Lesbian Magazines in Weimar Berlin

 

Berlin in the 1920s was ablaze with sexual and gender freedom. Magazines at newsstands boasted covers featuring people who were transgender and clad scantily. Their headlines touted stories on “Homosexual Women and the Upcoming Legislative Elections,” and offered, on occasion, homoerotic fiction inside its pages.

Publications like Die Freundin (The Girlfriend); Frauenliebe (Women Love, which later became Garçonne); and Das 3. Geschlecht (The Third Sex, which included writers who might identify as transgender today), found dedicated audiences who read their takes on culture and nightlife as well as the social and political issues of the day. The relaxed censorship rules under the Weimar Republic enabled gay women writers to establish themselves professionally while also giving them an opportunity to legitimize an identity that only a few years later would be under threat.

 “Reading stories about other queer women was such a powerful way that women came to terms with their own queerness,” Laurie Marhoefer, a professor of history at the University of Washington, told me. “That was super important for women more than for men because men would just have more opportunities to find other queer people.” Marhoefer, who first learned of these publications as a graduate student in Berlin in the 2000s, is part of a growing group of academics focusing on this oft-forgotten moment in German history.

Such research is part of a wider interest in the Weimar Republic, bolstered by recent TV shows like Transparent (which drew connections between the 1920s and modern-day queer identity) and the gritty Babylon Berlin, whose characters include a female sex worker who spends her days as a detective. Benjamin Tallis described the appeal of these depictions in New Perspectives: “The visceral thrill of watching 1920s Berlin as a creative, decadent socio-cultural mecca, beset by suffering, and haunted by myriad ghosts yet alive with possibility, is tempered by the knowledge of the political abyss that awaits.”

Although these fictional tales tend to romanticize this interwar period, the primary source documents that miraculously survived the period of the Third Reich and subsequent and repressive Cold War years provide a richer and more complicated picture.

There were some twenty-five to thirty queer publications in Berlin between 1919 and 1933, most of which published around eight pages of articles on a bi-weekly basis. Of these, at least six were specifically oriented toward lesbians. What made them unique is the space they made for queer women, who had traditionally been marginalized on account of both gender and sexuality, to grapple with their role in a rapidly changing society. (The concept of the “new,” albeit straight, woman in the Weimar Republic has been researched broadly, including by Rüdiger Graf in Central European History, who writes that it reflected a crisis of masculinity following defeat in the First World War as well fears over the country’s future when women were putting off getting married and having children.)

In these interwar years in Germany, queer and transgender identity became more accepted, in large part thanks to the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish doctor whose Institut für Sexualwissenschaft focused on issues of gender, sex, and sexuality. At the same time, women in Germany were making strides toward greater independence and equity; they gained the right to vote in 1918, and feminist organizations like Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine cultivated space for women in public spheres, encouraging their advancement in politics. As Sara Ann Sewell writes in the journal Central European History, the German Communist Party created the Red Women and Girls’ League in 1925 to attract more women and working-class people, particularly through organizing factory workers.

More generally, German women were becoming increasingly empowered. Queer people—including women—rallied around the abolishment of contemporary sodomy laws. This struggle “created a wider climate of publication, activism, and social organization that was much more embracing of different types of queer and trans lives,” according to Katie Sutton, an associate professor of German and gender studies at the Australian National University.

Like Marhoefer, Sutton came upon the Weimar-era lesbian publications in Berlin and was surprised that there wasn’t more engagement with these magazines or with the queer history of the Weimar Republic more broadly on the part of academics in the English-speaking world. Exceptions included the notable work of historian Claudia Schoppmann and her 1996 Days of Masquerade and Heike Schader’s 2004 Virile, Vamps, und wilde Veilchen (Virility, Vamps, and Wild Violets). The latter focused on the queer tropes that proliferated in lesbian magazine fiction of the time, and their creation, according to Sutton, of “codes of lesbian desire and lesbian eroticism” through color, flora, smells, and body parts, notably mouths, lips, hands, and breasts.

For its part, magazine fiction of the time challenged some of the restrictions of class and race in its love stories. A 1932 issue of Die Freundin, for instance, includes a story about a relationship between the German Töpsdrill and the Moroccan Benorina. Exoticizing of the “other” was common; Sutton points to another piece of fiction published in Ledige Frauen (Single Women) in 1928 about Helga, a German coffee importer, who falls for Nuela, a servant from Java. Notwithstanding the white, sometimes racist perspectives of the narrators, such stories offered compelling renderings of women-centered utopias.

Outside of fantasy, these publications also created a space for readers to assert themselves in the real world through personal ads and event listings. There included cream puff eating contests, ladies and trans balls, and lake excursions on paddle steamers. In fact, aspects of lesbian culture also seeped into the mainstream, particularly when it came to fashion, with a rise in the popularity of short haircuts, straight skirts, and pantsuits. There was little difference between the imagery in mainstream fashion magazines and the masculinized aesthetic eroticized in the queer ones. The “hint of queerness” in the mainstream, Sutton said, was “sexy and fascinating, but also a bit scary and potentially off putting.” A popular element in lesbian publications, the monocle was similarly charged, and, Sutton says, “a queerly coded, quite masculine symbol of owning the gaze.”

Such sartorial choices were in keeping with debates in the lesbian magazines of the time around the “extent that masculinity might be seen as hierarchically superior to that of the feminine lesbian women,” according to Sutton. Moreover, these debates foreshadowed the butch/femme debates of the 1980s and 1990s and the border wars of the late ‘90s and early 2000s.

Style was particularly significant for trans women and men who in the Weimar Republic defined themselves with a variety of terms: both as transvestites and masculine women who wore men’s clothes but identified as women. Trans people were given space in both their own magazines and even in some of the lesbian ones, highlighting a sense of cross-identity camaraderie. Die Freundin had a regular trans supplement highlighting these voices.

 In a 1929 issue, a writer named Elly R criticized the treatment of trans people in mainstream media, referencing sensational coverage of men wearing their wives’ wedding dresses. “Everywhere in nature we find transitional forms, in the physical and chemical bodies, in the plants and the animals,” she wrote. “Everywhere one form passes into another, and everywhere there is a connection. Nowhere in nature is there a delimited, fixed type. Is it only in man that this transition should be missing? As there is no fixed form in nature, a strict separation between the sexes is also impossible.”

These magazines were resilient, a testament to the strength of the communities they served. Still, they faced challenges. The 1926 Harmful Publications Act was intended to impose moral censorship on the widespread pulp literature sold at kiosks and newsstands, including the queer publications, which often featured nude photographs.

The Catholic and Protestant Churches as well as public morality organizations and conservative politicians led the fight against what they called “trash and filth literature.” As Klaus Petersen explains in a German Studies Review article, the list of materials, which included at least seventy works on sexology and “filth literature,” could still be sold, just not to those under age eighteen. While “the instrument was blunt and [its] impact minimal,” the restriction was boosted by members of religious and youth groups that checked up on newsstands to see what material was visible or advertised to children. (This is not a far cry from the Nazi book burnings that would occur just a few years later.) But the law also spurred a counter-campaign by writers, publishers, intellectuals, and leftist political activists who objected to these limitations, as Petersen explains.

“This coalition of protest groups against infringements of the freedom of expression considered the Index a simplistic and entirely ineffective means to avoid an honest discussion of the fast change in social attitudes and moral values and campaigned against it as an unconstitutional instrument of suppression.”

Despite their relative progressivism, these publications also represented a rather narrow, bourgeois segment of the German population. Even if women had greater access to education and publishing opportunities, the women who enjoyed this greater access were largely urban elites. Little if no space was given to proletarian struggles. “Middle-class values of respectability and citizenship shaped the political agenda, with contributors drawing on the powerful language of national inclusion in formulating their demands of legal and social acceptance,” wrote Sutton in an article in German Studies Review.

