Gustav Meyrink - The Golem

Carl Alexander Wittek, portrait of Gustav Meyrink, 1919

A heavyweight from the world of high finance is suspected of profiteering and loses his reputation overnight - it’s the talk of the town in Prague when it happens to banker Gustav Meyer in January 1902. The co-founder of Bankhaus Meyer & Morgenstern (established in 1889, together with the nephew of poet Christian Morgenstern) is not just a well-to-do businessman, but above all a celebrated figure in society. Elegantly dressed, feared for his sharp tongue, the owner of one of the first automobiles in Prague and something of an occultist - when someone like Meyer is arrested it does not go unnoticed. After two and a half months in detention, Meyer is released. His innocence is proven, but he is ruined all the same: the bank has not survived the enforced closure during the legal inquiry.

 Hugo Steiner-Prag, Illustration to Gustav Meyrink's The Golem, 1915

A bitter man, he decided to turn his back on Prague and seek out a new life in Vienna. It is the start of a miraculously fast metamorphosis, in which the thwarted banker Meyer exits the stage to make place for the successful man of letters Meyrink. Once in Vienna he found employment almost immediately as the chief editor of the progressive periodical Der liebe Augustin, and began publishing satirical stories with only one apparent objective: to affront as many men in high places as possible. The military machine, the clergy, judges, lawyers, speculators - anything that reeks of capital and petty bourgeoisie is the target of his virtuously phrased scorn. 

Titlepage Der Liebe Augustin, No. 12 (1904), devoted to oriental stories

One example is the short story The Siege of Sarajevo (written well before World War One), in which the not too clever prince Aloysius the Kindhearted is called upon to open the annual cattle exhibition with a few well chosen words. After a few stylistic blunders, the confused monarch cuts the cord with a final blunder: "I hereby - declare – the war!" At once the crowd is seized by a ravishing passion and while roaring nationalistic songs, the entire nation plunges into a completely incomprehensible Balkan war. 

 Fritz Schwimbeck, My dream, my bad dream,1915: "The moonlight falls on the foot of my bed and lies there like a large, flat stone."

Not surprisingly, Meyrink became the target of a nationalistic smear campaign once the First World War had broken out. Although he was not Jewish, he was branded as a "typically Jewish" intriguer and an enemy of all that was sound and German. His house came under attack and his books were confiscated in Vienna in 1917. Meyrink’s sardonic pen was admired by influential critics and kindred spirits like Max Brod and Karl Kraus. The former praised the "pugilistic spirit" of his prose, the latter his "predilection for Buddhism, combined with an aversion to the infantry".

 Hugo Steiner-Prag, Illustration to Gustav Meyrink's The Golem, 1915

During 1908 a compilation of his short stories, Waxworks, was published. Being in need of money, Meyrink also started working as a translator and he became a prolific one; during five years he managed to translate into German fifteen volumes of Charles Dickens. In the second half of the 1910s, the satire disappeared from Meyrink's work and the phantastical began to dominate. One hundred thousand copies were sold of his first great novel, The Golem, when it appeared in 1915. In late 1919, Paul Wegener, also starring in the title role, started production of his legendary  film Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt Kam (The Golem: or How He Came into the World), one of the first expressionistic movies. 

 Paul Wegener and Lya de Putti in The Golem, 1920

The Golem is based on an old Jewish legend about rabbi Löw, who formed an immensely strong man out of clay to protect the getto of Prague. The protagonist Athanasius Pernath wanders through the distorted slums of the getto in a nightmare, restlessly in search of the golem. Finally he encounters the creature in a liberating vision as a doppelgänger in the labyrinth of his own soul. The first sentence, "The moonlight falls on the foot of my bed and lies there like a large, flat stone", immediately evokes a sense of oppression which continues to grip the reader page after page. 

 UFA movie poster for the original screening of Wegener's The Golem, 1920

Meyrink's second novel, The Green Face, published in 1916, was also a major success, and holds a bonus for Dutch readers: the story is set in a disquieting Amsterdam, which shortly after the First World War is "flooded with aliens of every nationality". There is desperation in the city, coupled with a deep financial crisis. The crisis mood ends in religious mass hysteria, and while the streets are filled with self-flaggelating penitential preachers, Meyrink allows the city to vanish in an apocalyptic hurricane (below). In later books like The White Dominican, spiritual and occult messages are served up even more starkly, and it is not surprising that Meyrink began to lose his readership from the 1920s onwards. The critics, too, gave up on him: "It’s a shame that a great seer has cost us a great artist", Kurt Tucholsky already wrote in 1917. 

