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Persuading with the Unseen? Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung,
Photography, and German Communism's Iconophobia
Andrs Mario Zervign
Online publication date: 13 May 2010
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Photography, and German Communism's Iconophobia', Visual Resources, 26: 2, 147 164
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Visual Resources, Volume 26, Number 2, June 2010
ISSN 01973762 2010 Taylor & Francis
Persuading with the Unseen? Die Arbeiter-
Illustrierte-Zeitung, Photography, and German
Communisms Iconophobia
Andrs Mario Zervign
Taylor and Francis GVIR_A_475586.sgm 10.1080/01973761003750641 Visual Resources 0197-3762 (print)/0000-0000 (online) Original Article 2010 Taylor & Francis 26 2000000June 2010 AndresZervigon zervigon@rci.rutgers.edu
Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung [Workers Illustrated Magazine] (known as the AIZ) is widely
recognized as a highly successful and politically radical alternative to interwar Germanys
mainstream illustrated press. Far less acknowledged, however, is the extent to which the
magazines famously persuasive use of photography arose from deep misgivings about the
mediums accuracy. This article will take a fresh look at the AIZs 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
In the first week of August 1927, readers of the photo-besotted Arbeiter-Illustrierte-
Zeitung [Workers Illustrated Magazine] (known as the AIZ) found themselves
confronted with a stunning centerfold (Figure 1). To a certain extent, regular readers
of the periodical could have anticipated this large-format picture. The Workers
Illustrated Magazine was the biweekly and later weekly output of Willi Mnzenberg
(18891940), the man famous for operating as the Communist Internationals
Western Bureau propaganda minister. In this capacity for the Comintern, as it was
commonly called, Mnzenberg built a media empire of newspapers, book publish-
ing, and film distribution that, in a Rupert-Murdoch-like fashion, efficiently realized
his charge to disseminate radical propaganda to a broad audience of political sympa-
thizers.
1
But in addition to this efficiency and the sheer volume of his output,
Mnzenberg was also famous for his savvy and pioneering use of photography,
particularly in this flagship publication, the AIZ. Here, in 1927, that savvy was on full
display.
Figure 1 Thirteen Years of Hindenburg [13 Jahre Hindenburg]. Centerfold photo-essay in AIZ 6, no. 37 (28 September 1927): 89.
After flipping through this issues first few pages of photo-illustrated articles, read-
ers would have found themselves facing this large centerfold, drawn from press photo-
graphs and dynamic forms, titled Thirteen Years of Hindenburg. Even now as a
reader gazes right to left, then left to right, and then up and down, a narrative begins
to unfold that starts in horror and ends with menace. It had been thirteen years since
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148 Zervign
Germanys entry into World War I. It had also been two years since the former General
Paul von Hindenburg (18471934), who had led his country into that wars cata-
strophic defeat, won election as president of the new German Republic. And now,
transpiring before the readers eyes in layered photo fragments and a single postage
stamp, history was repeating itself, first as tragedy, and second as farce.
2
Perhaps just as impressive as this photomontages pictorial force is its stunning
novelty. Not long after this point in 1927, similarly inventive uses of photography
deluged the intertwined political and avant-garde fronts of Weimar-era Germany. One
year later, for example, Soviet artist Lazar El Lissitzky (18901941) astonished Central
European audiences with his photo-friezes for the 1928 Press Exhibition (Figure 2),
and he would only increase this optical impact with his work at the 1930 Hygiene
Exhibition.
3
But at this moment in the middle of 1927, such a dramatic staging of
photography was still only part of a subtly rising swell visible mostly on book covers
(Figure 3) and, of course, here in the AIZs pages. More astonishing, even, is that the
Workers Illustrated Magazine had already plied photographic acrobatics of this sort
for over two years (Figure 4). Since its inaugural issues in early 1925, the central and
double-sized spread, lying at the periodicals core, provided a mural-like restaging of
historyoften affirmativelyin elaborate arrangements of photographic fragments
which had largely been gathered from mainstream press photo agencies or, in some
cases, from Soviet press outlets. The magazine had also learned to use photos within
didactic and dynamic polygraphic amalgams, combining reports, charts, figures, and
texts (Figure 5).
Figure 2 Lazar El Lissitzky and Sergei Senkin (18941963), Detail from The Task of the Press is the Education of the Masses , from Catalog of the Soviet Pavilion at the International Pressa Exhibition (Cologne, MayOctober, 1928). Figure 3 John Heartfield, Platz! dem Arbeiter, 1924. Cover for the Malik Press yearbook. Figure 4 New Relationships, New People [Neue Verhltnisse, Neue Menschen]. Photo-essay in AIZ 4, no. 7 (July 1925): 89. Figure 5 (L): The Combative Church [Die streitbare Kirche]. Illustrated article in AIZ 6, no. 51 (21 December 1927): 45; (C & R): The International Steel Front [Die internationale Stahlfront]. Illustrated article in AIZ 5, no. 9 (12 May 1926): 2.
