The Bauhaus at the newsstand

Cover by László Moholy-Nagy

Between 1929 and 1943 die neue linie (The new line) was published by Beyer Press in Leipzig. The editors were based in Berlin, center of the fashion scene. An outstanding lifestyle magazine of its time, it provided trendy entertainment, but it had at the same time a groundbreaking, one could even say avant-garde concept : no other publication did so consistently bring in new typographic ideas. Leading designers from the Bauhaus put their stamp on the magazine’s layout. 

die neue linie focused on trends in the areas of travel, technology and architecture, in addition to fashion and literature. Aldous Huxley, Gottfried Benn and Thomas Mann wrote for the magazine. The target group was the intellectual and fashion-interested upper class, especially women, who could afford the handsome price of one Reichsmark per issue.

The magazine was considered a prestige object by its publisher. A total of 163 issues appeared with a relatively modest circulation of 40,000 copies each.
When it first appeared in September 1929, its appearance caused a sensation. Already the lower-case title was unusual, as was the design of the text, set in the sans-serif universal font developed by the Austrian Bauhaus artist Herbert Bayer (1900-1985). In addition to Bayer, another Bauhaus artist, László Moholy-Nagy, influenced the appearance with his dada-like montages of black-and-white photos and colored areas. 

Surprisingly, the publication, non-political but still modernist, was tolerated by the Nazi regime, maybe as a proof of their « largeness of spirit», but at later stages they forced it more and more to follow the party line. Its publication ended in 1943, due to paper shortages.

Berlin in the 1920's

"There was no place like Berlin in the 1920's. The capital of the modern movement in literature and the arts, pioneering in the cinema and theater, in social studies and psychoanalysis, it was the city of "The Threepenny Opera" and "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," the cradle of the youth movement and the haven of unheard-of sexual freedom. The Mecca of a whole generation of Isherwoods, it has entered history as the center of a new Periclean age.

Only a few were aware of its true importance at the time; most Germans emphatically rejected what Peter Gay calls Weimar culture and what, to all intents and purposes, was the culture of Berlin. "Swallow," "rootless," "destructive," "cultural Bolshevism," "asphaltliteratur," these were the most common epithets used by its critics.

The advocates and the enthusiastic followers of this avant-garde movement came from a small unrepresentative layer of German society; left-wing or liberal, largely Jewish, it was concentrated in Berlin and a few other big cities. It had no popular success at the time; in the list of contemporary best sellers one looks in vain for the famous names of the twenties. Yet internationally these men were the only ones who counted, and in Germany, too, there has been in recent years a spectacular revival of the golden twenties.

After 1933 many of these intellectuals and artists were forced to emigrate; their impact in foreign lands has been considerable. For Weimar-Berlin culture was the heir to a great tradition, intellectually most of the world has been subsisting until recently on what was created by two or three generations in the German cultural sphere, which then included Prague and Vienna as well, and even Budapest."

From a review of Peter Gay’s Weimar Culture, The Outsider as Insider. By Walter Laqueur, in the Books section of New York Times, November 24, 1968.

http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/98/10/25/specials/gay-weimar.html 

 

 

Otto Arpke, designer

Otto Arpke (1886-1943) was a painter and an illustrator. He designed the posters for The cabinet of Doctor Caligari, for shippings companies and for the Olympic Games of 1936. He had even decorated the Hindenburg zeppelin and made a number of title pages for the innovative lifestyle magazine die neue linie. In Berlin, 1912, he met the artist and teacher Emil Orlik, who had an influence on his creation. 

 

The dining-room of the Hindenburg Zeppelin, with paintings on silk wallpaper by Otto Arpke.

 

Expressionism: still shocking after all these years

Max Pechstein, 1910

These days an exhibition is being held in Stockholm. At the Millesgaarden museum, 150 works of painting and graphics belonging to the German expressionism are shown, by, among others, Emil Nolde, Otto Mueller and Max Pechstein.These masterpieces are borrowed from the Häuptli collection at Aargauer Kunsthaus in Switzerland and from the Osthaus-Museum in Hagen, Germany. These two collections contain outstanding works from various stages of the expressionist art produced in Germany during the period 1905-1938.

Expressionism scandalized the public back in that period, and one could think people are harder to shock these days. Not so : Max Pechstein’s picture of a young girl comfortably laying on a couch and with red painted lips was too much for some of the visitors. But ours is a time when voices are raised against the exhibition of paintings by the French artist Balthus, supposedly pedophilic. And, in a recent Expressionist show at the Tate Modern in London, a warning against potentially upsetting pictures was posted at one of the rooms.

At Tate Modern

Emil Nolde

Christian Rohlfs

Gabriele Münter

    

 

Hannah Arendt

What has Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) to do in this blog ? I don’t really know much about her, except that one is likely to find her name in any article about political philosophy, being as she was an influential German-American philosopher and political theorist.

Just by seeing her photograph I’m sure she was an intelligent and deep thinker. But, why mention her in a blog like this one ?

Because, being a Jew, she had to flee Germany in 1933 ? She was far from being the only one.

Because she had had a brief affair with Martin Heidegger, under whom she studied in Marburg back in the 1920s ? That makes her of course, if not unique, in any case remarkable, as Heidegger, considered one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, later turned out to be a nazi.

