Berlin полностью

Another artist who gave people—especially the people of Berlin—a sign of their fate was George Grosz. Like Beckmann, Grosz had moved to Berlin in the prewar years (1912) and flirted with expressionism. After the sleepy village of Stolp in Pomerania, where he had grown up, and Dresden, where he had attended art school, Berlin seemed exhilarating. As he later wrote: “In Berlin people were progressive . . . there was wonderful theater, a gigantic circus, cabarets and reviews. Beer palaces as big as railway concourses, wine palaces which occupied four floors, six-day [bicycle] races, futuristic exhibitions, international tango competitions.. .. That was Berlin when I arrived there.” There were also, of course, dozens of cafés in which a budding artist could while away his time, soaking up the local color. Grosz’s favorite was the café des Westens, known fondly as café Grossenwahn (café Grand Illusion). He stood out even among its eccentric clientele by dressing in theatrical checked suits, powdering his face, and carrying a skull-topped cane. It was there that he first revealed his prowess in performance art—by peeing a perfect profile of one of his friends on the bathroom wall.

Although Grosz loved Berlin for its racy glitter, he also appreciated its grime. His prewar drawings, based largely on the toilet graffiti he assiduously studied, exuded a blossoming misanthropy and misogyny, a partiality for Lustmord, the sex-murders in which men dispatched whores and wives in creatively grisly fashion. He was just reaching his stride as a chronicler of domestic mayhem when the war broke out. Unlike many of his fellow artists, he did not cheer this development, viewing the whole business as an expression of mass stupidity. He registered his revulsion in a drawing entitled “Pandemonium, August 1914,” which depicted prowar revelers as a howling pack of cretinous thugs. Nonetheless, he enlisted in November 1914, apparently convinced that the front could be no more brutal than the rear. He saw no action, though, for a sinus infection soon put him in a military hospital, and he was discharged as unfit for service in late 1915. Returning to Berlin, he found the city

cold and grey. The frenzied activity of the cabarets and bars contrasted un-nervingly with the dark, murky, and unheated places where people lived. The same soldiers who sang, danced and hung drunkenly on the arms of prostitutes could later be seen, ill-tempered, laden with parcels and still muddy from grave-digging duty, marching through the streets from one railway station to the next. How right Swedenborg was, I thought, when he said that Heaven and Hell exist here on earth side by side.

Grosz had always had an eye for the underside of life in Berlin, but now he seemed to see nothing but its stinking nether regions, as if it were the proverbial Asshole of the World. His representations of Germany’s capital in wartime seem like an amalgam of Hogarth, Bosch, and Brueghel. In 1917 he described one of his paintings, explicitly Hogarthian, as

a large picture of Hell—a Gin Lane of grotesque corpses and lunatics; there’s a lot going on—Old Nick himself is riding on the slanting coffin through the picture out towards the left; on the right a young man is throwing up, vomiting on the canvas all the illusions of youth. . . . A teeming multitude of possessed human beasts—I am totally convinced that this epoch is sailing on down to its own destruction—our sullied paradise. . . . Just think: wherever you step smells of shit.

Six months later Grosz (he had recently changed his name from Georg Gross to document his contempt for Germany) completed a canvas entitled Widmung an Oskar Panizza (Dedication to Oskar Panizza). Here the city was a riotous bedlam of flag-waving patriots, strutting generals, and grim priests, along with three grotesque figures representing alcoholism, syphilis, and plague.

One cannot escape the impression that Grosz took a certain perverse pleasure in the depravity he described, that he was proud to live in a place that smelled so thoroughly of shit. But his penchant for wallowing in the dreck did not diminish his work’s effectiveness as a searing commentary on life in the beleaguered German capital. In the end, no one was better than Grosz at representing Berlin as a hideous inversion of Germany’s vaunted “Peace of the Castle”: a place where instead of working harmoniously together people brayed patriotic slogans while fattening themselves at their neighbors’ expense, where everyone was fighting over everything from food rations and coal supplies to the anticipated privilege of pouring down boiling oil when the enemy began climbing the walls.