Persuading with the Unseen? Die Arbeiter‐Illustrierte‐Zeitung, Photography, and German Communism’s Iconophobia

Abstract

Die Arbeiter‐Illustrierte‐Zeitung [Worker’s Illustrated Magazine] (known as the AIZ) is widely recognized as a highly successful and politically radical alternative to interwar Germany’s mainstream illustrated press. Far less acknowledged, however, is the extent to which the magazine’s famously persuasive use of photography arose from deep misgivings about the medium’s accuracy. This article will take a fresh look at the AIZ’s astonishing alchemy of image and text and suggest that this formula, meant to expose the unseen, arose not in an outright enthusiasm for photography but from an institutionalized German communism that strongly distrusted images.

Keywords:

• Arbeiter‐Illustrierte‐Zeitung
• Illustrated Press
• Iconophobia
• Photomontage
• German Communism
• Reality and Appearance

Notes

1 The literature by and on Münzenberg is unfortunately inflected by strong political dispositions or, in other cases, various axes to grind. That said, sources on him and his enterprise consist of Willi Münzenberg, Die dritte Front. Aufzeichnungen aus 15 Jahren proletarischer Jugendbewegung (Berlin: Neuer deutscher Verlag, 1930); Babette Gross, Willi Münzenberg. Eine politische Biographie (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags‐Anstalt, 1967); Harald Wessel, Münzenbergs Ende. Ein deutscher Kommunist im Widerstand gegen Hitler und Stalin (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1991); and Sean McMeekin, Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Münzenberg, Moscow’s Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). For a meticulous and brilliant case study of the manner in which Münzenberg operated, see Anson Rabinbach, “Staging Antifascism: The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror,” New German Critique 35, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 97–126. On the AIZ, see Gabriele Ricke, Die Arbeiter‐Illustrierte‐Zeitung. Gegenmodell zur bürgerlichen Illustrierten (Hannover: Internationalismus Verlag, 1974); Peter Gorsen, ed., Ästhetik und Kommunikation. Beiträge zur politischen Erziehung [special issue on the AIZ and Der Arbeiter Fotograf] 3, no. 10 (1973); and Heinz Willmann, Geschichte der Arbeiter‐Illustrierten Zeitung 1921–1938 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1975). All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

2 Paraphrase of the opening sentences of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). The actual words were: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world‐historical facts and personages recur twice. He forgot to add: ‘Once as tragedy, and again as farce.’” See Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. Daniel de Leon (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1907), 5.

3 For more and these friezes and their impact, see Ulrich Pohlmann, “El Lissitzky’s Exhibition Designs: The Influence of His Work in Germany, Italy, and the United States, 1923–1943,” in Margarita Tupitsyn, ed., El Lissitzky. Beyond the Abstract Cabinet: Photography, Design, Collaboration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 52–64.

4 See my book manuscript, “The Agitated Image: John Heartfield, Photomontage, and the German Avant‐Garde 1914–1930,” currently under review, on this question.

5 For two studies on this question of Marxism and iconophobia, see W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Rhetoric of Iconoclasm: Marxism, Ideology, and Fetishism,” in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987) and Sarah Kofman, Camera Obscura of Ideology, trans. Will Straw (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).

6 The caption reads “Wilhelm II leads us to glorious times while Hindenburg, the toady, follows.” At the war’s declaration, Kaiser Wilhelm II declared that “I will lead you to glorious times.”

7 The dimensions of the AIZ were roughly 15 × 11 inches. The double spread, therefore, was about 30 × 22 inches.

8 On this mid‐Weimar‐era phenomenon, see Dora Apel, “Cultural Battlegrounds: Weimar Photographic Narratives of War,” in New German Critique 76, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 49–84.

9 Kurt Korf, “Die Berliner Illustrirte,” in 50 Jahre Ullstein 1877–1927 (Berlin: Verlag Ullstein, 1927), excerpted and translated in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism, 3 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 646–47. When the Ullstein Press founded this magazine in 1891, it employed the word “illustrirte” rather than “illustrierte,” the second of which had become the customary German adaptation of the English word “illustrated.” The press apparently used this misspelling in order to distinguish its new magazine from the Illustrierte Zeitung then being published by its competitor the Scherl Press.

10 In fact, Gabriele Ricke, in his study Die Arbeiter‐Illustrierte‐Zeitung, makes just this argument in his study, suggesting that the AIZ consciously positioned itself as a “counter‐model” to the mainstream press.

11 McMeekin conducted intensive research in Moscow’s Comintern Archive and essentially demonstrated that Münzenberg’s entire empire was financed through this Russian organization. See McMeekin, Red Millionaire, particularly his chapter “Follow the Money,” 163–73

12 See, in particular, the notorious Anti‐Bolshevist Campaign and the early 1919 issues of Die Berliner Illustrirte. On the first, see Sherwin Simmons, “Grimaces on the Walls: Anti‐Bolshevist Posters and the Debate around Kitsch,” Design Issues 14, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 16–40.