Figure 1 Thirteen Years of Hindenburg [13 Jahre Hindenburg]. Centerfold photo-essay in AIZ 6, no. 37 (28
September 1927): 89.
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Persuading with the Unseen? 149
Considering the extraordinary prescience of these photographic techniques, the
early innovations of the AIZ beg the following questions: How did this montage prac-
tice which seemingly arose with Berlins Dada movement in early 1919 (Figure 6)
migrate to the pages of this mass-circulation magazine?
4
What purpose did Mnzen-
berg feel this photographic practice served? And why was he one of the first agents of
this particularly aggressive use of the medium? By way of proposing answers to these
Figure 2 Lazar El Lissitzky and Sergei Senkin (18941963), Detail from The Task of the Press is the Education
of the Masses, from Catalog of the Soviet Pavilion at the International Pressa Exhibition (Cologne, MayOctober,
1928).
Figure 3 John Heartfield, Platz! dem Arbeiter, 1924. Cover for the Malik Press yearbook.
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150 Zervign
questions, I would suggest that these images were made by people who did not like
photographs. They were devised, that is, by editors who specifically wished to persuade
with the things that a given photograph had not shown, and that it had in many cases
purposefully occluded. In order to make photographs perform in this manner, the AIZ
Figure 4 New Relationships, New People [Neue Verhltnisse, Neue Menschen]. Photo-essay in AIZ 4, no. 7
(July 1925): 89.
Figure 5 (L): The Combative Church [Die streitbare Kirche]. Illustrated article in AIZ 6, no. 51 (21 December
1927): 45; (C & R): The International Steel Front [Die internationale Stahlfront]. Illustrated article in AIZ 5,
no. 9 (12 May 1926): 2.
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Persuading with the Unseen? 151
staff had to subject prints to the inventive procedures that led to these early forays in
avant-garde-cum-agitprop photomontage.
Figure 6 John Heartfield and George Grosz (18931959), Jedermann sein eigner Fussball [Everyone His Own Football], no. 1, 15 (February 1919). Title page.
I would also suggest that the ambivalence with photography that generated these
inventive practices was not Mnzenbergs alone. Instead, it was a hesitation that arose
through a broader iconophobia addling the German Communist Party, the KPD. The
leadership of this ultra-radical organization had earnestly read and reread Karl
Marxs foundational texts. And in these dense German-language discourses, they
perceived a sharp distinction between reality and appearance (Sein und Schein). This
division was particularly strong in Marxs proposal that an alluring world of glimmer-
ing commodities and their exchange, the social superstructure, overwhelmed and
obscured the actual work put into these goods, the labor-driven base.
5
The partys
leadership obsessively cultivated this dialectic of reality and appearance into a deep
distrust for all appearances. Weimars reality as a whole, they regularly insisted, was
Figure 6 John Heartfield and George Grosz (18931959), Jedermann sein eigner Fussball [Everyone His
Own Football], no. 1 (15 February 1919). Title page.
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152 Zervign
essentially chimerical, and only through adherence to the partys articles of faith could
one peel back the surface to see the true reality lying underneath. The AIZs inventive
practice may have arisen, therefore, when this near iconoclastic distrust for the surface
of appearance met photography, the medium most attentive to precisely that same
surface. Again, this would form the origin of what I wish to describe as photo ambiv-
alencea simultaneous suspicion for and attraction to the mediums documentary
capacity.
The Hindenburg composition in Figure 1 provides a useful case in point. Here
dynamic formal arrangements and careful juxtapositions seemingly force various
press photographs to reveal a deeply unsettling and invisible world they had initially
helped to conceal. These images were thereby forced to divulge the harsh political
reality lying beneath the alluring surface of military and governmental pomp in
wartime and interwar Germany. This was the parade of appearances to which the
selected photographs had originally been dedicated. Now, however, in the hands of
the AIZ photo editors, Hindenburgs proud visage, pressed onto a postage stamp, tips
rightward toward endless rows of graves which the caption announces are the dead of
Verdun, one of the First World Wars most lethal battles (21 February18 December
1916). As a reader gathers the relationship between this horizon of death and the
grimacing Hindenburg, steel-helmeted soldiers emerge from the distance at the right.