Because she played a role in the famous Eichmann trial in Israel 1961 ? She did, but…

What has Arendt to do in a blog dealing with Berlin in the 1920s ? Well, the fact is, she lived in Berlin back in those years, even if she was born in Hannover and died in New York.

More exactly, at the Opitzstrasse, in the Bayerisches Viertel, a neighbourhood favored by other celebrities like Albert Einstein and Walter Benjamin.

It was in Berlin that she started studying political theory, and reading Marx and Trotsky, without ever defining herself as a political leftist. She was more interested in Jewish issues as well as in women’s status in society.

From 1951, she taught at many universities in the U.S. She’s buried in the Bard College, at Annandale-on-Hudson, state of New York.

    

Emil Nolde, great artist and violently anti-semitic

Photo: Getty Images

The German expressionist painter Emil Nolde, considered one of the greatest artists of his time, was a pride of German art lovers. A controversy over the virulence of his anti-Semitism casts a shadow over the artist, an article from the newspaper Le Temps, from Switzerland.

Angela Merkel did not wait for the controversy. At the beginning of April, the Chancellor made it known that she did not want in her office two paintings of Emil Nolde which decorated the place. Nor will it replace them with two paintings by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff instead of the Prussian Cultural Property Foundation, which manages Berlin's museums and lends works from its funds to the Bundestag or the Chancellery.

Angela Merkel has always loved the work of Nolde. But an exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof highlighting the virulent anti-Semitism of this expressionist painter has made the company of his paintings unbearable for the Chancellor. Even if Brecher ("breaking") and Flower garden are not strictly speaking political works.

As for the expressionist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, his biography is not without stains, as shown by a second exhibition devoted to German Expressionists during National Socialism at the Brücke Museum in Berlin.

The controversy aroused by both Nolde's anti-Semitism, whose virulence has long been downplayed, and the Chancellor's decision to part from his paintings speaks a lot about the shadow that Nazism continues to shed on German contemporary art.

At the death of the painter, in 1956, the foundation of Seebüll maintains the image of an artist persecuted by Nazism, forbidden to work, deprived of paper and brushes and forced to brush a few watercolors of flowers in hiding, excluded from the art market and stripped of his livelihood. That Nolde admired Hitler, that he entered the NSDAP Nazi Party in 1934, that he hoped to see his popularity take off under the Third Reich were well known. But not the extent of his anti-Semitism.

The arrival at the head of the Seebüll Foundation of a new director, Christian Ring, in 2013 will change things. It opens to historians the painter's archives, and the 25,000 to 30,000 documents they contain.

"Nolde saw himself as the most important pioneer of the anti-Jewish struggle in the art world," says Bernhard Fulda. He liked to present himself as a victim of Jewish artists before 1933 and as a victim of the Nazis after 1945. Antisemitism played a central role in him. To the point of wanting to propose solutions to the "Jewish problem" that he wanted to submit to Hitler, to free Germany from its Jews. Or to denounce to Goebbels his colleague Max Pechstein, supposedly Jewish because of his name. When Pechstein, anxious for his safety, asked him for explanations, Nolde simply replied that his existential questions did not interest him.

"Merkel’s decision that no painting of a painter who supported the National Socialist ideology can decorate the office of the head of the German government is in my opinion a good thing," said the Deputy Speaker of the Bundestag, Thomas Oppermann (SPD). But Thole Rotermund, Treasurer of the German Federation of Art Galleries, sees it as a form of hypocrisy, noting that "Mrs Merkel continues to sit at the forefront" at the Bayreuth Festival devoted every year to the music of the very antisemite Richard Wagner.

"Emil Nolde - A German legend. The artist and the Nazi regime ", Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Until September 15th.

The post above reproduces parts of an  article from the Swiss 

newspaper Le Temps. 

    

Peter Lorre and his unwanted fan

Peter Lorre (1904-1964), the great actor of M – A City Searches for a Murderer, had roles in other classic films like The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. While still in Berlin, he worked with Bertolt Brecht as well.

Born László Löwenstein in a city of Austria-Hungary (now Slovakia), his parents were Jewish. In 1933, two days before the Reichstag fire, he left Germany.

But three years after his departure he is said to have received a letter from Hitler, expressing the admiration of the dictator, particularly due to the Lorre’s rôle in M ​​. The letter also announced that Lorre would be allowed to return to Germany and continue his career there despite his Jewish origins.

Peter Lorre, who in M had played the role of a serial killer, replied, it is said, that there was already a mass murderer at the head of Germany and that there was no need for a second one. An affront that Hitler did not forgive. During the war, a German agent captured by the FBI had a list of people to be suppressed : the third name was Peter Lorre‘s .

    

More from Lisbet Juel

Lisbet Juel, a talented illustrator of the Weimar years, was regularly published in Ulk, a weekly supplement of the Berliner Tageblatt. Ulk also appeared as a supplement to the Berliner Volks-Zeitung. Lisbet Juel worked also for the newspapers Svenska Dagbladet (Stockholm) and Politiken (Copenhagen). She was born in Copenhagen (or perhaps in Stockholm) in 1903 to a Swedish mother and a Danish father.