It’s also important to note that whatever sexual liberation the LGBTQ+ community enjoyed was at the discretion of the state, whose goal was to control its members. This was seen in the Transvestitenscheine (“transvestite certificates”) handed out by the German police to protect against the arrest of those cross-dressing in public. Between 1908-1933, dozens of such passes were distributed. They also guarded against arrests for sodomy law violations and played a role in a 1927 battle over legalizing prostitution, largely aimed at preventing the spread of venereal diseases.

That said, the plight of sex workers was largely excluded from consideration in the publications in question, and mentions of their readers’ privilege were few and far between. Still, a 1929 Die Freunden article cautioned readers: “Don’t go to your entertainments while thousands of our sisters mourn their lives in gloomy despair.”

More notably, these magazines gave precious little foresight into what was to come in Germany: the attempted extermination of all who did not fit the Aryan ideal. That, of course, included lesbians, some of whom perhaps took steps to save their own skin. Ruth Roellig, who wrote for Frauenliebe and published Berlins lesbische Frauen (Berlin’s Lesbian Women) in 1928, a first-of-its-kind travel guide to queer Berlin, published a second book in 1937. Soldaten, Tod, Tänzerin (Soldiers, Death, Dancer), an anti-Semitic screed, proved to be Roellig’s last book, though she lived until 1969. Selli Engler, a lesbian editor who founded the magazine Die BIF – Blätter Idealer Frauenfreundschaften (Papers on Ideal Women Friendships), wrote Heil Hitler, a play she sent directly to the führer.

As feminist and queer activism grew in Germany in the 1970s, so too did interest in the Weimar period. In 1973, Homosexual Action West Berlin began to collect flyers, posters, and press releases in an effort to create a comprehensive archive of lesbian history. The group eventually morphed into Spinnboden, Europe’s largest and oldest lesbian archive, with more than 50 thousand items in its holdings, magazines among them. Katja Koblitz, who runs the archive, says the existence of these lesbian periodicals is invaluable.

“These magazines were in one part a sign of the blossoming and of the richness of the lesbian subculture in these days,” she said. “Reading these magazines was a form of reassurance: Here we are, we exist.”

Publishing Queer Berlin. By  Hannah Steinkopf-Frank.   JSTOR Daily, June 7, 2023.

 

Each year, Lesbian Visibility Day on April 26 gives prominence to an often unseen minority. In Weimar Berlin, before the Nazis seized power, writer Ruth Roellig put same-sex female desire on the map for the first time.

It was 1928 and Berlin was undergoing a revolution. Poverty, insecurity and political polarization were everywhere. Yet at the same time, the German capital was enjoying a taste of freedom that had once seemed utopian. The storm of fascism had not arrived yet, and women and sexual minorities were eager to claim their place in society.

"The Weimar Republic was, especially in Berlin, in eruption," Sabine Balke, managing director of the Digital German Women's Archive, told DW. "Everything was possible."

Or so it seemed. Even though female emancipation was making day-to-day strides, crossdressers could still be arrested on the streets, and homosexual relations were criminalized.

Lesbians, often considered the most invisible group within what we today call the LGBTQ community, also had a glimpse of how the world could be if its rules were different. What we know about that today is to a great extent due to the work of a woman who drew the map of same-sex female love and desire in that era.

Heady times

Ruth Roellig (1878-1969) began writing just after finishing school. Hers was a male, straight world, yet she soon managed to publish fiction and travel journals. But it was the Weimar Republic and the relative press freedom that came with it that paved the way for some of her most remarkable works, at least from a contemporary perspective.

"For lesbians, the more relaxed censorship under the Republic was important. Many new lesbian magazines appeared," historian Laurie Marhoefer told DW. Garçonne, Die Freundin or Frauenliebe were some of the publications that gave homosexual and bisexual women a place not just to tell their own stories but also to discover safe spaces and leisure activities that did not force them to hide their sexual orientation.

 "One could go to the clubs and meet similar people, other lesbian women, to dance, to make music," Balke says. It was the time when cabaret queen Claire Waldoff's - also openly homosexual - rebel voice was played in the radios all over the country.

Pioneering work and historic document

Through her articles in Frauenliebe, Roellig became a prominent figure in the lesbian scene of Weimar Berlin. Publishing those pieces also meant outing herself, but it did not seem to be a great danger at the time. As it often does, progress must have felt irreversible.

Nonetheless, it wasn't until 1928 that her greatest contribution to the lesbian history in Germany was published. In Berlins lesbische Frauen (Berlin's Lesbian Women), she extensively depicted the German capital's network of bars, cafés and clubs aimed at this public. It was much more than a pioneering queer city guide.

"It's very important because it's evidence of what was there," Sabine Balke underlines. Also the head of Spinnboden, Berlin's lesbian archive, Balke is aware of the historical importance of such a document: "In the 70s, when women started to fight for a more open sexuality or against the abortion ban, they did not know that there had been something similar in the 1920s."

The backlash

The rise of the Nazis to power in 1933 also meant the end of this brief period of sexual emancipation. The magazines and venues that in the previous decade had become so important for sexual minorities were shut down. Roellig's life also changed forever. "She had exposed herself," says Balke. "She could not write as a lesbian woman anymore. She had to quickly make sure that everything disappeared."

Yet it was not the end of her writing career. Ruth Roellig did publish another novel in 1937: Soldaten, Tod, Tänzerin ("Soldiers, Death, Dancer"). With its anti-Semitic content, this book left a disturbing legacy. Within a few years, around six million Jews would be killed in the Holocaust. Roellig never wrote again.

Historian Laurie Marhoefer insists on the need to underline the controversial part of this pioneer in lesbian activism: "Every time we mention her, we also have to consider this part of her legacy. She was no 'bystander' in the Nazi period."

No black and white

Balke agrees, but also thinks it's important to go beyond that. "It was a question of survival. That's why we today cannot just say: She was a Nazi." After having openly maintained a lifestyle hated by the regime, Ruth Roellig was in complete danger. "But it could also be that she found that all right and was genuinely anti-Semitic," she adds.

"I think this shows us that people do not have only one story, and that they're not only good, or only bad" – a concept that, as Balke points out, Hannah Arendt underscored in her work.

 Whether Roellig was truly anti-Semitic or not is a question we cannot answer nowadays, Balke believes: "It's very hard to judge." By the time she died in Berlin, in 1969, she no longer held openly anti-Semitic views nor was she openly lesbian. What remain are her books and articles, the controversial legacy of the woman who made lesbians visible in Berlin decades before the Stonewall riots and the first gay pride marches.

At the time, however, Roellig was probably unaware of the importance of Berlins lesbische Frauen, Balke believes. The book was lost for many years and re-edited in the 1970s under the title Lila Nächte (Purple Nights). And for Balke, thanks to that book, "Ruth Roellig lives in our history."

 The woman who gave birth to lesbian Berlin. By Enrique Anarte. Deutsche Welle,  April 26, 2019. 

I came across these magazines when researching the topic of my most recent written assessment. By now, I have carried an intense fascination with the sexual socio-political climate of the Weimar Republic for a couple of years. On the course ‘Reassembling Modernism: Artists’ Networks in Europe 1909-1960’ as an undergraduate, I was introduced to Weimar culture when we examined the Neue Frau in the Berlin of the 1920s. It was a text by Maria Makela entitled ‘New women, new men, new objectivity’, however, that truly peaked my interest in the subject.

This year, I revisited the Neue Frau and explored her myth and ideological potential whilst considering her as a phenomenon of cosmopolitanism—in relation to class, gender and violence in the city. Makela’s essay was my starting point, and these magazines gave me an example of how the Neue Frau’s multi-faceted identity was utilised to develop a progressive symbol of gender subversion. The Neue Frau/neue frauen is the German adaptation of the New Woman. The New Woman was a female figure, a new gender type, who emerged in modern society towards the end of the nineteenth century, becoming a popularised construct in the first half of the twentieth century.
 
 

The Neue Frau was a fashionable woman who adopted traditionally heteronormative, ‘masculine’ traits within her dress identity to disassociate herself from the pre-WWI woman. Her image epitomised modern femininity, but it also effectively mirrored how interwar Germany perceived itself to be under cultural threat from the masculinisation of a ‘New’ generation of emancipated women. In the pages of queer publications, however, the Neue Frau’s image was represented without ridicule or cynicism. It was interesting to reconfigure my own perception of her image after months of aligning it with the caricatured parody that male, Neue Sachlichkeit artists had painted her to be.