Quickly our gaze travels to the left as the widening photo-strip accommodates the
soldiers nearing proximity with larger dimensions, thereby suggesting the mens
surging movement leftward and forward toward us. At their greatest volume, these
soldiers strike the porcine head of Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff (1865
1937), the true power behind the Great Wars administration. His ample and self-
assured stature, in turn, dwarfs the wartime Hindenburg who stands before the
outsized quartermaster like a small Russian coupling doll, removed from its larger
double. Next to these figures, General Hindenburg appears again, this time following
the former Kaiser down a flight of steps like a toady, as the caption confirms.
6
Meanwhile, farther to the right, this same lickspittle of the German Republic bows
deeply before the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg at a horse race while, to the right, he
cozies up to Roman Catholic princes in place of the exiled Kaiser. As Hindenburgs
kowtowing moves forward in time, the size of these photos increase along a rising
diagonal. Therefore, through sequencing, juxtaposition, and dynamic shaping of
image forms, the reality veiled by the ceremony of appearancehere recorded with
the photographis dramatically unleashed.
Less noticeable in this reproduction yet key to the impact of its furiously unveiled
history is the pictures size, splashed across a centerfold surface nearly double
the dimension of todays American tabloids.
7
This aggressive lurching forward of
repressed history, therefore, operates as a photographic revelation taking place only
inches in front of the readers face.
Yet Thirteen Years of Hindenburg is only one example. From roughly the
middle of 1925 forward (Figure 7), the AIZ provided similar dramas again and again,
as in a more rectilinear composition from April 1926, warning of the Wests rapid
rearmament. Here, too, history unfolds as a menacing repetition, this time charted by
military weapons in action. As planes above shoot rightward, forward, and leftward,
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Persuading with the Unseen? 153
fleets of ships float at the ready, and colossal cannon battlements wield their steel
architecture with a menacing and elongated point. In this pictorial amalgam, wings
break from their pictorial frame and sharply clip their neighbor just as the cannons on
the right exceed their frame and seemingly protrude into the readers now militarized
space. Meanwhile, as mounted soldiers gallop forward at the bottom left, another
advance takes place at the compositions center through plumes of camouflaging
smoke. The more deadly meaning of these puffy columns is then spelled out clearly in
the phantom-like bust bearing a gas mask and hovering over these fields of glory.
Where these images once heralded the technical sophistication of military equipment
and the military prowess of soldiers, here they proffer the frightening specter of a grisly
war in the past and a future war likely on the horizon. Here lay the shocking violence
of war that Weimar-era citizens were quickly forgetting as glorifying photo albums of
the conflict washed over the countrys book market.
8
Figure 7 The Arms Race to Another World War [Das Wettrsten zu einem neuen Weltkrieg]. Photo-essay in AIZ 5, no. 8 (8 April 1926): 89.
Considering the originality and power of these photomontages, the question
remains: how had Mnzenberg and his editors come across or developed this sophis-
ticated photomontage practice? It was certainly new for the countrys illustrated press.
Indeed, at this early point, particularly in the first two years of the magazines run
(1925 and 1926), the photo-compositions found in its pages stood well beyond the
standard matrixes of image and reportage that determined an illustrated weeklys
layout. In such customary presentations (Figure 8), photographs generally had been
chosen for their first flush of meaning and, perhaps even more importantly, for their
immediate visual impact. As Kurt Korff (18761938), editor of the tremendously
Figure 7 The Arms Race to Another World War [Das Wettrsten zu einem neuen Weltkrieg]. Photo-essay
in AIZ 5, no. 8 (8 April 1926): 89.
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154 Zervign
popular Berliner Illustrirte [sic] Zeitung explained in 1927, his periodical adopted the
editorial principle that all events should be presented in pictures with an eye to the
visually dramatic and excluding everything that is visually uninteresting. Most
intriguing was his confession: It was not the importance of the material that deter-
mined the selection and acceptance of pictures, but solely the allure of the photo
itself.
9
Here was an outright celebration of the photographs potentially superficial
appeal, a dedication to the medium that ran directly opposite the AIZs own.
10
Figure 8 The Hamburg Derby Week [Die Hamburger Derbywoche]. Illustrated article in Die Hamburger-Illustrierte-Zeitung 5, no. 27 (1923): 1415.
