George
Grosz
was born in
Berlin, Germany, in 1893. After studying
art in Dresden and Berlin he began contributing cartoons to German
journals such as Ulk and Lustige
Blatter.
On the outbreak of the First World War Grosz
was conscripted into the German Army.
A strong opponent of the war, he was eventually released as unfit
for duty. However, the following year, desperate for soldiers, Grosz
was called up again. Kept from frontline
action, Grosz was used to transport and guard prisoners of war.
After trying to commit suicide in 1917, Grosz was placed in an army
hospital. It was decided to execute Grosz but he was saved by the
intervention of one of his patrons, Count Kessler.
Grosz was now diagnosed as suffering from shell-shock
and was discharged from the German Army.
In 1917, Grosz joined with John Heartfield
in protesting about the German wartime propaganda campaign against
the allies. This included anti-war drawings such as
Fit for Active Service (1918), in which a well-fed doctor
pronounces a skeleton fit for duty.
After the Armistice Grosz was active
in left-wing politics and contributed to communist journals published
by Malik-Verlag. He also joined with artists such as John
Heartfield, Otto Dix, Max
Ernst, Kurt Schwitters to form
the German Dada group. Grosz's drawings
often attacked members of the government and important business leaders.
Grosz was taken to court several times but although heavily fined,
managed to escape imprisonment. Grosz's collected drawings, The
Face of the Ruling Class (1921) and Ecce
Homo (1927), earned him an international reputation as
a politically committed artist.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s Grosz directed his attacks against
Aldof Hitler and the Nazi
Party. In 1932 Grosz was forced to flee from Nazi
Germany and after settling in the United States
became a naturalized citizen in 1938.
His
memoirs, The
Autobiography of George Grosz
was published in 1955.
George Grosz
returned to Germany in 1959, saying "My
American dream turned out to be a soap bubble". He died shortly
after his arrival following a fall down a flight of stairs.
George
Grosz, Friedrich Ebert:
Life of a Socialist (1919)
(1)
George Grosz, Autobiography of George Grosz (1955)
What can I say about the
First World War, a war in which I served as an infantryman, a war
I hated at the start and to which I never warmed as it proceeded?
I had grown up in a humanist atmosphere, and war to me was never anything
but horror, mutilation and senseless destruction, and I knew that
many great and wise people felt the same way about it.
I don't even like to talk about it. I hated being a number and not
merely because I was a very small one. I let them bellow at me for
just as long as it took me to find enough pluck to bellow back at
them. I stood up as best I could to their disgusting stupidity and
brutality, but I did not, of course, manage to beat them at their
own game. It was a fight to the bitter end, one in which I was not
defending ideals or beliefs but simply my own self.
(2) George
Grosz, Autobiography of George Grosz (1955)
In 1916 I was discharged from military service, or rather, given a
sort of leave of absence on the understanding that I might be recalled
within a few months. And so I was a free man, at least for a while.
The collapse of Germany was only a matter of time. All the fine phrases
were now no more than stale, rank printer's in on brown substitute
paper. I watched it all from my studio in Sudende, living and drawing
in a world of my own.
I drew soldiers without noses; war cripples with crab-like limbs of
steel; two medical orderlies tying a violent infantryman up in a horse
blanket; a one-armed soldier using his good hand to salute a heavily
bemedalled lady who had just passed him a biscuit; a colonel, his
fly wide open, embracing a nurse; a hospital orderly emptying a bucket
full of pieces of human flesh down a pit.
(3)
George Grosz, interviewed by Erwin Piscator (1928)
When John Heartfield and I invented
photomontage in my South End studio at five o'clock on a May morning
in 1916, neither of us had any inkling of its great possibilities,
nor of the thorny yet successful road it was to take. As so often
happens in life, we had stumbled across a vein of gold without knowing
it.
(4) George
Grosz, Autobiography of George Grosz (1955)
I was recalled (to the German Army) in the middle of 1917. My new
duties were to train recruits and to transport and guard prisoners
of war. But I had enough and one night they found me semi-conscious,
head-first in the latrine. I spent some time in hospitals after that.
Whenever
I had a moment to spare I would vent my spleen in sketches of everything
about me that I hated, either in my notebook or on sheets of writing
paper; the brutal faces of my comrades, badly mutilated war cripples,
arrogant officers, lascivious nurses.
(5)
George
Grosz, Autobiography of George Grosz (1955)
One day, I gathered that I was to be shot for desertion. Luckily Count
Kessler heard about it as well, and interceded on my behalf. In the
end, they pardoned me and packed me off to a home for the shell-shocked.
Shortly before the end of the war, I was discharged a second time,
once again with the observation that I was subject to recall at any
time.
(6)
George
Grosz, Autobiography of George Grosz (1955)
I thought the war would never end. And perhaps it never did, either.
Peace was declared, but not all of us were drunk with joy or stricken
blind. Very little changed fundamentally, except that the proud German
soldier had turned into a defeated bundle of misery and the great
German army had disintegrated.
I was disappointed, not because we had lost the war but because our
people had allowed it to go on for so many years, instead of heeding
the few voices of protest against all that mass insanity and slaughter.
(7)
George
Grosz, The Autobiography of George Grosz (1955)
In those days (after the
First World War) we were all Dadaists. If the word meant anything
at all, it meant seething discontent, dissatisfaction and cynicism.
Defeat and political ferment always give rise to that sort of movement.
We held Dadaist meetings, charged a few marks admission and did nothing
but tell people the truth, that is, abuse them. The news spread quickly
and soon our meetings were sold out, crammed with people wanting to
be scandalized or just after fun.
Between insults we performed "art", but the performances
were as a rule interrupted. Thus hardly would Walter Mehring begin
to rattle away at his typewriter while reciting some piece or other
of his own composition, when Heartfield or Hausmann would come out
from behind the stage and yell: "Stop! You're not trying to bamboozle
that feeble-minded lot down there, are you?"
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