 Fritz Schwimbeck, The Destruction of St. Nicolai in Amsterdam, 1917

The Golem was illustrated with a now famous series of lithographs by Hugo Steiner-Prag. Fritz Schwimbeck illustrated both The Golem and The Green Face and Emil Preetorius was responsible for most of Meyrink’s book designs published by Kurt Wolff Verlag. At the outset of his writing career Meyrink became friends with the artist Alfred Kubin. Amongst others, Alfred Kubin, Richard Teschner and Franz Sedlacek figure in several of Meyrink’s novels and stories. A number of Sedlacek’s fantastical paintings appear to have been inspired in turn by Meyrink’s stories. His 1922 painting Moulage Studio not only evokes Meyrink's Waxworks (A moulage is a wax anatomical model), but also Golems made from mud:

 

 Franz Sedlacek, Beim Moulagenmacher (Moulage Studio), 1932

Gustav Meyer was born in Vienna in1868. He was the illegitimate son of Baron Karl von Varnbüler von und zu Hemmingen and actress Maria Wilhelmina Adelheyd Meier. Until thirteen years of age Meyrink lived in Munich, where he completed elementary school. He settled in Prague in 1883, where he lived for twenty years and has depicted it many times in his works. In, 1905 Meyrink married Philomene Bernt, and one year later their daughter Sybil Felizata was born, followed in 1909 by a son, Harro Fortunat (the main character of The Green Face was given the same name). By 1920, Meyrink's financial affairs improved so that he left Vienna and bought a villa in Starnberg, Bavaria. The villa became known as "The House at the Last Lantern" after the name of the house from The Golem. There he and his family lived for the next eight years.

Gustav Meyrink with his son and daughter, 1920

The name "Fortunat" did not bring much luck to Meyrink's son: during the winter of 1932, while skiing, he injured his backbone terribly. That meant that for the rest of his life he would be confined to his armchair. On July 12, at the age of 24 he committed suicide - at the same age as his father once was trying to do it. Meyrink survived his son by half a year. He died on December 4, 1932 in Starnberg.

Ilse Bing - Queen of the Leica

 Ilse Bing, Self-Portrait in Mirrors, 1931

Ilse Bing (1899-1998) was born into a comfortable Jewish family in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. In 1920, she enrolled at the University of Frankfurt for a degree in mathematics and physics, but soon changed to study History of Art. To illustrate her doctorate on the Neo-Classical German architect Friedrich Gilly, Bing bought a Leica in 1929, the new revolutionary 35mm hand-held camera that enabled photographers to capture fast-moving events. Like Gisèle Freund (who also, in the late 1920s, studied History of Art in Frankfurt), Bing started to teach herself photography. In 1929, while still pursuing her studies, Bing started to gain photojournalism commissions for the image magazine Frankfurter Illustrierte. 

Ilse Bing, Hellerhofsiedlung Frankfurt - my shadow and the shadow of the architect Mart Stam on the roof, 1930

At this time, Bing also started collaborating with the architect Mart Stam, who taught at the Bauhaus school of design from 1928 and was appointed chief architect to Das Neue Frankfurt (The New Frankfurt), a major construction project in 1929. Stam commissioned Bing to record all of his housing projects. He also introduced her to Frankfurt's avant-garde circles, in particular that of artist Ella Bergman-Michel and her husband Robert, patrons of the arts who frequently hosted artists such as El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, and Hannah Höch at their house. 

Ilse Bing, Photomontage of projects by Mart Stam from the 1920s, 1930

In 1930, Mart Stam became one of the 20 architects, organized by Frankfurt city planner Ernst May, who traveled to the Soviet Union to create a string of new industrial cities, including the gigantic steel mills of Magnitogorsk. The same year, Bing finally gave up her thesis to fully concentrate on photography. In 1931, greatly impressed by an exhibition of modern photography in Frankfurt, especially by the work of Paris-based Swiss photographer Florence Henri, Ilse Bing decided to move to Paris. Paris, at the time, was an epicentre of developments in modern photography, and, until the Second World War, a safe heaven for many artists who had fled their increasingly repressive home countries.

