Berlin

In the last two years of the war, Grosz and another Berlin artist, John Heartfield (he had changed his name from Helmut Herzfelde), began experimenting with a new technique, photomontage, which involved composing parts of photographs into synthetic images seemingly produced by a camera—a very bizarre camera. Their obvious susceptibility for the absurd made Grosz and Heartfield natural converts to a new art movement sweeping up from Zurich: Dada. Invented by an international coterie of war refugees, dada expressed the artists’ contempt not just for the “civilized” world at war, but for all the traditional art forms that either failed to point up the absurdity of the war or that opportunistically abetted it. Dada declared war on Art by producing anti-art; it attacked sense with non-sense. “Bevor Dada da war, war Dada da. (Before dada was there was dada there.)” “Aimless of the world unite,” declared writer Richard Huelsenbeck, who brought the movement to Berlin. Grosz put this doctrine to practice by performing a tap dance while pretending to pee on a painting by Lovis Corinth. “Art is shit,” he cried, and pee made excellent varnish.

Although Dada caught on in many European cities, Berlin became its most important outpost after Zurich. There was method in the madness here: in no other city, after all, was there a greater gap between seemingly rational rhetoric and patently irrational reality; nowhere had the old verities proven so bankrupt. According to Huelsenbeck, the war, like a purging fire, would eventually burn out the rotten underpinnings of Western Civilization, though this would require even more bloodletting. “We were for the war, and Dada is still for the war,” he declared. “Everything has to crash together; things are not horrible enough yet by a long shot.”

Defeat and Revolution

Things were perhaps not yet bad enough for the Dadaists, but they were fast becoming so for most ordinary Berliners. In the second half of the war the food and coal crisis worsened appreciably, while prices continued to mount. Police reports on morale in the city registered an escalating malaise and “a tense political situation” due to the endless shortages, high prices, and an inequitable distribution of resources. If wealthy people were still able to purchase scarce items through back channels, this was beyond the reach of the poor and even of the middle classes, who complained with justice about the authorities’ inability or unwillingness to make life’s daily necessities affordable to the general population. As the crisis deepened, Berliners increasingly forgot that quietude was their first duty as citizens. In March 1917 about 500 women stormed a municipal vegetable warehouse in Charlotten-burg, demanding an immediate distribution of its contents. Then they marched to the town hall, crying “Hunger, hunger, we want turnips!” It was a bad sign when people started protesting for turnips.

Because the Social Democratic Party, the traditional champion of Berlin’s working classes, continued to do little to relieve the suffering, the party leadership lost credibility in the capital. “In no other city does the established Socialist leadership command so little influence as here,” reported the Berlin police in March 1917. The capital thus became the natural breeding ground for an internal leftist opposition. Such a movement had surfaced as early as January 1916 with the foundation of the Spar-takusbund by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who had never reconciled themselves to their party’s support of the war. On May Day 1916 the Spartacists organized a demonstration in the center of Berlin against the government and the war; as a result, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were packed off to jail. By early 1917, dissension within the party had reached the point where advocates of an early peace decided to split off from the SPD to form a new entity, the Independent Social Democratic Party (Unabhangige Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands, USPD). The group was strongest in Germany’s industrial areas, especially in the Ruhr and Berlin.