In the case of the women depicted in Liebende Frauen (1927-1930), the tensions felt nationwide between opposing genders are made redundant. At the time of the1929/30 issue, Liebende Frauen was one of two lesbian magazines in Berlin; the other, the more widely-known Die Freundin (The Girlfriend: Journal for Ideal Friendship between Women) had been in circulation since 1924. Art historian Heike Schader notes that Liebende Frauen is most likely a reprint of the magazine Frauenliebe (Women Love); which in turn was renamed Garçonne in 1930.

In the above image, a cover dated 1929, the female subject sports a bubikopf—a haircut strongly associated with the Neue Frau, which translates directly to ‘boy’s head’ and was reconfigured into numerous variations, such as the shortened and smoothed ‘Eton crop’, similar to that of Louise Brooks’ Lulu in Pandora’s Box. The overlapping strings of pearl necklaces that decorate her neck, the draped cut of her neckline and way in which her face is coquettishly turned from the camera’s gaze tells the reader that this Neue Frau, like Brooks’ Lulu—will not apologise for claiming her own sexuality. This cover presents allure and a conscious play on the provocation of desires, celebrating the figure of the New Woman by virtue of her dress and demeanour.

These covers are truly wonderful examples of how the New Woman, specifically the homosexual New Woman, found alternative means of how her image could be disseminated in popular culture via ways less damaging to her personhood. Each cover is a portal into an important history for women, and they each contribute to the Neue Frau as a social construct: one that was repeatedly well-documented until the Weimar Republic’s fall. 

To see more of these wonderful covers, go to the Spinnboden Lesbenarchiv und Bibliothek, Berlin’s online archives: www.meta-katalog.eu

Additionally, there are lots of many interesting texts covering the Neue Frau’s image, such as:
Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture by Katherina von Ankum
Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation by Ute Frevert
Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses in German Culture, 1918-1933 by Mila Ganeva
The New Woman International by Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco
Visions of the “Neue Frau”: Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany by Marsha Meskimmon
The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany by Katie Sutton
 
Sources
Maria Makela, “New Women, New Men, New Objectivity” in New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1919-1933
Heike Schader, ‘Liebende Frauen’
Katie Sutton, ‘The Masculinisation of Woman’ in The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany
 
In her image: the documentation of the Neue Frau in German Weimar-era lesbian magazines. By Kathryn Reed. The Courtauld,  February 26, 2019. 

Before World War I, Berlin was known for its large male homosexual subculture. After the war, however, the sudden emergence of a visible lesbian subculture was unprecedented and remarkable because, previously, lesbianism had been thought to be rare. The development of modern mass culture coincided with the rise of homosexual subculture, facilitating the formation of lesbian identities. However, as will be suggested first, these identities also had their roots in medical discourse and the homosexual emancipation movement, which looked to medical research to support its demands for homosexual rights. Also, lesbian clubs and nightclubs, as well as lesbian magazines, were closely linked to the homosexual emancipation movement, and they were the sites which brought women together and which facilitated lesbian identification. Therefore, this paper will explore the production of these identities by examining the subcultural network and, in particular, the lesbian magazine Die Freundin, as a mass cultural publication in which science, mass culture, and subculture intersected. This will highlight the constructed, unstable and ambiguous nature of Weimar lesbian identities, which were varied and overlapping.

Scholars of sexual cultures and gender relations in Germany have tended to overlook Weimar lesbian identities, confining their interest to the subculture itself, rather than to the role it played in the development and elaboration of homosexual identities more generally. For example, in relation to lesbians, the works of Lillian Faderman and Brigitte Eriksson, Ilse Kokula, Adele Meyer and Claudia Schoppmann have provided valuable documentation of the Imperial, Weimar and Nazi periods. More specifically, both Richard Dyer and Ruby Rich have examined homosexual cinema in Weimar,while Katharina Vogel and Petra Schlierkamp have documented the history of the lesbian magazines Die Freundin and Garçonne respectively. One recent scholar, Christiane von Langerke, has investigated the numerous historical designations for lesbians in order to prevent these women from being subsumed under the male-identified label of ‘homosexual.’  All of this work is invaluable as a foundation for further scholarship.

However, as Patrice Petro’s study of female spectatorship and textual practice in Weimar Germany has powerfully illustrated, gender is of paramount importance to representation and ways of looking. That is, Petro has shown “the existence of a female spectator, and the function of representation for mobilizing her desires and unconscious fantasies.” Like the women’s magazines in Petro’s study, lesbian magazines such as Die Freundin made a direct address to women, articulating their desires and offering them ‘modern’ new conceptions – and choices – for gender roles, sexuality, relationships and, hence, possibilities for identification.

This suggests that a study which builds on the inroads made by Gudrun Schwarz and Geertje Mak, and specifically considers the nature and production of lesbian sexual identities, is needed. Both von Lengerke and Faderman have illuminated the changes and continuities of woman-centred relationships across time, but such an approach has a tendency to imply an essential lesbian identity, which is constant and, despite the variations they discuss, well-defined. For example, Faderman encapsulates lesbian behaviour under a single rubric of “romantic friendships” that spans countries and centuries. In contrast, this paper will situate lesbianism within a specific historical and cultural context. In the same way that Denise Riley has disrupted the idea of ‘woman’ as a discrete category,[ this paper will highlight the constructed and unstable nature of Weimar lesbian identities.

In the late nineteenth century, as scientists increasingly turned their attention to sexuality, a growing body of medical literature was produced. In 1886, Richard Krafft-Ebing’s book, Psycopathia Sexualis, asserted that homosexuality was an abnormal congenital manifestation. The physicians Magnus Hirschfeld and Iwan Bloch both expanded on this discourse, arguing that true homosexuals were biologically predisposed to members of the same sex. Conversely, they believed that pseudohomosexuals – usually women – were the creation of external circumstances, such as the absence of male sexual partners in prisons and schools.

As European sexologists described and explained other sexual ‘anomalies,’ the list of medical identifications grew. As one Weimar transvestite explained, “when sexual science began to concern itself with the sexual orientation of humans, it searched for words with which to designate the different variations. That is how names like sadist, masochist, fetishist, exhibitionist, bisexual, transvestite, homosexual, and so on originated.” Similarly, the labels for lesbians expanded to include ‘masculine lesbian,’ ‘feminine lesbian,’ ‘transvestite,’ ‘Mannweib’ (literally, ‘Man-Woman’ but suggesting a masculine woman), ‘Männin’ (‘Butch’), and ‘gleichgeschlechtlichliebende Frau’ (‘same-sex loving woman’). The variety of names for women suggests the instability of lesbian identity and the expansion of the discourse.

Medical ‘science’ was integral to conceptions of sexuality and underpinned the homosexual emancipation movement. Hirschfeld in particular argued that since homosexuality was inborn, it was natural and should not be persecuted, and in 1897 he founded Germany’s first homosexual organization, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. After the First World War, Hirschfeld founded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin (1919) and, in 1923, the League for Human Rights, a group dedicated to homosexual emancipation.

At the same time, the manifold growth of mass culture, particularly in Berlin, brought homosexuals together and facilitated identification. There were mutually reinforcing relationships between the organized homosexual rights movement, the large number of public leisure and entertainment venues (like clubs and nightclubs), and the extensive publications of the homosexual press. Indeed, one reader of Die Freundin, a male transvestite, stated that after he read the books of Iwan Bloch and Otto Weininger, as well as others, he had the greatest longing to go to Berlin and spend time with people who were his like.

 A 1931 Berlin travel guide highlighting the city’s sexual attractions claimed that there were at least 160 bars and clubs for male and female homosexuals. With the (temporary) abolition of censorship, films dealing directly with male and female homosexuality were shown in Berlin’s 300 cinemas. A large quantity of lesbian popular fiction, newspapers, and magazines also appeared. The German Friendship Association added community-building activities to this entertainment scene, and to the political activities of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, by holding dances and weekly meetings and publishing a weekly newspaper, Die Freundschaft.

