Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Georg Grosz (Review of World War One and the Weimar Artists by Matthias Eberle)

It is hard to gauge now — in this era of outrage and daily disaster — what the effects of the sinking of the Titanic were on the popular imagination in 1912. Was it simply one of shock and blank astonishment? Or did it give rise to darker premonitions? Matthias Eberle suggests, in this very intriguing if somewhat earnest book, that — certainly as far as German artists were concerned — it was a seminal date, the beginning of a process of profound suspicion and disenchantment with the mechanized forces of industry that reached its apotheosis in the 1914–18 war. That fervid exultation in dynamism and the heroic potential of mechanics so eagerly celebrated by the Futurists and, one suspects, by the world at large as well as the German artists, received its gory comeuppance on the Western Front. The fragility of the human body and the transience and futility of human aspirations were all too cruelly exposed when the machines they were pitted against took the form of trench mortars and howitzers.

No one was better placed to observe this than Otto Dix, a machine-gunner on the Western Front who no doubt on many occasions had the opportunity to observe at first hand the effect of high technology on the lumbering Tommies slogging across the mud. Dix had joined the war full of sub-Nietzschean enthusiasm for the fight. He was swiftly disillusioned and that disillusion manifested itself in his art. The same bitterness occurred in other German artists in a curious unity of vision which was called — in opposition to Expressionist and Futurist excesses — the Neue Sachlichkeit, the “New Objectivity.” Dix, Grosz and Beckmann are the most famous exemplars of the grouping and each is the subject of an essay in this book. Dix and Grosz are the most commonly linked and I suppose the most well known, but one of the bonuses of this book was to discover that the same strains in Dix and Grosz appear in Max Beckmann’s work. Indeed there are stronger parallels between Dix and Beckmann than one might have surmised. Each was influenced by Nietzsche, each saw active service and their war experiences produced in them tortured, morbid obsessions with sex, human cruelty and vague religious impulses. Grosz’s work exhibited similar tendencies but, interestingly, it was not produced by a spell at the front. Grosz was first declared unfit for military service. Later he was conscripted, but after a nervous breakdown of sorts he was sent to a sanatorium. A medical student, who thought he was perfectly fit, ordered him out of bed. In a fury, Grosz attacked him and was promptly beaten up by the other patients with, by all accounts, considerable glee. It was this trauma which accelerated his acerbic cynicism, not any spectacle of mass destruction.

For all their power, there is something unpleasantly pathological in the work of all three artists. There is a kind of righteous nihilism which one can applaud: their portrayals of the horrors of war (no British artist has painted anything so scarifying); their excoriation of the sleek industrialists and corrupt businessmen and so on. It is a little harder to explain away, however, their morbid obsession with sex. One could say that after the war, once the fighting was over, the crude commerce of prostitution served as a useful symbol of the degeneracy of the human spirit, but it rings somewhat of special pleading, especially when one is faced with its lurid prominence in the work of all three men. Both Dix and Grosz, for example, independently produced a series of etchings on sex murders. The answer lies, rather, in the complex individual personalities of the artists than in any Neue Sachlichkeit programme. Their respective traumatization — coincidentally — engendered the same symptoms.

It may be, of course, a national psychosis: it is tempting to see Weimar Germany (or rather one’s received image of Weimar Germany) suffering — so to speak — in the same way as its artists, especially when one takes into account the German race’s propensity for doing things en masse. It is a theory that gains some further credence when we look at Britain between the wars. If we accept that the Neue Sachlichkeit artists represent the most significant cultural response to the Great War in Germany then its corollary in Britain is the war poets — Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg, Gurney et al. What a fascinating contrast they make. The same shock and condemnation of the horrors of war provides a powerful stimulus for their respective arts, but nowhere in the British response do we encounter this purulent nihilism reflected through overt sexual loathing and revulsion. Is this simply a sign of the dissimilarity between the British and German psyche? Or is it merely the difference between victor and vanquished? Searching for an answer, it is perhaps significant that Grosz himself later (in 1933) disowned and repudiated his post-war etchings because he considered that the relentless cynicism of the Weimar artists and writers had contributed to the rise of the Nazis.

1988