Correspondingly, in a spread from Korffs sister mainstream paper, Die Hamburger
Illustrierte Zeitung (Figure 8), illustrated reports unfold almost cinematographically. In
this case, establishing shots of a derby, seen above and below at the left, set the scene,
while a close-up at the left-center provides the thematic focus. Meanwhile, a dramatic
cast of diegetic observers on the right allows one to imagine his or her presence at the
tony affair. Here was a titillating re-orchestration of the visible world built partly
around a text providing appropriate narrative. But, again, this was scarcely a model for
the AIZ that specifically abjured the first flush of a photographs meaning and also
wished to interrogate, not luxuriate in, the ordinary perception of reality. At most, this
was a model that the AIZ wished to challenge.
Perhaps a useful prototype lay in the East. Mnzenberg and his early editors had
the contacts that would have allowed them to import these uses of photography from
the Soviet Union. The AIZ, after all, was essentially bankrolled by the Comintern in
Moscow.
11
Indeed, Mnzenberg was only able to develop his publishing and film empire
through his personal relationship with Lenin, whom the German had met in Switzerland
Figure 8 The Hamburg Derby Week [Die Hamburger Derbywoche]. Illustrated article in Die Hamburger-
Illustrierte-Zeitung 5, no. 27 (1923): 1415.
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Persuading with the Unseen? 155
during the war. Moreover, Mnzenbergs earliest charge before inaugurating the AIZ
was to propagandize for Soviet Russia, as the country called itself at the time, and
help improve the young states image in Central Europe. This image had been deeply
impugned during Germanys own revolution of 1918/1919. In these early years of the
German Republic, well-funded right-wing organizations and weekly illustrated maga-
zines depicted Russia as a wellspring of dangerous anarchism and a self-immolating
nightmare of starvation and factional Bolshevik murder.
12
Many of these reports reso-
nated with German audiences in part because of Russias isolation during its civil war,
before the similarly ostracized Weimar Republic signed the Treaty of Rapallo with Russia
in 1922. Before the reestablishment of diplomatic and commercial contact that this
treaty allowed, there remained in particular a lack of photography from the young coun-
try, effectively rendering it a socialist Bermuda Triangle for the photo-hungry press of
early Weimar.
Mnzenbergs Russian-financed counter campaign came in the form of Soviet
Russia in Pictures and then Sickle and Hammer, successive illustrated periodicals that
preceded his AIZ.
13
In a 1924 issue of this second serial, an article on the new art and
the proletarian from around the world reproduced a soon-to-be famous photomon-
tage by Gustav Klucis (Figure 9), which depicts the then deceased Lenin speaking
through an abstracted megaphone. Such compositions could have offered a formative
Figure 9 Gustav Klucis (18951944), Photomontage illustration for Young Guard [Molodaia Gvardiia], 1924.
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156 Zervign
model for Mnzenberg, particularly because they combined the charge both to heroize
Lenin and to propagandize through photography.
14
Figure 9 Gustav Klucis (18951944), Photomontage illustrations for Young Guard [Molodaia Gvardiia], 1924.
Yet the more synthetic mural-like spreads that Mnzenberg and his staff soon
developed were quite distinct from such visually disjunctive and polygraphic works by
Klucis. These were images, after all, that were meant to jolt and activate vision with the
new optical experiences of Soviet modernity, not persuade with synthetic narratives.
Alexandre Rodchenko (18911956) ultimately did develop photo-histories in 1926
(Figure 10 and cover), yet these works were also far more disjunctive and composi-
tionally dispersed than the spreads running through the AIZ. Only in 1928 did
Russians such as Lissitzky develop an approach similar to that which had already
dominated the central pages of Mnzenbergs AIZ since 1925. And this is to say noth-
ing of the magazines other prescient pages, which used copious amounts of graphics,
darting text, tables of figures, andof coursephotographs to further unfold the
hidden subtleties of Weimars reality.
Figure 10 Alexandre Rodchenko, Poster from The History of the VKP(b) [All-Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik)] in Posters [Istoria VKP(b) v plakatakh], 19251926. Lithograph, 72 54.5 cm. A series of twenty-five posters commissioned by the Central Museum of the Revolution [Muzei revolutsii] and Komakademiia, Moscow.
Looking elsewhere, German photomontage artist John Heartfield (born Helmut
Herzfelde, 18911968) could have provided a model. His 1924 Fathers and Sons
Figure 10 Alexandre Rodchenko, Poster from The History of the VKP(b) [All-Russian Communist Party
(Bolshevik)] in Posters [Istoria VKP(b) v plakatakh], 19251926. Lithograph, 72 54.5 cm. A series of twenty-
five posters commissioned by the Central Museum of the Revolution [Muzei revolutsii] and Komakademiia,
Moscow.