The first guide to the homosexual club scene, Ruth Roellig’s Berlins lesbische Frauen (Berlin’s Lesbian Women), was published in 1928 with a foreword by Magnus Hirschfeld. This guide purported to educate and enlighten homosexuals and the public,but it also served to alert and connect women to the wider lesbian community. One woman recalled that Berlin’s Toppkeller Club was “so exciting that women from all walks of life came, even actresses. It was always so crowded, and on Fridays you could hardly get in at all.”

One of the most popular ladies’ clubs was the Damenklub Violetta, led by Lotte Hahm, a well-known figure in the homosexual rights movement .The Violetta hosted many dances, such as the “Calling-Card Ladies’ Ball” (Damenball mit Saalpost) and the “Dance Roulette” (Roulette-Tanz), and also auto tours of the Spreewald and fashion shows for masculine women and transvestites. One of the most popular activities was the “Moonlight Steamship Party” (Mondschein-Dampferpartie), in which a ship carried passengers from Spittelmarkt to Mugelsee, where they disembarked at the Inselhotel, enjoyed orchestra, cabaret, and tombola, and danced until 5 or 6 a.m., after which they returned to the ship for a quick sunrise photograph before sailing back.

Such clubs could also be found in other German-speaking cities, including Zurich, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Leipzig and Breslau, and the League for Human Rights encouraged women across Germany, Switzerland and Austria to start and join clubs in their own towns and regions. This helped to expand the subculture and the homosexual rights movement itself.

In creating a sense of community through common experience, clubs informally politicized lesbians, linking the social scene to the homosexual rights movement. For instance, at Violetta, women sang “Das Lila-Lied” (The Purple Song), which declared lesbians’ difference and eventual liberation.Lotte Hahm also reminded women that “Not only dance and social events can bring you equality, but rather struggle is also necessary.”

Lesbian magazines, of which there were at least five, were available at newsstands or by subscription, and together they circulated to more than one million readers across the German-speaking countries. The magazines’ centrality in facilitating the growth of subculture and identification can be illustrated by examining the most popular publication, Die Freundin (The Girlfriend), which appeared monthly, and later weekly, with some interruptions from 1924 to March 1933.

Die Freundin was closely affiliated with the League for Human Rights through the group’s chairman, Friedrich Radszuweit, who also published the magazine. Given this overlap of the publisher’s interests, it is not surprising that through its editorials, Die Freundin politicized homosexuals by highlighting the League’s concerns, such as the repeal of Paragraph 175, the law criminalizing male homosexuality. Die Freundin accepted only advertisements from members of the League for Human Rights, and it exhorted its readers to patronize only those clubs sanctioned by the publication. The need for club owners to hold League memberships also undoubtedly benefited the homosexual rights movement by increasing the organization’s size.

Die Freundin also played a significant role in fostering the growth of the subculture by publicizing homosexual films, clubs, nightclubs and books available from the Berlin publishing house Radszuweit, which published both non-fiction, including medical books on sexuality,and fictional works, such as Grete von Urbanitzki’s Der wilde Garten (The Wild Garden), Anne Elisabeth Weirauch’s trilogy Der Skorpion, the German translation of Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness (Quell der Einsamkeit) and even novels that presented a less flattering image of lesbians, such as Alfred Döblin’s Die beiden Freundinnen und ihr Giftmord (The Two Girlfriends and their Murder by Poisoning). These kinds of publications facilitated lesbian self-identification. As one lonely and isolated woman living in a small town explained, she “had only one joy..., the book The Scorpion. I love it. With it, I feel that I belong to you, that no one can tear the innate feeling of happiness out of the heart.”

Clearly, physical and psychological isolation were major problems for both lesbians and transvestites. Personal advertisements helped overcome this, bringing together readers from as far away as Amsterdam. “Nuremberg. Lonely woman seeks same, educated but modern thinking girlfriend.”

In the impersonal city, Die Freundin could also be used to signal one’s identity to others ‘in the know.’ Several articles in the magazine depicted scenarios in which women reading or purchasing the magazine met like-minded women who had noted their choice of reading material. For example, one story told how a transvestite reading Die Freundin in a café attracted the notice of another woman. Another story began with two strangers meeting accidentally at the newspaper vendor where they had both just purchased Die Freundin.

Through Die Freundin lesbians discovered other women who “yearned for a great love,” but who, as the fictional character Lotte explained, “could not like any man.” Lesbians found both capable and career-minded women who reflected their own aspirations, as well as women who embodied the ‘feminine’ ideals to the extent that they were comfortable only in the company of other women. If women felt comfortable in men’s clothing, or if they embraced the modern styles, they also found like-minded women in the magazine – and the magazine gave them a name. One lesbian, Charlotte Falk, explained, “Through my indifference, through the style of my clothes, which are sporty but completely normal, my shoes, I... became a Mannweib... I had absolutely no idea that so many women love as I do...”

If the small advertisement section of Die Freundin provided a way for women (and men) in even the remotest German-speaking towns to find and make contact with one another and to psychologically, if not literally, expand their community, the readers of Die Freundin also developed a real sense of fellowship. A letter sent to Die Freundin about another reader’s contribution on the issue of cross-dressing and marriage began warmly with “Dear sister Willina!” and closed with “It would be a great pleasure for me to hear more from you and also from your wife herself. Warmest greetings. Your Georgette.”

 Yet it was not only a sense of fellowship that facilitated identification. Die Freundin’s representations and image were instrumental in the production of sexual identities. However, few articles in Die Freundin programmatically outlined female homosexual identities. Instead, they were elaborated implicitly through its fiction, non-fiction and/or medical articles.

In a classification scheme that invoked the heterosexual gender paradigm, lesbians were often differentiated as either ‘virile’ or ‘feminine.’ As with their heterosexual counterparts, these traits were thought to be manifested both physically and psychologically.The feminine woman was “echt weiblich” (“genuinely feminine”). She was dependent and had a clingy character, but was also a very skilled “housewife,” whereas the ‘virile’ woman had no affinity for housework, was independent and career-minded. This kind of male-female complementarity was seen and reinforced at the Klub Monbijou in the Bell-Dance, in which only the ‘young lads’ or ‘Bubis’ would hold bells, which they used to ring for their ‘gals’ or ‘Mädis.’

However, in the magazine’s fiction, the virile ‘type’ tended to be more common, probably owing to the notion that lesbianism was an inverted sexuality in which a woman was masculinized. For example, one novel serialized in Die Freundin described the lesbian Olga as a cigar-smoker and as having dreams in which she rode horses in the dark of night . In addition:

    “She felt herself to be a man and believed that she felt better in such surroundings. Even her rooms appeared to be furnished according to a rather masculine taste. She had a drawing room with an escritoire. She possessed a smoking room and a gaming room. Her bedroom gave the impression of being austere and cold. One found no vanity table or attractive Biedermeier armchair of the kind that women usually love. The walls were decorated with female figures, portraits, nude studies – the only objects to lend the rooms a certain warmth.”

Lesbian and transvestite “marriages” also reflected male-female role division, and most male transvestites seemed to accept and regard housework as a logical extension of their gender role. Indeed, an affinity for either a masculine or a feminine profession seemed to validate what was believed to be one’s “true” gender.

Visible manifestations of lesbian sexual identities were also to be found on the covers of Die Freundin. Most often, the images featured women as objects of sexual desire, which, indeed, they were. Very early on, readers expressed their sexual longings by requesting more nude photos. Over time these depictions expanded to include exotic ‘orientals’ , ‘natural’ women , New Women , masculine women (who were usually celebrities), and transvestites . Although photographs of bare-breasted women were the norm and many images were reused – not just once or twice, but many times over the years – the array of representations suggests that the lesbian community was comprised of a great variety of women and that over time lesbian identities became increasingly complex.