Ilse Bing, Eiffel Tower with the thermometer, ca. 1932

Gradually, Bing started to publish work in the leading French illustrated newspapers such as L'Illustration and Le Monde Illustré, and from 1932, increasingly worked for Vogue and Harpers Bazaar. When on assignment, Bing would take extra pictures that satisfied her own artistic interests. During a commission to photograph the Moulin Rouge, she made a series of photographs of dancers which were exhibited in the gallery window at the newly-established publishing house La Pléiade in 1931. This was her first exhibition. 

 Ilse Bing, Can Can Dancer at the Moulin Rouge, 1931

Later in 1931, Bing's photographs were included in the 26th Salon Internationale d'Art Photographique. They quickly caught the attention of the photographer and critic Emmanuel Sougez who praised the dynamism of the photographs and christened Bing "the Queen of the Leica". The same year, Bing met the Dutch-American writer Hendrik Willem van Loon who became her most important patron and introduced her work to American clients. During the 1930s, Bing frequently exhibited in Parisian galleries, where her work was shown alongside that of Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Florence Henri, Man Ray and André Kértesz. In 1933, Bing met her future husband Konrad Wolff, a German pianist living in the same block of flats, and whose music she would hear drifting up to her apartment.

 Ilse Bing, Shoes, for Harpers Bazaar, 1935

In 1936, Ilse Bing was given a solo exhibition at the June Rhodes gallery in New York. Hosted by her patron Van Loon, she travelled to the USA, where she stayed for three months, during which time she made photographs in New York and Connecticut. Bing was greatly impressed by New York. In an interview in the New York World Telegraph entitled "Famous German Woman sees life in New York as Transitory and Wild", Bing spoke of her excitement with the "jazz rhythm" of New York, stating that "I did not find the New York skyline big like rocks. It is more natural than that, like crystals in the mountains, little things grown up." During her stay, Bing met Alfred Stieglitz. This meeting was, she later stated, a major event in her life and we can see the influence of Stieglitz's vision on Bing's photographs of New York. Bing was ranked among the leading photographers of the time, with her work included in the important exhibition Photography 1839-1937 at the Museum of Modern Art.

 Ilse Bing, Empire State Building, 1936

In 1938, Bing and Wolff moved together to live in their new, elegant apartment on Boulevard Jourdan. However, the photographs Bing made of the splendid views across Paris towards Sacré Coeur from her balcony of this apartment were some of her last in Paris. The outbreak of the Second World War changed everything. In 1940 Bing and Wolff were forced to leave Paris and, both Jews, were interned in separate camps in the South of France. Bing spent six weeks in the notorious Gurs camp, before rejoining her husband in Marseille. The couple spent nine months there, awaiting visas for America. Eventually, with the support of the fashion editor of Harpers Bazaar, they were able to leave for New York in June 1941. 

Ilse Bing, Fokker Plane, Amsterdam 1933

Five years after her visit to New York in 1936, Ilse Bing now returned to an altogether different environment. Partly because of the large number of photographers who had also fled Europe and were seeking work, Bing found it hard to gain commissions for reportage work and worked much less as a photojournalist from this point on. In the late 1950s, Bing eventually gave up photography, wanting to go beyond the figurative and work in a more generalised, abstract mode with poems and line drawings, and later, collage.

 Ilse Bing, Three men on steps by the Seine, Paris 1931

In 1976, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired some of Bing's work. Her work was included in a touring exhibition, organised by the Art Institute of Chicago. A collection, including a large number of Bing's prints, was eventually acquired by the Art Institute. From this point, Bing's work was exhibited more frequently in museums and commercial galleries and acquired by American and French museums. Aged 99, Ilse Bing died 1998 in New York.