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Persuading with the Unseen? 157
(Figure 11) offers a remarkable compression of Prussian militarisms historical impact
on German subjects. The compositions synthetic staging seems remarkably similar to
the AIZs own. Yet Heartfield merely displayed this 1924 poster in the Malik Verlag
bookshop shortly after the ten-year anniversary of the wars declaration, and he only
published it in the AIZ ten years after that in 1934, a year after the magazine retreated
to its Prague exile following Hitlers 1933 rise to power. Moreover, Heartfields part-
nership with Mnzenberg began in 1927 when the famous photomonteur designed a
special issue of Das neue Russland [The New Russia], which was a joint venture of
Mnzenbergs larger press apparatus, the Neuer deutsche Verlag, and the KPD. A year
later he began contributing book cover designs to the literature arm of the same Neuer
deutscher Verlag. Thereafter, starting with 1930, Heartfield would furnish the AIZ
with photomontages that brought this technique its greatest notoriety in German-
speaking countries. In short, he seems not to have collaborated directly with the AIZ
in its early years.
15
Figure 11 John Heartfield, Fathers and Sons, 1924. Poster prepared for display in the window of the Malik Verlag bookshop. Berlin, Akademie der Knste.
In fact, there seems to have been no artist on the AIZs editorial or layout staff, and
certainly not of Heartfields stature. A man named Hans Holm (18951981), trained
as a decorative painter, became the presss administrative chief in 1929, but this was
well after the AIZ had developed its unique approach to photomontage.
16
Hermann
Leupold (19001967), who in the same year of 1929 became the magazines official
photo editor, had risen to left-wing fame as a sports correspondent, not a visual
artist.
17
Mnzenberg himself was a master propagandist who apparently showered
close personal attention on Germanys left-wing avant-garde.
18
But he left most of the
Figure 11 John Heartfield, Fathers and Sons, 1924. Poster prepared for display in the window of the Malik
Verlag bookshop. Berlin, Akademie der Knste.
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158 Zervign
creative work at his press to others, including his own writing which reportedly
required substantial editing.
19
Could it be, therefore, that to a significant extent it was
the very ideological and historical conditions around the AIZ, rather than any artists,
that incubated the magazines unique approach to photography?
These would be precisely the same ideological and historical conditions that
produced the following statement:
From the centers of capitalist power to the farthest corners of the imperialist
world, imperialism oppresses the powerful masses of proletarians from
every country with the dictatorship of plutocratic finance capital. With
elementary violence, imperialism veils and deepens all the contradictions of
capitalist society [my emphasis].
20
These words animate a 1928 declaration by the Comintern, the same organization that
Mnzenbergs AIZ ultimately served. And in this statement one can clearly divine the
driving notion of an everyday reality veiled by appearancesappearances that hide an
all-too-telltale array of contradictions. These were the sort of themes that Mnzenberg
was specifically charged with illustrating through photography. Herein lay his funda-
mental challenge: to unveil and persuade with precisely those things that the medium
was generally made to obscure.
In the KPD itself, the notion of a deeply conflicted reality hidden by mere appear-
ances was even more fanatically pursued. A 1925 statement issued in support of its
electoral candidate for president began with the following pronouncement:
The governing coalition that unites the bourgeois parties of Germany and
that stands behind the powerfully influential circle of big capital, has chosen to
run Hindenburg as candidate for the office of president of the Republic, the
same Hindenburg who was the imperial field marshal in the last war, who
held the trust of Wilhelm, that fool by the grace of God [my emphasis].
21
Behind the governing coalition and its candidate, this statement declares, there stands
the cloaked reality of finance capital. Indeed, the fact that Hindenburg was running
for office at all, these words continued, openly pronounces that we live in an imperial
republic in which a mere democratic facade cloaks the dictatorship of a monarchist
haute bourgeoisie [my emphasis].
22
Again and again, the KPD made these sorts of pronouncements, continually
asserting that political reality and, indeed, visible reality itself, were chimerical.
Underneath this covering lay nefarious and self-interested forces that German
communism could convincingly unmask. Only the gritty actuality of unemployment
and poverty could speak for itself, yet it was the KPD that would carefully reveal the
hidden relationships between these conditions and those same self-cloaking forces of
capital by applying its dense party line discourses.