Other representations, particularly those associated with “modern” women, also interested Die Freundin’s readers. For instance, the incidence of smoking among women around the world was discussed in the article “Rauchende Frauen” (“Smoking Women”).] There were also articles on a possible tax on the Bubikopf (pageboy hairstyle) and on the British Lords’ opinions of short hair. Meinungsaustausch Fragen (“Exchange-of-opinion Questions”) even asked for readers’ views on the Bubikopf.  In one response, Irene von Behlau came out strongly in support of the Bubikopf and urged all lesbian women to embrace the fashion.

As this accounting suggests, readers actively participated in shaping their own identities. They sent Die Freundin literary contributions, as well as their personal experiences, insights and opinions on “Questions of the Day” (“Tagesfragen”) and “Fashion Questions” (“Modefragen”). Regarding the latter, a transvestite named Ellen van Derk complained that men who did not want to shave their beards should not wear women’s clothing and that, moreover, too many transvestites wore jewellery with artificial pearls.

I will return to the issue of transvestites, but what should be clear at this point is that lesbians were not part of a singular, discrete, uniform category, whose identity was the expression of a singular and innately fixed disposition. As will be shown below, their identities were varied, ambiguous and contested. Clearly, one reader was aware of the constructed nature of sexual identities when s/he asserted that “the norm is not something given by nature, but rather is determined by us, created from our own minds.”

Lesbians reappropriated and rearticulated their identities from medical and popular discourses and countered the dominant discourses that labelled them “sick” and “unnatural.” For example, Die Freundin’s editors asserted homosexual morality by pointing to heterosexual depravity as the cause of the high incidence of children and youth infected with venereal disease by their fathers or through prostitution.

Lesbians also referred to the philosopher and theorist Otto Weininger’s unfortunately but indicatively influential book Sex and Character and invoked the existence of a sexual continuum to assert that their sexuality (which was linked to gender) was a natural variation, a transitional form (“Übergangsform”) found between the masculine and feminine poles of gender. Contributors to Die Freundin argued that: “Nowhere in nature does a fixed and demarcated type exist... Just as there is no firmly delimited form in nature, a strict distinction between the sexes can be ruled out.”The concept of ‘natural variation’ confirmed lesbians’ belief that their identity was an essential trait rather than an acquired vice. They refuted accusations of degeneracy by arguing that homosexuals had existed throughout history, from Sappho, to Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

Die Freundin’s inclusion of male and heterosexual transvestites, along with lesbian transvestites, who really combined two identities, complicates the question of lesbian identification. Pictures and regular articles about male transvestites reinforced the message that the community of “Girlfriends” was not limited to the female sex but also included those with female “natures.” Even after the Human Rights League created a special magazine for them, transvestites continued to read, write to, and advertise in Die Freundin, suggesting their identification with lesbians.

Geertje Mak has shown that within the discourse of sexual science elaborated by Magnus Hirschfeld in Die Transvestiten (Transvestites) (1910), a man’s internal drive to wear female clothes was considered a natural sexual variation that did not automatically make him a homosexual. Mak argues that women were not included in this concept of transvestitism and, as a consequence, their sexuality remained linked to their gender, defining them as “inverted.” However, the editors of Die Freundin applied the concept of natural sexual variation broadly to both males and females. This explains why the line between transvestitism and lesbianism was so unclear. The magazine actually offered two competing discourses: the concept of the “inverted, masculine woman”  and the notion of “sexual variation in nature” . While much of the magazine’s fiction and photographs offered up images of ‘masculine’ women such as “Charly and Boy,” it did this alongside of articles that insisted that: “There are only bisexual variations.”

The ambiguity was compounded by the fact that the definition of a transvestite seems itself to have been in a state of flux. The term ‘the third sex’ was used by Hirschfeld until about 1910 to denote all homosexuals, but after the war, Radszuweit Publishing Company used it in the book Das 3. Geschlecht (The Third Sex) to refer specifically to transvestites. Still, men and women moved fluidly back and forth between the two identities of ‘transvestite’ and ‘lesbian.’ The ambiguity – indeed, the overlap – of lesbian and transvestite identities is illustrated by one reader of Die Freundin, Hans Irmgard Markus, who wrote that where she lived she had few opportunities to meet a girlfriend and that she had been forced by her uncle to marry a man. Gradually, however, Markus achieved her husband’s conversion into a woman, by inducing him to dress in women’s clothing and perform housework. She, on the other hand, had assumed a male role, dressing as a man and becoming a city councillor. In this way, Markus testified, their relationship became “like one that usually occurs between girlfriends.” Yet this configuration, which was in effect a simple reversal of heterosexual gender roles, indicates the ambiguities in a system that tried to transcend the traditional gender paradigm (one that fixed sexuality and behaviour to gender), but which was nevertheless beholden to it.

In theory, what constituted a ‘true’ lesbian was a congenital disposition, but Die Freundin also implicitly made the distinction that, unlike pseudo-homosexuals, true lesbians were indifferent to, or had an aversion to, men. One story, “How Hannelore Fell in Love with a Man,” vigorously illustrates this belief. This short story describes a romantic tryst that occurred one afternoon between Hannelore and a ‘man’ whom she met by chance at a café. The author emphasizes the confusion felt by Hannelore, whose indifference and distaste for men was normally so great that even taking a seat near one was to be avoided. When eventually the new boyfriend removed ‘his’ male disguise to reveal that ‘he’ was, in fact, a woman, the message was clear: true lesbians are only ever attracted to other women. Moreover, the story suggests that this attraction was such a strongly ingrained biological affinity that it transcended the deceptive outward appearance of male clothing.

Bisexuality, on the other hand, was another matter. Despite its characterization in Die Freundin as a variation of transvestitism, it was largely treated as a form of pseudo-homosexuality. Indeed, after a reader complained to the publication that one could not speak freely in it on the topic of bisexuality without encountering disapproval, another reader pointedly replied that a person could not serve two masters and that such women, i.e. bisexuals, were not true homosexuals.

More delicately, Roellig labelled prostitutes “a special category” because she believed they only entered homosexual relationships to try to find happiness and salvage what remained of their humanity. Although congenital homosexuality was in doubt in the case of prostitutes, as with bisexuality, having sexual relationships with men called the authenticity of a homosexual identity into question.

 The question of prostitution also reflects the mutability of lesbian identification. In 1924 considerable concern was expressed in Die Freundin over the problem of Mädchenhandel (white female slavery)  Over time, however, this changed. Editorials defensively asserted the moral rectitude of homosexuals and distanced lesbians from prostitution, thereby suggesting once again the shifting nature of sexual identities.

In conclusion, the homosexual cultural network, exemplified by Die Freundin, was the site at which science, subculture, and mass culture intersected to produce new and constantly shifting identities. The variety of often conflicting discourses present within the subculture also produced overlapping and sometimes contradictory identities. Nevertheless, if the behaviours and desires of women (and men) did not conform to gender norms , homosexual subculture linked them to a new community and new possibilities for identification. As one reader stated: “As so often [happens] in the world, it was through chance that I came into the possession of Die Freundin and Das 3. Geschlecht. It was through them that I received valuable enlightenment about my own nature and also learned that I am not, by any means, unique in the world.”

 

“I feel that I belong to you”: Subculture, Die Freundin and Lesbian Identities in Weimar Germany. By Angeles Espinaco-Virseda.  York University, April 1, 2004.

Under the Nazi regime, there was no official law or policy prohibiting sexual relations between women. Nonetheless, beginning in 1933, the Nazi regime harassed and destroyed lesbian communities and networks that had developed during the Weimar Republic (1918–1933). This created a climate of restriction and fear for many lesbians.

Lesbians under the Nazi Regime.  United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

At Last : A George Grosz Museum in Berlin

 

“The ducks had to go,” dealer and collector Juerg Judin told me, pointing at the small, now duck-free pond he had installed in the backyard of his old Berlin residence, a repurposed gas station from the 1950s. His former private home, which also became the habitat of a few exotic geese, ducks, and birds, has been recently handed over to a nonprofit association that will run an institution there over the next five years, the new Kleine Grosz Museum.
 