Fritz Kahn - Man as Industrial Palace

 Fritz Kahn, Fairytale journey along the bloodstream – Entering a glandular cavity with an idealized cell-scape, illustration by Arthur Schmitson for "Life of Man, Vol. II", 1924

Ever since Fantastic Voyage, the 1966 sci-fi film about a crew of biologists who were miniaturized to fit into a microbe-size submarine that sailed perilously through the human bloodstream - encountering dangers like parasites and immune-system defenses along the way  - one could easily fantasize that tiny homunculi actually control our bodies. And  that our bodies are really huge factories. A German scientist, gynecologist and author named Fritz Kahn (1888-1968), had not only developed this idea in the 1920s but created a copyrighted graphic system that visually codified the metaphoric notion of man as machine, which he introduced to the world in a humorous diagrammatic poster (executed by an unknown artist) from 1926 called Man as Industrial Palace. Humor aside, Kahn was quite serious. In the 1920s, his magnum opus, Das Leben des Menschen (The Life of Man) was renowned as an accomplishment of global repute.

 Dr. Fritz Kahn, c. 1920

Fritz Kahn was born in Halle. Just like his father, doctor and writer Arthur Kahn, Fritz was very talented and interested in various topics. He grew up with a Jewish-Orthodox tradition and received a classical humanistic education. The family immigrated to the USA in 1893 (Fritz spent his first two school years in Hoboken, New Jersey) but returned to Germany three years later. In 1905, after several relocations, the family settled in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Kahn studied medicine and microbiology at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-University (1907-1913). During his studies, he began writing popular science articles for nationwide newspapers. During World War I, Fritz Kahn served as an army doctor in France and Italy.

Fritz Kahn, Car and Ear Match, 1929

After the war, Kahn worked as a surgeon and obstetrician in Berlin and wrote two successful books: Die Zelle (The Cell) and Die Juden als Rasse und Kulturvolk (The Jews as Race and Cultural Nation). In 1920, he married Irma Glogau and opened a gynecological practice. Kahn's success in the field of publishing soon required a separate studio where he employed secretaries and professional illustrators, who executed his exceptional image ideas in various styles of modernism. Kahn also wrote regularly on science and medicine for the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, Weimar Germany’s most widely read weekly. 

 Fritz Kahn, Man eats 1.400 times his weight in 70 years, 1926

Kahn produced illustrations that drew a direct functional analogy between human physiology and the operation of contemporary technologies, especially industrial machines. Kahn's best known work, The Man as Industrial Palace poster (below), was originally designed as a special offer for those Kosmos readers (a widely read popular science magazine named for Alexander von Humboldt's 1885 publication of the same name) who had subscribed, in 1921, to the five-volume book Das Leben des Menschen (The Life of Man), an anatomy and physiology of the human body (1922-1931). The book finally had more than 1.600 pages, with the last of its 50 binders issued and distributed in 1931, a decade after the start of the project. More than a thousand illustrations were included in the five volumes, and almost 150 colour plates. The Life of Man series' circulation finally amounted to an astonishing couple of hundred thousand copies.

Fritz Kahn, Man as Industrial Palace, 1926

The poster, a cutaway schematic of a human form, reveals a complex industrial apparatus housed in numerous compartments that were analogous to bodily organs and cellular functions. In these rooms, dozens of hopefully skilled homunculi (some wearing business suits) control the body as though in a normal day at the industrial park. The poster is reproduced full-size in a new, profusely illustrated monograph, Fritz Kahn: Man Machine by Uta and Thilo von Debschitz (Springer Wein, NewYork). Walter Gropius and Herbert Bayer were among those who responded directly to this work; for example, Gropius used several of Kahn’s images for his lectures in "Design Topics". Bayer, a Bauhaus student (later Bauhaus teacher and head of the printing section), used Kahn’s visualization style in, for example, the Wunder des Lebens (Wonders of Life) show in Berlin in 1935.

Fritz Kahn, The Life of Man, 1931. The physiology of vision, with the rods and cones of the pupils as receptors of light, is compared to the technology of photographic reproduction in which an image is screened and broken down into dot patterns.

