German Propaganda

[J. Herzog]

The site below has some anti-nazi images by the great photomontage artist
John Heartfield which are pretty amazing...
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>http://burn.ucsd.edu/heart.htm

>Germany, like all other countries during the First World War, was 
>gripped by a "patriotic" frenzy. Supporters of the German empire had 
>succeeded in creating a political environment where "God punish England" 
>became a common greeting on the street. Protesting this idiocy, the 
>young artist Helmut Herzfeld changed his name to John Heartfield.
>The young Heartfield was influenced by the soldiers on the western 
>front, who unable to get their reports passed military censors, turned 
>to pasting photographs together in order to relate the horror of the 
>battlefield to their friends and relatives back home. Inspired by this 
>as well as the collage of the cubists, Heartfield and his close friend 
>and fellow artist George Grosz, invented photomontage.
>
>During the twenties Heartfield created photomontage bookcovers for the 
>Malik Verlag, a Berlin publishing house which published the best of the 
>world's left-wing literature, from Upton Sinclair and Richard Wright to 
>Maxin Gorky. Heartfield worked for several radical newspapers and began 
>to contribute regularly to the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung or Workers 
>Illustrated Paper (AIZ).
>
>As Germany spiraled ever downward into the abyss of fascism, 
>Heartfield's art became increasingly acrid and aggressively political. 
>In unrelenting denunciations of the Nazis and their backers, his works 
>became ingrained in the mind and eye of a generation. Everyweek, a half 
>a million copies of AIZ would be distributed to anti-Fascists impatient 
>for the latest Heartfield photomontage. His art would fulfill what 
>Picasso once considered to be the purpose of painting, to create works 
>that would be the "instruments of war for attack and defense against the 
>enemy."
>
>The situation had become dire. There were mass arrests and executions, 
>the concentration camps were beginning to fill up. Recognizing the power 
>of Heartfield's art, the Nazis were determined to arrest him, but he 
>escaped to Prague in 1933, where he continued his artistic work against 
>the terror in his homeland. The Nazi regime protested his being able to 
>exhibit in exile and demanded his extradition, ultimately depriving him 
>of German citizenship. After the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia he made 
>a narrow escape to London, where he organized anti-Fascist groups, spoke 
>at political rallies and wrote on the relationship of art and politics.
(snip)

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 "I've got a funny feeling they got plastic in the afterlife"
                                                     Beck