This privately funded venue, which opens to the public on Saturday, May 14, will be dedicated to the Berlin-born political artist George Grosz, a fixture of modern art history in Germany.
 
The name, which translates to the Little Grosz Museum, is a pun—Grosz sounds like the German word for big. It’s also a cheeky reference to the intimacy of the space, which is spread across two small levels of the revamped Shell station.
 
Despite the size, the modernist location has been expertly outfitted to provide museum-standard climate conditions. “That’s a must if we ever want to exhibit loans from institutional collections,” curator Pay Matthias Karstens said. (That’s also the reason why the exotic fauna had to be relocated.) Until the museum establishes a two-year backlog of climate control with which to approach institutions to obtain loans, the works on view will all stem from private collections—including Judin’s—and from the holdings of the Grosz estate.
 
Through painting and drawing, Grosz, who was active in the early 1900s until his death in 1959, captured the social realities of Berlin without euphemism. His caricature-like figuration has established him as one of the German capital’s most well-known artists from that last century; and yet, the Kleine Grosz Museum is the first institution dedicated to his oeuvre. This private initiative probably would not have happened if it weren’t for Ralph Jentsch, the managing director of the estate and the editor of Grosz’s forthcoming catalogue raisonné. The museum’s future beyond its initial five-year run will depend on its success in drawing in visitors and accruing financial support from additional funders.
 
Georg Before George; Gross Before Grosz

 
The museum’s ground floor houses a permanent collection that provides a chronological overview of the artist’s career, highlighting major periods of work during the Weimar years as well as his time in the U.S. It outlines a narrative that not only follows the sharp-eyed artist and draftsman’s sensibilities but also the horrors of the first half of the 20th century and the economic boom of the post-war years.
 
In 1928, Grosz created the stage set and costume design for Erwin Piscator’s staging of the dark comedic story Soldat Schwejk, and the watercolors he created as studies are a wonderful highlight of the exhibition in Berlin. Like much of the museum, it conjures a Berliner story: The German theater director’s famed Piscator-Bühne was just around the corner from where the museum is located, in the neighborhood of Schöneberg.
 
The upper level of the museum is dedicated to changing exhibitions; there will be two per year, ten in total for the museum’s already-secured duration. The first one, titled “Gross Before Grosz,” focuses on the artist’s very early years: already as a teenager, the young country boy named Georg Ehrenfried Gross exhibited a great talent as an illustrator. After the current show closes in September, the second exhibition set to open in November will explore Grosz’s 1922 travels to Soviet Russia where he met Lenin.
 
A selection of drawings from the current exhibition dating to 1904, when the artist was only 11 years old, are the first works visitors will encounter here. One drawing on a torn piece of paper features four anthropomorphized frogs. “You see very early on that someone is trying to master the technique, who has the ambition to become a real artist,” Karstens, the show curator, said. “Many of the motifs we see later are already present here.”
 
This early work is prominently signed G. Gross. Key to the artist’s ambition was to be recognizable, successful, and a brand—to do that, his birth name was simply too common in Germany at the time. In 1906, aged only 13, he already began experimenting with signing his creations under the name Grosz. It is only much later on during World War I that the artist became politicized and radicalized, developing anti-German sentiments that prompted him to change his first name as well to its anglicized version, George.
 
Grosz, the Great Observer
 
Alongside works created as a student in Dresden, the temporary exhibition also includes works from his early years in Berlin. Interestingly, these show a certain fear of the big city and its colorful characters. Human figures suddenly begin to appear in works such as Nächtlicher Überfall (translated: nighttime robbery) and Selbstmord (the German world for suicide), or a drawing of a derelict bar (all from 1912), which show scenes of violence and despair. “Moving in the city by day and night, he drew what he saw,” Jentsch said. “Grosz is not a caricaturist, he’s an observer.”
 
The artist’s canny observations, which Grosz is most well-known for, continue in the permanent exhibition on the ground level. Works in the chronological show include output from the 1950s, after Grosz and his family had moved back to Germany from the U.S. Never having reached the financial success he had hoped for on the other side of the Atlantic, a self-portrait shows the artist in his studio, bitter and defeated. The canvases around him are in disarray, and are punctured by a bean-shaped hollow that also features on the artist’s forehead. In his later years, George Grosz, one of the artists most closely associated with Berlin’s history, considered himself a failure.
 
Despite his tumultuous career, what he depicted ended up being occasionally prophetic. A watercolor from 1934, done when Grosz was already living in the U.S., called the Menace, shows Hitler as a murderous monster. “Created three years before Guernica,” Jentsch pointed out, “the work already anticipates what Hitler would soon become responsible for.”
 
A Former Gas Station in Berlin Has Been Revamped Into a Museum Dedicated to the Celebrated Weimar Artist George Grosz. By Hili Perlson. ArtNet News, May 11, 2022.

Filled with lustful murderers, dishevelled streetwalkers and hollow-eyed wartime amputees, George Grosz’s jagged sketches of Berlin street life during the Weimar Republic never sought to capture the German metropolis at its most beautiful.
 
Only fitting, then, that Berlin’s first museum dedicated solely to its master chronicler should not be in the gilded neoclassical halls of the German capital’s Museum Island but a seedier part of the city in which the satirist and Dada artist was born and died.
 
The Little Grosz Museum opens on Friday inside a former petrol station on the dusty Bülowstraße thoroughfare, overlooked by a noisy elevated metro track, and a stone’s throw from the German capital’s red-light strip around Nollendorfplatz.
 
It began as a privately funded initiative started seven years ago by Ralph Jentsch, the managing director of Grosz’s estate. It does not have its own collection but will present works loaned from other galleries over two compact gallery floors.
 
“George Grosz is an artist of worldwide renown, yet there is no museum on this globe that permanently shows more than two of his paintings,” Jentsch told the Guardian.
 
This is in part because his work was spread far and wide in the tumult of 1920s and 30s Germany, and in some cases destroyed. Subject to several court cases during the Weimar years – over defamation of the German army, blasphemy and “attacks on public morals” – about 300 of Grosz’s works were seized, then sold or burned as degenerate art by the Nazis after he emigrated to the US in 1933. “Plans for a Grosz museum were long hampered by that dispersal,” said Jentsch.
 
The small museum, which cannot hold more than 60 people at a time, serves up a reminder of the relevance of an uncompromising artist politicised by the horrors of war – while also correcting some of the myths about its hero along the way. In spite of his pacifist inclinations, Grosz volunteered to join the army in November 1914, in the hope of preempting conscription and avoiding being sent to the front.
 
One commonly told story, fed in part by the artist’s own vague descriptions of his wartime activity, is that the violence he witnessed in the first world war fired up the violent imagination of his later works and alienated him so radically from Germany that he decided to anglicise his name from Gross to Grosz to make a political statement.
 
The curators of “Please write Grosz instead of Gross”, the museum’s first exhibition, say that tells only half the story. After tracking down Grosz’s military medical records, they say it is likely the dadaist never experienced any frontline action first-hand. While his regiment fought trench warfare in Flanders in February 1915, Grosz was recovering at Berlin’s Charité hospital, having fallen ill with sinusitis on the way to the front. How closely to the front the artist was when he collected impressions that would result in a series of four sketches with titles such as Battlefield, is unclear.
 
When being redrafted into the reserve army two years later, Grosz had a mental breakdown, with officers finding him naked from the waist down on his first night. After the then 23-year-old tried to attack a medical officer with a knife, he was sent to a specialist hospital for patients with nervous system disorders where he spent the rest of the war.
 
“Grosz saw the flipside of wartime heroism, but mainly from within hospitals, in the company of those spat out by the front,” said Pay Karstens, the exhibition’s curator.

 
Digging through Grosz’s archive of early works, Karstens discovered that the artist’s change of surname took place years before the war, making a purely political motive unlikely. Born Georg Ehrenfried Gross, he signed his first work “Grosz” in 1906, aged 13, when an anti-nationalist sentiment was unlikely to have been held as a principled belief.
 
