‘Use Photographs as Weapons’

Helmut Herzfelde was born in Germany in 1891 to socialist parents involved in trade unionism and other subversive activity. He was identified as having a gift for painting and enrolled at art school, where he was heavily influenced by, and worked with, numerous graphic designers. By the outbreak of the first world war Herzfelde was a committed Marxist and Pacifist. Angered by the wave of anti-British sentiment sweeping Germany (or perhaps just looking to antagonise his fellow countrymen) he anglicised his name to John Heartfield.

In 1916 he and his brother founded a publishing house, with John Heartfield producing graphics for the publications, and from 1917 he became increasingly involved in the Dada movement.  Dadaism was partly a rejection of many of the principles of traditional art. Heartfield’s photomontage work initially conformed to many of these anti-conventions, but as his work became more overtly political, and he increasingly needed to express ideas simply and clearly he re-embraced many of the techniques that Dadaism had abandoned. What he retained from Dadaism was it’s battle cry: Benütze Foto als Waffe, ‘Use Photographs as Weapons’.From 1924 onwards Heartfield contributed political photomontages to AIZ (Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung) a pro-communist, anti-fascist paper with one of the highest circulations in Germany. As it happened Heartfield’s tenure at AIZ concided almost exactly with the rise of the German Nazi Party. In the Nazis Heartfield found political adversaries who’s views were completely opposite to his own, and who provided him with seemingly infinite material for vicious political satire.

The success of the Nazi party was partly a result of the way it used propoganda, particularly visual propoganda. Stark images like the Swastika and the Hitler salute made Nazism visible in Germany even before it became a major political force, making it seem more powerful, and its members seem more numerous than they were. However for Heartfield’s agile mind these images were easy to twist, turning symbols of power into icons of mockery, or of startling foresight. In one image a dead soilder is sprawled on the ground, apparently giving a morbid Hitler salute, in another the swasitka is replaced by four bloody axes. While intended for mass consumption, Heartfield did not shy away from more complicated visual messages. In the image below he depicts a person broken on a Swastika, a reference to the medieval practice of breaking on the wheel.Adolf Hitler was also a frequent target of Heartfield’s montages. In one image Hitler looks in to a mirror to see a skeleton holding him by the throat, in another Hitler’s head is superimposed on to a chimp’s body, which holds a sword over the globe. Part of the great significance of Heartfield’s work is that it clearly contradicts the claim made by many in Germany and abroad after the Second World War that there was no way to predict that Hitler would turn out to be the monster he was. Heartfield’s work makes it quite clear that Hitler’s intentions were already obvious to those willing to see them.

What makes John Heartfield particuarly interesting though was the way he inverted the inherent non-truthfulness of photographs and text. He stated in an interview not long before he died that when he first began to use photomontage he was reacting to the way photographs were often intentionally misconstrued by their captions. This was something he had seen during the first world war, when an unwinnable conflict was promoted to the German people with deceptive photographs and text. Heartfield instead used highly ironic titles combined with images that were clearly manipulations to bluntly drive home the point that what people could not believe what they read and saw in mainstream media. In a sense he used lies to tell the truth.

By 1933 it was too dangerous to remain openly critical of the Nazis and Heartfield left for Czechoslovakia, where he continued to produce anti-Nazi montages for AIZ which was also now publishing in exile. By 1938 it looked increasingly likely that Czechslovakia would be annexed by Germany and Heartfield left for England. After the war he returned to Germany, living in the Communist east and designing theatre sets, including for Bertholt Brecht. It’s strange imagining these two old dissidents living under a regime almost as oppressive as the one they had both fled a decade earlier. John Heartfield died in 1968 and is buried in Berlin.