Seeing Class: Graphic Satire and the Cultivation of Radicalism in the Weimar Republic
Mandarino, Grant
2018
Abstract
The power of visual images to foster political identities and mold ways of seeing has long been a concern for scholars of print. From the outbreak of the Reformation to the development of serial illustrated publications, historians of European print culture have documented a widespread belief that print media, properly aimed and deployed, can transform like-minded viewers into reliable constituencies, or even a revolutionary force. While such insights have proven decisive for studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century graphic satire, art historical discussion of twentieth-century production remains oddly unaffected, especially so in the case of the Weimar Republic, a period of intense political polarization that saw a resurgence of graphic satire. Seeing Class: Graphic Satire and the Cultivation of Radicalism in the Weimar Republic aims to address this lacuna through an in-depth exploration of how artists of the interwar period reshaped graphic satire for political ends. The representational flexibility of graphic satire provided partisan artists ample resources to attack the republican government and ridicule perceived enemies. Focusing on the German Left, I show how the targeting of working class audiences spurred formal experimentation and led to reevaluations of graphic satire’s artistic import and political potential. Upon its foundation in 1919, the German Communist Party (KPD) garnered immediate support from a number of recognized avant garde artists (e.g. George Grosz, John Heartfield, Rudolf Schlichter) who eventually became regular caricaturists for party publications. Their goal was to translate structural foes of the working class into identifiable enemies whose visibility would assist in propagating a revolutionary perspective. How to meet this goal became a topic of debate, as the party struggled to define a consistent approach to visual culture and artists struggled to relate to a politics of proletarian revolution. Early efforts were guided by the writings of the Marxist cultural historian Eduard Fuchs, who championed graphic satire as a potent "agitational medium" (Kampfmittel) before WWI. By the end of the 1920s, however, the political value of such imagery was no longer so clear. Criticized for being aloof and “too negative" by party leaders, the sardonic drawings of Grosz, Schlichter, and fellow caricaturists gave way to more positive, "social" themes. Over the course of three chapters I discuss why this shift occurred and how it relates to changing conceptions of class, visual culture, and artistic production during this period, within and beyond the Communist milieu. I combine extensive archival research with analyses of images within and across specific publications, resulting in an approach that holds the political significance of visual art to be irreducible to formal innovation and highly dependent upon its ability to resonate with the lived experience and perspectives of specific audiences.Subjects
Graphic satire during the Weimar Republic
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