In a climate of growing anti-Semitism, the liberal Kahn was elected chairman of the Jüdische Altershilfe (Jewish Senior Aid). In 1933, his books were publicly burned. Because of his Jewishness, he lost his medical accreditation, and immigrated to Palestine. Five years later, Kahn returned to Europe with his second wife and settled in Paris. His internationally successful book Unser Geschlechtsleben (Our Sex Life) was published in Switzerland (in Germany, it was immediately put on the index):

 Fritz Kahn, The Male Erection System, 1937

After the German occupation of France in 1940, Kahn fled to Bordeaux, where he was arrested and imprisoned. Kahn escaped to Portugal via Spain, and, with the help of Albert Einstein, he immigrated with his wife to the United States in 1941. During these difficult times, Der Mensch gesund und krank (Healthy and Ailing Man) was published in Switzerland:

 Fritz Kahn, Healthy and Ailing Man (Vol. II), 1940

Kahn's last European publication - Man in Structure in Function -­ was subsequently translated for Alfred Knopf and published in the United States in 1943 where it went through two printings in its first year. The first image of the book - refered to in the first sentence - introduces the primary themes which Kahn utilized throughout: the functional analogy between man and machine. In the image a silhouetted male figure is set inside a cut­out drawing of a train locomotive; both man and locomotive have specific internal parts drawn, which are compared functionally (Man and Machine):

 Fritz Kahn, Man in Structure in Function (Fig. 208), 1943

The accompanying text explains the functional analogy explictely: "Man and machine exhibit far­reaching similarities. Both derive their energy from the combustion of carbon, which they obtain from plants. Man, the weaker machine, utilizes fresh plants for fuel, while the locomotive, a stronger machine, uses fossilized plants in the form of coal."

 Raoul Hausmann, Dada (Collage for the First International Dada Fair in Berlin), 1920

The analogy between functional anatomy and technology was not exactly new. Contemporary art styles (like Raoul Hausmann's above Dada collage) also dealt with modernity and made use of the man-machine amalgams: Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism and New Objectivity all dealt extensively with it. Many writers and visual artists had experienced the terrible mechanized battles of the First World War (and the widespread use of protheses thereafter). In part, it was the war induced man­-machine analogue that made Kahn's illustrations possible. 

Reeducation of mutilés de guerres at the Maison blanche reeducation camp for agricultural workers, January 8, 1919. Reproduced in Surrealist Masculinités.

In another illustration (below) contained in Man in Structure in Function the speed of a nerve impulse is compared to the speed of a telegraph signal and an air plane. We are told that: "In earlier times the rapidity with which an impulse was conducted along a nerve fibre was considered the quintessence of speed. This idea has been superseded, however, by the accomplishments of modern technology." The illustration's subtitle rather coldly explains: "A person reaching from Cape Horn to Alaska would first feel a shark's bite after eighty hours."

 Fritz Kahn, The Speed of Thought, 1943

Kahn continued his successful career in the United States. In addition to Man in Structure and Function, Kahn's US publications included The Atom - Finally Explained, The Book of Nature, and Design of the Universe. In 1956, Kahn returned to Europe and settled in Switzerland. Among others, he wrote a matrimony guidebook entitled Muss Liebe blind sein? (Must Love Be Blind?). After surviving the Agadir earthquake in 1960, Kahn lived and worked in Denmark. Aged 79, during a trip to Switzerland, Fritz Kahn died in a clinic in Locarno. By the time of his death, Kahn had written more than a dozen books, most of them translated into several languages, including Chinese, Indonesian, and Finnish.

Hannah Höch - Brushflurlets and Beer Bellies

 Hannah Höch with her Dada Dolls, 1920

Hannah Höch (1889-1978) was born in Gotha. Her father was the director of an insurance company, her mother a hobby painter. Hannah studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule (Arts and Crafts School) in Berlin between 1912 and 1915. She finished her studies under Emil Orlik, concentrating on collage techniques. After her schooling, she worked in the handicrafts department for the Ullstein publishing house, designing dress and embroidery patterns for Die Dame (The Lady) and Die Praktische Berlinerin (The Practical Berlin Woman).

Hannah Höch, The Puppet Balsamine, 1927

She met Dadaist Raoul Hausmann in 1915 and they became close friends. Höch was the only woman participating in the First International Dada Fair which took place at at Dr. Otto Burchard’s Berlin art gallery in July 1920. Among her fellow dadaists were Johannes Baader, George Grosz and John Heartfield. Höch's personal relationship with Hausmann grew from friendship to a  temptous romance over time, but they separated in 1922, partly because Höch didn't like Hausmann's insistence on an "official" ménage à trois together with his wife (Hausmann's dream came true in the late 1920s, when he moved with his wife Hedwig and his model Vera Broido to the fashionable district of Charlottenburg). 