13 Not long after its inauguration, the AIZ chose to backdate its founding year from 1925 to 1921, the date when Münzenberg’s Sowjetrussland im Bild [Soviet Russia in Pictures] first rolled off the presses. Therefore, 1931, for example, became the AIZ’s tenth anniversary rather than its sixth.

14 On this charge, see Margarita Tupitsyn, “Lenin’s Death and the Birth of Political Photomontage,” in The Soviet Photograph 1924–1937 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 9–34.

15 For more on Fathers and Sons and Heartfield’s relationship with Münzenberg, see Eckard Siepmann, Montage: John Heartfield. Vom Club Dada zur Arbeiter‐Illustrierten Zeitung (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1977).

16 On Holm, see n. 77 in Roldan März and Gertrud Heartfield, eds., John Heartfield. Der Schnitt entlang der Zeit. Selbstzeugnisse. Erinnnerungen. Interpretationen (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1981), 565–66.

17 See Oliver Kersten, Die Naturfreundebewegung in der Region Berlin‐Brandenburg 1908–1989/90. Kontinuitäten und Brüche. (Berlin: Naturfreunde‐Verlag, 2007).

18 For more on Münzernberg’s early contact with the German avant‐garde, see Cristina Cuevas‐Wolf, “Montage as a Weapon: The Tactical Alliance between Willi Münzenberg and John Heartfield, New German Critique 107 (Summer 2009): 185–205.

19 See the chapter “Red Eminence” in Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing: An Autobiography (London: Collins, 1954), 205–21.

20 “Das Programm der kommunistischen Internationale (1928),” in Hermann Weber, ed., Der deutsche Kommunismus. Dokumente 1915–1945 (Cologne and Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1963), 46.

21 “Thälmann Präsidentschaftskandidat der KPD,” in Weber, Der deutsche Kommunismus, 148.

22 “Thälmann Präsidentschaftskandidat der KPD,” in Weber, Der deutsche Kommunismus, 148.

23 “Aus dem Programm‐Entwurf der KPD (1922),” in Weber, Der deutsche Kommunismus, 44.

24 This working assumption that mainstream press photography cloaked Weimar’s underlying reality was also central to Der rote Stern, the weekly photo‐illustrated supplement of the daily party paper Die rote Fahne. Der rote Stern began printing in the late 1920s. Die rote Fahne itself began using photography under this rubric—albeit far more sparsely—in the late 1920s with the consequences most keenly realized in John Heartfield’s contributions.

25 On the first, see Barbara McCloskey, George Grosz and the Communist Party. Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918–1936 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). On the second, see Der Arbeiter‐Fotograf, Münzenberg’s monthly periodical, intended for groups of “worker photographers.”

26 From an interview of Heartfield by Bengt Dahlbäck, curator of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, 1967. Excerpts of transcript printed in März and Heartfield, Der Schnitt, 464.

27 Bertolt Brecht on the tenth‐anniversary of Münzenberg’s Arbeiter Hilfe, in AIZ 41 (1931).

28 Oskar Maria Graf, “John Heartfield. Der Photomonteur und seine Kunst,” in Deutsche Volkszeitung, Paris ed., 20 November 1938; excerpted English translation available in Peter Pachnicke and Klaus Honnef, John Heartfield (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 207.

29 See Laszlo Moholy‐Nagy, “Unprecedented Photography (1927),” translated in Christopher Phillips, ed., Photography in the Modern Era (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989), 83–85.

30 See Rodchenko’s various translated statements in Phillips, Photography in the Modern Era.

31 Wieland Herzfelde, Gesellschaft, Künstler und Kommunismus (Berlin: Malik Verlag, 1921), 25.

32 See Benjamin Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” October 39 (Fall 1984): 82–119, and Devin Fore, “The Operative Word in Soviet Factography,” in October 118 (Fall 2006): 95–131.

33 See Tupitsyn, “Lenin’s Death,” 9–34.

34 The circulation numbers of the AIZ are as difficult to discern as the people sitting on the editorial staff. Münzenberg claimed that it reached its highest level of 400,000–500,000 in 1931: Willi Münzenberg, Solidirität. Zehn Jahre internationale Arbeiterhilfe 1921–1931 (Berlin: Neuer deutscher Verlag, 1931), 86. But Karl Retzlaw, who worked at Münzenberg’s Neuer deutscher Verlag (NDV) in the late 1920s and early ’30s, suggested in 1972 that the printing press where the NDV paid to have the AIZ printed could only reach a maximum output of 280,000 copies per week. See n. 6 in Peter Gorsen, “‘Das Auge des Arbeiters’—Anfänge der proletarischen Bildpresse,” in Gorsen, Ästhetik und Kommunikation, 37.