“Grosz wanted to become a successful illustrator for satirical magazines at the time, and he needed a brand name,” said Karstens. “Gross was too much of an everyday name for that.”
 
The anglicisation of his first name, by contrast, was a deliberately provocative act, at a time when other artists and poets celebrated their hatred of the wartime enemy, England.
 
“After witnessing this year of war, I am no longer such a strong friend of my fatherland,” he wrote to a friend in June 1916. Pictures such as 1917’s German Men, piled with grotesquely fat men in uniforms, show an artist thoroughly disgusted with his country of birth. From 1917, the letters he sent from his hospital bed were signed “George Grosz”.
 
Unlike his Dada jester-in-arms Helmut Herzfelde, who anglicised his name to John Heartfield around the same time, Grosz never sought to change his name officially by deed poll after the end of the war.
 
Instead he voted with his feet and left for New York, and later Huntington, shortly after the Nazi party emerged as the biggest political force in the 1932 elections. One of the planned exhibitions at the Little Grosz Museum will focus on the works he produced in the US, a country in which he felt enough at home to opt for naturalisation, but where his new work was often ignored in favour of his sketches of Weimar Berlin.
 
Other shows will focus on Grosz’s pioneering photo collages and his 1922 trip to the Soviet Union, which included an audience with Lenin.
 
With a total of 10 six-month temporary exhibitions planned, the museum’s lifespan is likely to be limited to five years. “If Berlin still wants to have a Grosz museum after that, it needs to cough up,” said Juerg Judin, the Swiss art collector who turned the converted Shell petrol station into his home 10 years ago and has temporarily offered it to the curators.
 
 
George Grosz: museum dedicated to city’s master chronicler opens in Berlin.  By Philip Oltermann. The Guardian. May 11, 2022. 

Tankstelle wird Grosz-Museum In der Berliner Bülowstraße kann man bald einen besonderen Kraftstoff tanken, nämlich Kunst. Eine Tankstelle wird dort zu einem Museum für Werke des Malers George Grosz.

Tankstelle wird Grosz-Museum.  Von Christhard Läpple. ZDF, May 5, 2022. 

1  He was a master of disguise
 
George Grosz was born Georg Gross in Berlin in 1893. No accepted explanation has been given as to why, in his twenties, he changed his name, other than that he loved the art of disguise. In public he often pretended to be a cowboy or a Dutch businessman, while in private he occasionally greeted first-time visitors to his home by saying he was Herr Grosz’s butler and apologising for his master’s absence. He also adopted a range of pseudonyms throughout his life: from Count Bessler-Orffyre and George Leboeuf to Dr William King Thomas.
 
2 No matter how many times Grosz left Berlin, something kept drawing him back
 
Grosz was born in Berlin but grew up in Stolp, a small town in Eastern Pomerania, not far from the Baltic. He returned to Berlin in 1910 to study at the School of Arts and Crafts, becoming a regular at the Café des Westens where the German Expressionists gathered. Arguably an even more important artistic influence on the young Grosz, however, was Futurism. The dynamic angularity of the jostling forms in his two breakthrough paintings, The Funeral: Dedicated to Oskar Panizza (1917-18) and Germany, A Winter's Tale (1918), shows a clear debt to the movement.

 
3  He joined the army twice during the First World War — and twice was discharged
 
War broke out while Grosz was still a student. He reluctantly signed up for the Deustches Heer in November 1914, only to be invalided out of the conflict with a sinus infection months later. Recalled to the front in 1917, he soon suffered a breakdown and was admitted to a field hospital, and then a military mental asylum, where doctors declared him unfit for service on grounds of insanity. The experience prompted a number of rapidly sketched drawings — featuring, in the artist's own words, ‘the beastly faces of comrades, arrogant officers and lecherous nurses’.

 
Gefährliche Straße  (above) captures Berlin’s descent into moral and physical chaos. It is one of a series of around 20 paintings — roughly half of which are now lost — that Grosz made of the city at night between spring 1917 and November 1918.
 
Peace would be signed with the Allies on 11 November 1918, two days after Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated as Emperor. In the wake of Germany’s defeat, Grosz said he ‘was disappointed not because the war had been lost, but because the people had suffered for so long without heeding the few voices raised against the mass slaughter’.
 
 
4  He became a key figure of the Dada movement
 
Starting in Zurich, before spreading to other European cities as war came to an end, Dada was rooted in disbelief that a conflict as absurdly long and devastating as World War I could have been fought in the name of progress. Dadaists concluded that the world had gone mad and that received values must be turned on their head.
 
In a defeated, demoralised Berlin, this included provocative stage performances — such as an obscene tap-dance routine with which Grosz made a name for himself. He also helped pioneer the technique of photomontage, which involved assembling fragments of photographs to create a synthetic new image — a reflection of the fractured Europe that was being unconvincingly pieced back together in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles.

 
5   Grosz was the pre-eminent chronicler of Berlin in the Twenties
 
Between the collapse of Germany's monarchy in 1918 and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933, Berlin gained a reputation for being the bawdiest, most licentious city in Europe. Its cabaret acts were outrageously explicit, and its brothels were infamous. It is said that cocaine could be bought in the city's nightclubs for half the price of a decent dinner. ‘Barbarism prevailed... the times were mad,’ wrote Grosz in his autobiography, A Little Yes and a Big No. His best-known works are visions of the seamy side of German metropolitan life at this time, which, along with Christopher Isherwood's ‘Berlin’ stories about Mr Norris and Sally Bowles, have indelibly shaped our picture of what the German capital was like in the Weimar years. They give off a heavy whiff of social decadence and political corruption. Take, for instance, Grosz’s 1922 watercolour Orgie, depicting a dingy bar in which a grotesque, cigar-chomping drunk spews wine through his teeth, while other patrons defecate and copulate around him.

 
6    He was sued on various occasions
 
In his drawing collections such as The Face of the Ruling Class and Ecce Homo — as well as in his work for journals and broadsheets — Grosz depicted greedy capitalists, smug bourgeoisie and nouveaux riches hags, among other social groups. Blessed with a razor-sharp wit, he was a social satirist who saw himself continuing in the tradition of William Hogarth.
 
As the German philosopher Hannah Arendt observed years later, however, Grosz's cartoons ‘seemed to us not satire so much as realistic reportage. We recognised these types, they were all around us’.
 
Pimps and prostitutes abound in Ecce Homo, a book that caused such a furore that Grosz felt compelled to apply for a pistol license on the grounds of self-defence. He was also taken to court on charges that 52 of the book’s 100 images were pornographic. Grosz was tried in February 1924 and was fined 6,000 marks. Numerous plates from the publication were confiscated and banned. This was the first of three separate occasions on which Grosz was successfully sued for producing offensive artwork.
 
These events may have led to his extended trip to France in 1924, and a further stay in Paris from June to October in 1925. The Dingo American Bar was opened in 1923 and quickly gained notoriety among English-speaking artists and writers, not least because it was one of the few drinking-houses that was open all night. Ernest Hemingway first met F. Scott Fitzgerald there in April 1925, two weeks after the publication of The Great Gatsby and a few months before Grosz executed a study of the bar.

 
7     He briefly became a Communist
 
Grosz's work often expressed sympathy for poor, downtrodden workers suffering at the hands of rich, fat-cat bosses. ‘To show the oppressed the true face of their masters is the purpose of my work,’ he once said.
 
For a while, he was a member of the Communist Party, even receiving his membership card personally from Rosa Luxemburg (though over time, and after an underwhelming meeting with Lenin in the Soviet Union in 1922, his party loyalties waned).
 
Grosz felt that the fall of the Kaiser removed few of the inequalities that had long existed in German society. In 1930, he found an outlet for his frustrations by designing the costumes for Carl Sternheim’s adaptation of Flaubert’s political satire, The Candidate. Updated from 19th-century France to contemporary Berlin, it follows an ambitious candidate for the Reichstag who is courted by three different political party leaders — and who ultimately gives up his own wife to one of them to win the election.
 