 Raoul Hausmann, Double Portrait Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann, c. 1920 

Hannah Höch - by now living with a woman, Dutch writer Til Brugmann, left a sketch of Hausmann around 1931:  "After I had offered to renew friendly relations we met frequently (with Til as well). At the time he was living with Heda Mankowicz-Hausmann and Vera Broido in Kaiser-Friedrich-Straße in Charlottenburg. Til and I went there often. But I always found it very boring. He was just acting the photographer, and the lover of Vera B, showing off terribly with what he could afford to buy now - the ésprit was all gone."

Hannah Höch und Til Brugmann, Berlin 1931

While the Dadaists paid lip service to women's emancipation they were clearly reluctant to include a woman among their ranks. The filmmaker Hans Richter described Höch's contribution to the Dada movement as the "sandwiches, beer and coffee she managed somehow to conjure up despite the shortage of money." Raoul Hausmann even suggested that Höch get a job to support him financially. Later, Höch ironized the hypocrisy of the Berlin Dada group in her photomontage The Strong Guys: 

 Hannah Höch, Die starken Männer (The Strong Guys), 1931

Höch observed in an undated note: "None of these men were satisfied with just an ordinary woman. In protest against the older generation they all desired this "New Woman" and her groundbreaking will to freedom. But - they more or less brutally rejected the notion that they, too, had to adopt new attitudes. This led to these truly Strindbergian dramas that typified the private lives of these men".

Hannah Höch, The Staircase, 1926

Höch was one of the forerunners in criticising society in the form of photomontages, a technique she developed in 1919. Her most famous piece became Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser DADA durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche (Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch), a critique of Germany in 1919. Perhaps it was the training at Ullstein that facilitated Höch’s finely-tuned eye for both snipping and re-assembling, which is so amply on display in Cut with the Kitchen Knife:

Hannah Höch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch, 1919

Another brilliant and utterly ironic collage from 1919 (below) shows Friedrich Ebert (middle), first President of the Weimar Republic and his "bloodhound", defence minister Gustav Noske (right above), who was responsible for the assasination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht earlier that year. Both men are depicted in bathing suits with a fig leave - a symbol of innocence - before their bellies. The collage also refers to the so-called "bathing suit affair": After the liberal Berliner Illustrierte had printed a photo of Ebert and Noske in bathing suits, the right-wing press (which, a couple of months earlier had celebrated the assasinations of Luxemburg and Liebknecht) started a campaign against the "obscene behaviour" of the two statesmen.

 Hannah Höch, Dada Panorama, 1919

An exciting work during the mid 1920s was the ambitious From the Ethnographic Museum series, 17 works that constitute an epic foray into the notion of alien cultures and female identity (see Imaginary Bride below). It was visually influenced by the newly-redone tribal art displays in Berlin's Ethnological Museum. 

Hannah Höch, Imaginary Bride, 1926

Around 1920, the woman was for many artists the "eteral woman" or "world mother" - either a subject of their male salvation fantasies, or an object of morbid desires. Oskar Kokoschka spooned with dolls and imagined his Murderer, The Hope of Woman, Dix painted his Moon Woman, and Otto Freundlich anchored "The Mother" in the world of ideas of his cosmic communism. Marcel Duchamp built Bachelor Machines, Kurt Schwitters designed his Merzbau as a "cathedral of erotic misery", and Rudolf Schlichter's yearning for boots remained unsatisfied because he got the whole woman instead. And Höch painted Associations. In the center of the picture she placed two intertwined plant-like structures, engaged in a process of fertilization, whose blossoms are made of machine parts:

Hannah Höch, Vereinigungen (Associations), 1929

Höch’s focus on the nature of female identity (and its depiction in the media) reached a crescendo in the early 1930s in works like Tamer (below). Most probably Tamer relates to her new life with Til Brugman (they were together from 1926 to 1936). It represents the general move toward increasing gender ambiguity in Höch’s imagery, as can also be seen in her self-portrait Russian Dancer.

