemann to Dix, 14 July 1933. As in note 31.
48Dix to Lenk, undated (summer 1935), reprinted in Dix, Briefe, 482.
49See Beck, “Flucht ist immer falsch,” 21, 30.
50Dix to the Thielepapes, 1936, and Dix to Franz Lenk, undated, in Dix, Briefe, 486, 496.
51The following discussion is based on: Samuel (Semi) Moos, Geschichte der Juden im Hegaudorf Randegg (Gottmadingen: Eckerlin, 1986); Helmut Fidler, Jüdisches Leben am Bodensee (Frauenfeld: Verlag Huber, 2011); and http://www.alemannia-judaica.de/
52For important discussions of this group of pictures, see Dietrich Schubert, “Politische Metaphorik bei Otto Dix, 1933–1939,” in Kunst und Kunstkritik der dreißiger Jahre, ed. Maria Rüger (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1990), 148–55, 319–22 and his very closely related “‘Ich habe Landschaften gemalt—das war doch Emigration’: Zur Lage von Otto Dix und zur politischen Metaphorik in seinem Schaffen 1933–1937,” in Otto Dix. Zum 100. Geburtstag 1891–1991, eds Wulf Herzogenrath and Johann-Karl Schmidt, exh. cat. Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1991), 273–82. Furthermore, see Peters, Neue Sachlichkeit und Nationalsozialismus, 133–44.
53Moos, Geschichte der Juden, 108–9, 137–47.
54Josef Karlmann Brechenmacher, Deutsches Namenbuch (Stuttgart: Verlag Adolf Bonz, 1928), 113. See also Hans Bahlow, Deutsches Namenlexikon: Familien- und Vornamen nach Ursprung und Sinn erklärt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 267.
55According to one website that provides decade-by-decade lists of the names ranked by ostensible popularity, Joseph was generally at the bottom end of the thirty most popular names in Germany between 1900 and 1920. Ephraim never appears in the rankings. Though it does explain its sources and methods, such rankings are difficult to verify. However, reputable German lexica and studies of first names lead to much the same conclusion. At least two (Bahlow, Brechenmacher) do not include Ephraim at all. Others do, but their entries for Ephraim are substantially shorter than the ones for Joseph. See Ernst Wasserzieher, Hans und Grete: 2500 Vornamen erklärt, 18th revised edition (Bonn: Ferdinand Dümmlers Verlag, 1972), 43, 63; Günther Drosdowski, Lexikon der Vornamen: Herkunft, Bedeutung und Gebrauch von mehreren tausend Vornamen, 2nd edn (Mannheim: Biographisches Institut, 1974); Wilfried Seibicke, Vornamen (Wiesbaden: Verlag für deutsche Sprache, 1977), 282, 301; and https://www.beliebte-vornamen.de/
56See, for instance, Sabine Rewald, ed., Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s, exh. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 104–19, 116–19, 162–4; James A. van Dyke, “Erasure and Jewishness in Otto Dix’s Portrait of the Lawyer Hugo Simons,” in Renew Marxist Art History, eds Warren Carter, Barnaby Haran and Frederic J. Schwartz (London: Art/Books, 2013), 362–81; James A. van Dyke, “The Politics of New Objectivity: A Specific History,” in Barron and Eckmann, eds, New Objectivity, 65–75.
57Dix to Martha Dix, undated, in Dix, Briefe, 93.
58Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent, 3; Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, 83–4.
59Peters, Neue Sachlichkeit und Nationalsozialismus, 124–8.
60Lorenz, Dix: Das Werkzeichnis der Zeichnungen, vol. 4, 1564; Van Dyke, “Dix’s Folk Art,” 90–5.
61Peters, Neue Sachlichkeit und Nationalsozialismus, 140.