It was ultimately just these harsh points of ideological departure, I would
suggest, that forged a deep anxiety within German communism for images and
particularly for photography. The partys early experience with the medium had only
excited this disquiet. In 1919, shortly after the party officially came into being, the
German Revolution entered its most violent phase. Although the KPD had almost
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Persuading with the Unseen? 159
nothing to do with the initial violence, right-wing and mainstream magazines
insisted that it had. The KPD, these assertions maintained, fostered a maniacally
violent terrorism imported straight from Bolshevik Russia that swirled in a down-
ward death spiral of anarchism. Photographs in the Berliner Illustrirte [sic] seemingly
documented these points in early 1919 by repeatedly foregrounding the rubble and
chaos inaugurated by what appeared to be organized communist violence. By
contrast, the magazine reassuringly proffered the quiet and order imposed by
right-wing troops dispatched by the provisional majority-socialist government. The
KPD was deeply stung by this photo campaign and its larger implications. The
bourgeoisie including its social democratic lackeys, as a 1922 party statement
declared, clamor about the violent methods of the communists, about communist
terrorism. The complaint of the bourgeoisie about communist violence is a great
sham. The bourgeoisie itself was only brought to power through a series of bloody
revolutions . . . .
23
Communist violence, so this declaration asserts, was a mere
fiction proffered by the bourgeoisie as a facade to cloak that constituencys far graver
violence beneath. And to a significant degree, that cloak was woven with photo-
graphic emulsion. Through the remainder of the Weimar period, the KPD would
forever try to ameliorate the terror-infused image of communism, so heavily plied by
photographs in the illustrated weeklies.
24
And it used just this discourse of surface-
versus-reality to do so.
It may be, therefore, that this deep suspicion for images, reinforced by an assault
of seemingly misleading photographs, created a hostility toward mimesis that remark-
ably paralleled the historical avant-gardes own. Of course, the party roundly
condemned Berlins Dada movement and its photomontage, and it looked with great
suspicion on Laszlo Moholy-Nagys (18951946) photography, for instance. Both,
declared the party, constituted bourgeois decadence.
25
But this political institution
nonetheless shared with Dada and Moholy-Nagy the view that representation even in
its most modern conveyancesphotography and filmwas simply inadequate before
the actual conditions of modern reality. Heartfield, for example, later explained that
his route to photomontage came from his utter frustration with the photographic
propaganda disseminated throughout Germany during World War I. This sparked his
realization that you can lie to people with photos, really lie to them.
26
This admon-
ishment focusing most specifically on press photography parallels what Bertolt Brecht
(18981956) famously counseled in 1931:
The tremendous development of photojournalism [Bildreportage] has
scarcely yielded any truth about the worlds current conditions: in the hands
of the bourgeoisie, photography has become a terrible weapon against the
truth. The enormous amount of pictorial material that is spat out daily from
the printing press and that appears to bear the character of reality actually
serves just the obfuscation [Verdunkelungliterally: darkening] of facts.
The camera can lie just as the typewriter [Brechts emphasis].
27
Heartfields response to his earlier awakening to this same phenomenon became his
signature aesthetic practice: photomontage. This technique became his way to tease
from photos what is concealed behind things and appearances, as author Oskar
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160 Zervign
Maria Graf explained of his friends method in 1938.
28
In a similar vein, Moholy-Nagy
dismissed mimesis as the mere re-presentation of given relationships, a reproduction
that fails to stimulate the modern senses. Photography, therefore, had to reject tradi-
tional forms of representation and instead establish a new kind of seeing, a new kind
of visual power with such techniques as photograms and photomontage.
29
In Russia,
too, photographers such as Alexandre Rodchenko suggested that no single photo-
graph could adequately grasp or synthesize reality. Instead, the photo-series, photo-
montage, and radically divergent points of view had to be employed.
30
For both the
avant-garde and German communism, photography had to be updated if it were to be
used at all. In response, ideologues associated with workaday communism, just as
artists participating in the historical avant-garde, would ultimately have to redefine
the terms of photographic representation itself. They would have to devise new means
of photographic persuasion that bypassed mimesis in order to unmask the far more
authentic but unseen reality that photography consistently failed to record.
For those in Germany associated with the party, however, this realization took
time to mature. Initially, the KPD generally refused to print illustrations and photo-
graphs in its party publications. It simply preferred partly-line rants and the sort of
readymade left-wing jargon that Austrian poet Karl Kraus (18741936) dismissed as
Moskauderwelsch [Moscow gibberish]. Heartfields brother, Wieland Herzfelde (1896
1988), complained in 1921 that when artists pressed the KPD to include more images
in its daily Die rote Fahne, the editors retorted that this is not a comic sheet.
31
Images, it seems, were trivial at the very least and misleadingly alluring at worst. The
party only haltingly learned to accommodate pictures more comfortably in the first
years of the 1920s as propaganda needs in the socialist Russian motherland demanded
iconographic specificity. It had been just such demands that pushed Russian avant-
garde artists, oriented toward nonobjectivity, to incorporate photographic fragments
into their work, transforming an interest in facture and the material properties of art
into a dynamic marshalling of epoch-changing facts.