 Hannah Höch, Tamer, 1930

Höch made many influential friendships over the years, with Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters among others. She met Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian in 1924 in Paris, and a trip to Holland in 1926 was extended to a stay of three years. Here, in 1926, she met and grew to love Til Brugmann. The relationship, scandalous as it was for the time, sharpened her eye to the allocation of male and female roles. Höch and Brugmann returned to Germany in 1929, and  she participated in two important exhibits: The prestigious Film and Photo exhibition, the first big photography show in Europe, included 18 of her photomontages.  Some 10.000 people saw the exhibition on its first tour stop alone, Stuttgart. In that year, the De Bron Gallery in The Hague mounted her first one-woman show, which included her oil paintings, numerous drawings, and watercolors, though not her photomontages.

Hannah Höch, The Journalists, 1925

Höch’s public career as an artist was launched. Other exhibitions followed - in 1931 at Berlin’s Kunstgewerbemuseum; and in 1932 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels. The Bauhaus mounted a show of 15 of her photomontages later that year. This public recognition came to an end in 1933, when Adolf Hitler seized political power. Like all avantgarde artists, Höch and her circle were deemed "Cultural Bolshiviks" and "Degenerates" by the National Socialist régime.  Höch refused to support the Nazis, and continued to secretly produce critical works like the The Mockers (you can see that she was a brilliant painter too):

 Hannah Höch, The Mockers, 1935

As the 1930s wore on, Höch’s world became increasingly dangerous. She expressed her feelings of loneliness and isolation in her painting The Fear (below). Höch married the much-younger businessman and pianist Kurt Matthies in 1938 and divorced him in 1944. In September, 1939, a few days after the begin of the Second World War, she moved to the relative obscurity of Heiligensee, a remote suburb of Berlin. She felt lucky to have found a place where "nobody would know me by sight or be aware of my lurid past as a Dadaist". 

 Hannah Höch, Angst (Fear), 1936

After the end of the war, Höch was one of the first to actively revive artistic life in Berlin and to contribute to the gradual recovery of German art after the war. In 1945, she put together her Bilderbuch (Picture Book), a photomontaged zoological garden populated with Brushflurlets (below) as well as other strange  creatures, and accompanied by a series of sly, silly poems like Unsatisfeedle:

Flailing his arms about, quite a sight,
He had wanted the black dress
But God gave him the white.
So with his sourpuss
he lives out his life.
He nurtures the eccentricity
it’s the wrong one — explicitly.

Hannah Höch, Brushflurlet, 1945

Bilderbuch wouldn’t be published in its entirety until 1985, six years after Höch’s death, and then only in a limited edition of 200. Now, Berlin publishing house The Green Box has rescued this unique volume from out-of-print obscurity with a lovely facsimile edition that reproduces the poems in English translation. During the 1950s and 1960s, Höch produced abstract works but also a large number of highly acclaimed colour collages, which transformed reality in an ironic and fantastic manner:

 Hannah Höch, Grotesque,1963

Höch exhibited works at the large Dada exhibitions such as at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1948 and at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 1958. Other exhibitions in London and Paris followed. An important retrospective exhibition of Höch's work was organised in 1973 in Paris and then toured to her hometown Berlin. Höch died in 1978 at the age of 88 years in her house in Berlin-Heiligensee.

Peter Drömmer - Revolutionary Take-Offs

 Peter Drömmer, The Card Player [probably Richard Blunck], 1919

Friedrich Peter Drömmer (1889-1968) was a German expressionistic visual artist and designer who is almost completely forgotten today. Drömmer was born in Kiel as son of a carpenter family. He left school early and started a painter apprenticeship which he finished in 1908. Between 1908 and 1912, he studied at Kiel's Art and Crafts School (Städtische Handwerker und Kunstgewerbeschule). Drömmer's artistic talents were spottet by Wilhelm Ahlmann, the doyen of an old Kiel banking family, who financed his academic education at Weimar's prestigious Academy of Art (1912-1913). 

 Peter Drömmer, Masurenschlacht (Battle of Masuria), 1914

Like Karl Peter Röhl, another of Kiel's "revolutionary expressionists", Drömmer studied In Weimar under the famous Austrian painter Albin Egger-Lienz. In 1914, Drömmer returned to Kiel where he worked in a studio at his parent's home. Still in a patriotic mood, it was probably there where he painted Masurenschlacht (above). The painting refers to the First Battle of the  Masurian Lakes between German and Russian troops (there is a brilliant novel by Aleksandr  Solzhenitsyn, August 1914, about this dramatic engagement). Drömmer was drafted in 1915, and served at the Western and Eastern front until 1918. He visualized his war experiences in his Kriegsfurienbilder (war fury paintings). 

