Berlin and George Grosz

Street in Berlin, 1931

Berlin in the 30s: between frenzy and chaos (from the excellent French website “L’histoire par l’image" Author: Charlotte Denoël)

The First World War and the German defeat had important political and economic consequences. On one hand, the fall of the monarchy in November 1918 and the official proclamation of the Weimar Republic a few months later did not succeed in stifling the revolutionary agitation, maintained by both the extreme left and the extreme right and militarist formations. The war gave way to a period of violent internal disorder, especially in Berlin, where the Spartacist revolution took place at the beginning of 1919.

On the other hand, in 1923, the Weimar Republic faced a very serious economic crisis: Germany suffered an unprecedented inflation, which ruined millions of savers and made a lasting impression on the minds of some industrialists. get rich during this time. Despite the recovery of the economic and social situation in the following years, social inequalities remain glaring, and the government was the object of increasingly virulent criticism not only of the extremist parties, but also of the intellectuals.

George Grosz (1893-1959), cartoonist and painter from Berlin, put his art at the service of social criticism. Mobilized during the war, he returned to Berlin in 1918, where he took part in political activity: he contributed to the founding of the Dada movement in Berlin in 1918, before joining the German Communist Party, while his caricatures, very aggressive, mercilessly pit the representatives of the bourgeoisie and refuse to offer an embellished image of reality.

Painted in 1931, this Street in Berlin is distinguished by the violence of its iconography and its style: in this street scene, Grosz depicts the loneliness of people from different social classes. The bourgeois of the time, identifiable thanks to their clothes typical of the fashion of the Roaring Twenties, their pig facies or their plump forms, rub shoulders with the people, who here takes the appearance of a butcher's view of the back, an apron knotted at the waist. History burst into the midst of the stage through a woman dressed in black, the incarnation of the war widow, an omnipresent figure in Germany where the First World War decimated an entire generation. All these human beings wander in the street, without their paths crossing one another. In the background, from left to right, a railway station sign, butcher's stalls, a new building surrounded by wooded areas and a car, remind us that the scene takes place in the German capital, a symbol of modernity.

Grosz's painting, which in some respects is close to the art of Hieronymus Bosch, is nevertheless distinguished by its style: its sketching character, its rapid and disorderly brushstrokes that evoke graffiti. its lack of material effects and the darkness of its tones inscribe this canvas in its time. The impression of fragmentation, asymmetry and overlapping plans are a reflection of urban frenzy and chaos.

Latent in this work, Berlin, which was the object of love, anguishes and hatred of Grosz, aroused the same contradictory feelings among the artists who came to settle there, the German capital having become the meeting point of the European avant-gardes. Its extraordinarily rapid growth in the nineteenth century helped to forge a reputation as a city of "new rich". The enrichment of the bourgeois class, which coincided with the growth of the proletariat in the 1920s and 1930s, only accentuated the contrasts between rich and poor neighborhoods. Moreover, Berlin was for a long time the theater of bloody street fighting. Thus, the sordid poverty and the climate of violence which prevailed continuously in Berlin constitute the backdrop of the works realized at that time. But the arrival of Hitler to power on January 30, 1933 put an end to all artistic expression and brought about the ruin of the Berlin civilization. The avant-garde artists, like Grosz, who had not been able to go into exile in the United States or elsewhere, were persecuted by the Nazis, and their works described as "degenerate art".

Charlotte DENOEL, "Berlin in the 30s: between frenzy and chaos"

L’histoire par l’image

URL: http://www.histoire-image.org/etudes/berlin-annees-30-entre-frenesie-chaos