32
This need escalated with partic-
ular speed after Vladimir Lenins death in January of 1924 and the corresponding need
to heroizeeven immortalizethe Russian Revolutions leader.
33
It is likely around
this time that the Comintern placed tremendous pressure on the German Communist
Party to make its peace with images, particularly photography. But it was the AIZ that
stood uniquely well-disposed to dispense with this intensifying pictorial charge. The
magazine was sponsored by the same Comintern that may have now demanded a
surfeit of specifically realist and photographic propaganda, and its foreign backing
meant that the AIZ was partially autonomous of the KPD where German communist
iconophobia maintained its tightest hold. Helpful, too, was the fact that Mnzenberg
had already made the publication of photographic propaganda for Russia his primary
task after 1921. Therefore, turning his lens inward toward Germany, as developments
now demanded, was an easy task to realize.
Lastly, Mnzenberg had famously set himself the charge of appealing to less parti-
san fellow travelers on the left who might be won for full-throttle communism. He
therefore found himself less restrained by German communisms deepest iconophobic
anxieties. Yet, quite critically, he and his staff had to figure out a way to use the photo-
graph not for its first flush of meaning, but as an instrument to teach a large public
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Persuading with the Unseen? 161
sphere that reality and its representation were rarely what they first appeared to be,
exactly as the KPD party line insisted. It is here, therefore, that the conflicting imper-
atives of photography and communist dogma might have encouraged a magazine
staff, untrained in cutting-edge art, to realize one of Weimar-era Germanys most
inventive uses of the medium. These editors and their layout workforce would be, in
other words, quite nearly in the same position as Germanys avant-garde artists (and
perhaps those of Russia) who themselves de-skilled their highly trained aesthetic prac-
tices to produce similar forms of photomontage.
It may very well have been these ideological and photographic conditions that
positioned the AIZ to play a magnificently important role in disseminating its own
cutting-edge visual culture to a mass audience of German speakers that numbered
around 280,000 in the late 1920s and early 30s.
34
This magazine may not have been
the product of artists interested in sharing their ideas and art, but of politicians keen
to forge the most persuasive and alluring political propaganda possible. Despite this
seemingly less aesthetic point of departure, the AIZ paralleled the historical avant-
gardes goal of teaching audiences how to perceive reality with different eyes. It sought,
in other words, the challenging task of agitating and persuading with the unseen. As
I hope to have demonstrated here, this fascinating advent may have arisen not because
avant-garde artists joined the magazines staff, but because the avant-garde and
German communism shared fundamental doubts about the nature of visible reality
andin turnthe viability of mimesis. With this in mind, might it be necessary to
historicize the avant-garde in a subtly different manner? Should we perhaps take more
literally the notion that modern citizens could be both consumers and producers of
their own pictorial culture, no matter what their training in the visual arts? Could it be
that the vagaries of condition and ideology shape pictorial advents just as much as a
sharply trained creativity? If so, then photography as a relatively accessible image
procedure may have indeed played the role in the aesthetic democratization that
thinkers such as Moholy-Nagy, Walter Benjamin (18921940), and Sergei Tretiakov
(18921937) hoped it would.
ANDRS MARIO ZERVIGN received his doctorate in art history from Harvard Univer-
sity in 2000 and is currently assistant professor of art history at Rutgers University. He
specializes in the history of photography and concentrates his scholarship on the interac-
tion between photographs, film, and traditional fine art images. His work generally focuses
upon moments in history when media prove inadequate to their task of representing the
visual. Zervign recently guest-curated an exhibition of the work of German photomon-
tage artist John Heartfield at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (FebruaryJune
2006). His book on the artists career in the years 19141930 is currently under review. He
has published articles in New German Critique and the Australia & New Zealand Journal of
Art while his other projects include a history of Weimar-era German photography and the
editing of the translation of Sergei Tretiakovs 1936 book John Heartfield: A Monograph.