 Peter Drömmer, The Rider (Yellow Incarnation), 1918

Under the impression of the Kiel mutiny, Drömmer painted in 1918 The Rider (above), a pathetic glorification of this important revolutionary event (I have previously written about Heinrich Ehmsen, another forgotten painter from Kiel, who produced a series of great paintings depicting the bloody aftermath of the failed German revolution). After the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919, Drömmer produced a series of "solidarity paintings", and an utterly expressive self-portray which he labeled The Revolutionary:

 Peter Drömmer, The Revolutionary, 1919

Together with the painters Karl Peter Röhl, Werner Lange, and Adolph Meyer - all of them born in Kiel - Drömmer joined the progressive artist group Expressionistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Kiel (Expressionistic Working Group Kiel), which had been  founded around 1916 by the writers Richard Blunck and Gerhard Ausleger. The group published the magazine Schöne Rarität which combined texts and graphics, and worked closely together with similar groups in Berlin and Dresden, headed by Georg Tappert and Conrad Felixmüller. 

 Peter Drömmer, War Memorial, 1921

Highlights of the group's activities in 1919 and 1920 were two exhibitions in the "bourgeois temple of art", Kunsthalle Kiel, with the intention to overcome Kiel's reactionary image as the principal Prussian navy base. The modest exhibition slogan was: Still nobody has put the sun in his buttonhole. There, Drömmer first showed his architectural phantasies, paintings between Gothic cathedral and prismatic abstraction symbolizing the social and cultural utopia of a classless society, and reminescent of similar ideas by Lyonel Feininger (Cathedral of Socialism, 1919), and Wenzel Hablik. 

Peter Drömmer, City, 1923

Until 1923, Drömmer worked as a freelance artist producing a series of visionary architectural and cityscape works which put him into contact with The Bauhau in Dessau. Between 1923 and 1933, he headed the promotion and corporate design department of the Junkers-Werke, also located in Dessau, and at that time Germany's largest aeroplane manufacturer. Hugo Junkers, the visionary company founder and leader was passionate in his support of The Bauhaus and from that, Junkers and Bauhaus people formed relationships. 

Revolutionary take-off in 1929: Peter Drömmer (right) with Hugo Junkers (3rd from right) in front of the Junkers G38 ("Flying House") after its maiden flight. At the time, the G38 was the world's largest terrestrial airplane. You can see that some of the passenger seats were located inside the wings. Only two of these monsters were built. Luft Hansa employed one of them for its regular services between Berlin and London via Amsterdam until 1939.

Professor Junkers who almost always shunned the spotlight even showed up on December 4, 1926 when Walter Gropius' splendid  Bauhaus Building was formally dedicated and reportedly stayed at the party past midnight. It wasn’t long before the impact of Drömmer was felt and seen by millions aboard Junkers aircraft: He created the stylized Flying Man, the elegant logo of the Junkers factory:

Peter  Drömmer's "Flying Man", Logo of the Junkers Aerospace Company, c. 1925

Responsible for Junker's corporate design, which he developped in close cooperation with The Bauhaus, Drömmer became quite influential at the company. Based upon his autonomous position, and with the support of Hugo Junkers, he was even able to hire some of his leftist friends from Kiel, among them Heinrich Ehmsen and Richard Blunck (who later wrote Hugo Junker's first biography). Hugo Junkers wanted modern, functional design not only for the exterior of his airplanes, but also in the interior appointments. As a result, starting in 1925, Bauhaus designer Marcel Breuer and Drömmer were able to develop their first steel tube furniture, which in a modified form was later installed in Junkers commercial airplanes. You can read more about this here (in German).

Peter Drömmer, Portrait Adolf Dethmann [Director of Junkers-Werke 1931-33], 1921

Almost nothing is known about Drömmer's following years. After Hitler came to power in 1933, he was arrested by the Gestapo, and, since 1935, had to work as a freelance designer (he designed the logo of the Deutz Company at that time). During the Second World War, he moved to Southern Germany, and, shortly after the war, suffered a complete physical and mental breakdown. Friedrich Peter Drömmer died in 1968 in Gräfeling, Bavaria.