1 The literature by and on Mnzenberg 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 Mnzenberg, Die dritte Front. Aufzeichnungen aus 15
Jahren proletarischer Jugendbewegung (Berlin: Neuer deutscher Verlag, 1930); Babette
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162 Zervign
Gross, Willi Mnzenberg. Eine politische Biographie (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-
Anstalt, 1967); Harald Wessel, Mnzenbergs Ende. Ein deutscher Kommunist im
Widerstand gegen Hitler und Stalin (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1991); and Sean McMeekin,
Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Mnzenberg, Moscows Secret Propa-
ganda Tsar in the West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). For a meticu-
lous and brilliant case study of the manner in which Mnzenberg operated, see Anson
Rabinbach, Staging Antifascism: The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler
Terror, New German Critique 35, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 97126. On the AIZ, see
Gabriele Ricke, Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung. Gegenmodell zur brgerlichen Illustri-
erten (Hannover: Internationalismus Verlag, 1974); Peter Gorsen, ed., sthetik und
Kommunikation. Beitrge zur politischen Erziehung [special issue on the AIZ and
Der Arbeiter Fotograf] 3, no. 10 (1973); and Heinz Willmann, Geschichte der Arbeiter-
Illustrierten Zeitung 19211938 (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 Lissitzkys
Exhibition Designs: The Influence of His Work in Germany, Italy, and the United
States, 19231943, in Margarita Tupitsyn, ed., El Lissitzky. Beyond the Abstract
Cabinet: Photography, Design, Collaboration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1999), 5264.
4 See my book manuscript, The Agitated Image: John Heartfield, Photomontage, and
the German Avant-Garde 19141930, 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 wars 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): 4984.
9 Kurt Korf, Die Berliner Illustrirte, in 50 Jahre Ullstein 18771927 (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), 64647. 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.
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Persuading with the Unseen? 163
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 Moscows Comintern Archive and essen-
tially demonstrated that Mnzenbergs entire empire was financed through this
Russian organization. See McMeekin, Red Millionaire, particularly his chapter
Follow the Money, 16373
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): 1640.
13 Not long after its inauguration, the AIZ chose to backdate its founding year from 1925
to 1921, the date when Mnzenbergs Sowjetrussland im Bild [Soviet Russia in
Pictures] first rolled off the presses. Therefore, 1931, for example, became the AIZs
tenth anniversary rather than its sixth.
14 On this charge, see Margarita Tupitsyn, Lenins Death and the Birth of Political
Photomontage, in The Soviet Photograph 19241937 (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1996), 934.
15 For more on Fathers and Sons and Heartfields relationship with Mnzenberg, 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 Mrz and Gertrud Heartfield, eds., John Heartfield. Der
Schnitt entlang der Zeit. Selbstzeugnisse. Erinnnerungen. Interpretationen (Dresden:
Verlag der Kunst, 1981), 56566.
17 See Oliver Kersten, Die Naturfreundebewegung in der Region Berlin-Brandenburg
19081989/90. Kontinuitten und Brche. (Berlin: Naturfreunde-Verlag, 2007).
18 For more on Mnzernbergs early contact with the German avant-garde, see
Cristina Cuevas-Wolf, Montage as a Weapon: The Tactical Alliance between
Willi Mnzenberg and John Heartfield, New German Critique 107 (Summer
2009): 185205.
19 See the chapter Red Eminence in Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing: An
Autobiography (London: Collins, 1954), 20521.
20 Das Programm der kommunistischen Internationale (1928), in Hermann Weber,
ed., Der deutsche Kommunismus. Dokumente 19151945 (Cologne and Berlin:
Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1963), 46.
21 Thlmann Prsidentschaftskandidat der KPD, in Weber, Der deutsche
Kommunismus, 148.
22 Thlmann Prsidentschaftskandidat 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 Weimars
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 rubricalbeit
far more sparselyin the late 1920s with the consequences most keenly realized in
John Heartfields contributions.
25 On the first, see Barbara McCloskey, George Grosz and the Communist Party. Art and
Radicalism in Crisis, 19181936 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). On
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164 Zervign
the second, see Der Arbeiter-Fotograf, Mnzenbergs monthly periodical, intended for
groups of worker photographers.
26 From an interview of Heartfield by Bengt Dahlbck, curator of the Moderna
Museet in Stockholm, 1967. Excerpts of transcript printed in Mrz and Heartfield,
Der Schnitt, 464.
27 Bertolt Brecht on the tenth-anniversary of Mnzenbergs 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), 8385.
30 See Rodchenkos various translated statements in Phillips, Photography in the Modern
Era.
31 Wieland Herzfelde, Gesellschaft, Knstler 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): 95131.
33 See Tupitsyn, Lenins Death, 934.
34 The circulation numbers of the AIZ are as difficult to discern as the people sitting on
the editorial staff. Mnzenberg claimed that it reached its highest level of 400,000
500,000 in 1931: Willi Mnzenberg, Solidiritt. Zehn Jahre internationale Arbeiterhilfe
19211931 (Berlin: Neuer deutscher Verlag, 1931), 86. But Karl Retzlaw, who worked
at Mnzenbergs 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 ArbeitersAnfnge der proletarischen Bildpresse, in
Gorsen, sthetik und Kommunikation, 37.
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