8    His work was included in the Nazis' exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art’
 
After a brief, enjoyable spell spent teaching in New York, Grosz returned to the US on what turned out to be a long-term basis in 1933, just a week before Hitler became German chancellor. (He would remain in America for more than two decades.) Grosz’s subject matter was highly objectionable to the Nazis: they labelled him ‘Cultural Bolshevist Number One’, destroyed many of the works he’d left behind and included another 15 in their Entartete Kunst exhibition of ‘degenerate art’ in Munich in 1937.
 
By this point, however, Grosz was revelling in life across the Atlantic: as an artist he largely split his efforts between street scenes of Manhattan and windswept landscapes of Cape Cod. For the former, he roamed New York by day, sketchbook in hand, creating finished versions of his scenes by night — a typical result of this process being Quick Lunch, which shows customers of all socio-economic backgrounds crowding around a fast-food counter.
 
9   He became an American citizen
 
In 1938, having been stripped of his German citizenship, Grosz legally became an American. His style softened in these years, although there was still the occasional, apocalyptic painting of hell-fire on earth, which suggests the repression of freedoms back in his birth country were never far from his mind.
 
More than a hint of poignancy can be found in certain works on paper, too, such as the ink drawing titled Refugees, a self-portrait with his two sons. During the Second World War, his mother (who hadn't emigrated to the US with him) was killed in a bombing raid.
 
10   Grosz returned to Berlin six weeks before his death
 
By the 1950s, Grosz had started to drink heavily, and his wife Eva hoped that a change of surroundings — namely a return to post-Nazi Germany — would help him kick the habit. In May 1958 they moved into her parents’ old flat in West Berlin; but in July, after falling down a flight of stairs during a heavy night’s drinking, Grosz died. He was 65.
 
 
10 things to know about George Grosz. By Alastair Smart. Christie’s, January 9, 2020.

 

A new exhibition of work by the German artist George Grosz is staged, this autumn by Richard Nagy in London.  This major display will be the first in the UK since the Royal Academy’s retrospective almost 20 years ago. Some 50 works by the titan of German satirical art have been assembled from leading private and public collections around the world.

 
The works in this exhibition include savage caricatures and nightmarish visions that articulate Grosz’s sharp contempt for all aspects of bourgeois life in Germany. His childhood distrust of authority figures found its outlet after the catastrophic events of the First World War. Later in life he would describe his experiences in the trenches as ‘wholly negative’ and his caricatures of military generals in works such as Vor der Kaserne (In front of the Barracks) (1918) exude his hatred for the empty bluster of German militarism.
 
In the years following its humiliating defeat, Germany was cast into political disarray. Grosz established a reputation as a formidable satirist, producing bloodcurdling images such as Nieder mit Liebknecht (Down with Liebknecht) (1918) and encapsulating the cynical humour of Berlin’s Dada Movement with his wry illustrations for Die Pleite. Grosz became particularly fascinated by the decadent side of cosmopolitan
 
Berlin in the 1920s. In his art he fought against the base preoccupations of bourgeois society by uncovering a shadowy world of crime, murder and erotic license. Lustmord (Sexual Murder) is a prominent motif in his work, in which the combination of sexuality and violence is presented as a ritualization of the human quest for power, exemplified by political practice.
 
A highlight of the exhibition is an important work that was recently discovered in a private collection and has never been shown outside of Germany. The work is an earlier watercolour version of what Grosz claimed to be his greatest oil painting, Deutschland, Ein Wintermärchen (Germany, a Winter’s Tale) (1918), which was likely destroyed in the early 1930s. The title harks back to a classic of German literature, a satirical poem by Heinrich Heine, but the object of Grosz’s contempt is decidedly contemporary. In the centre of the image a well-fed bourgeois nationalist (Biedermann) sits at a dinner table with an upright knife and fork as though ready to start carving. In the chaos around him the viewer can distinguish brothels, factories and tenement buildings, while figures symbolising the pillars of society – the Church, the Military, and Education – turn a blind eye and loom in the foreground.
 
Several striking watercolours from Grosz’s famous series Ecce Homo (1923) are also on display. Dämmerung (The Gloaming) (1922) shows the day ending and nightlife awaking in the twilight of the big metropolis. A pimp with a cigar in his mouth watches over his harlots roaming the streets, while a neatly dressed businessman can be seen next to a prostitute who is wearing a striking red hat. A blind man at a house corner is selling matches. In the far distance one can detect a suspicious man walking towards the onlooker. A policeman, the so-called Schupo (Schutzpolizei), watches the scene from the corner of his eye, ready to intervene at his discretion.
 
At the root of Grosz’s political message is a moral imperative. As he wrote in 1921, ‘You can’t be indifferent about your position in this activity, about your attitude towards the problem of the masses… Are you on the side of the exploiters or on the side of the masses?’ For this reason, Richard Nagy is pleased to announce that the show will serve to benefit Global Witness, a charity dedicated to protecting communities and their environments from the abuses that result from natural resource- related conflict and corruption. Patrick Alley, Director of Global Witness comments: ‘We are delighted that Global Witness will share a platform with this fascinating and timely George Grosz exhibition. Being so savagely critical of corruption and injustice, his work resonates strongly with our campaigns to tackle the international systems, and political, financial and economic norms which exacerbate these problems.’
 
George Grosz (1893-1959) was born Georg Ehrenfried Groß in Berlin, Germany, though he spent most of his childhood in the Pomeranian town of Stolp. At the age of 15 he was dismissed from high school for striking one of his disciplinarian teachers. Fortunately Grosz had demonstrated artistic talent and he was encouraged to apply to the Dresden Academy of Art. In 1909, at the age of 16, he began a two-year course of study for his art diploma and was accepted into the Berlin Academy in 1911. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 delayed his ambitions to be an artist and illustrator, but he was eventually released from service on medical grounds. Back in Berlin, he published artwork in Franz Pfemfer’s leftist journal, Die Aktion, and soon became a prominent member of the anti-establishment Dada Movement.
 
Grosz’s artworks quickly attracted the notice of the authorities and in 1921 he was charged with defaming the German army. He would be charged twice more prior to his departure for the United States in the early thirties. During the Third Reich, hundreds of his paintings and drawings were confiscated and many destroyed. In the latter part of his career he tried to establish himself as a pure painter of landscapes and still life, but also continued to produce compositions of an apocalyptic and deeply pessimistic kind. He returned to Berlin in 1958, where he died a few months later.
 
 
George Grosz Exhibition Explores Berlin Prostitutes, Politicians And Profiteers Between The Wars. Artlyst, July 26, 2013.

George Grosz in Germany, on view at the New York Studio School Gallery, offers a rich overview of Grosz’s development as an artist and dissident. The works on paper, all from the Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection, featured in the show from 1913–1925 could be considered collectively like a piece of documentary, a primary source for visualizing life in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. It is the portrait of a war victim coming to grips with the underlying horror of everyday reality.
 
Much of his early work, before 1920, fits well into more traditional forms of graphic art like newspaper illustrations, political cartoons, and one work that echoes the lines of Durer’s engravings. Grosz’s pen and ink drawings like “Das Ende,” Chaos,” and “Untitled (Man Walking His Dog),” are less typical for being unapologetically raw and impulsively drawn. They might be Grosz at his best and most disturbed, truly “degenerate.”
 
In the aftermath of World War I, Grosz’s loose, almost painterly approach is more soberly inflected. Grosz’s drawings from this period are described as caricature, in that they serve as a caustic remark upon the Weimar Republic, however, his message is not explicit, in fact, Grosz’s use of cartoon-like imagery and its perceived inferiority in the hierarchy of the arts only sublimates his askance glance at German society. In works like, “Bar Montmartre,” “Berlin Cafe,” and “Portraits,” Grosz offers a gadfly on the wall view of Bourgeois Berliners in situ: on the streets, in cafés, nightclubs, bars, and brothels. His slice of life portraits are immediately nerve wracking, asking the viewer to look for whatever it is that’s awry.
 
Grosz’s deranged yet graceful pen work might first appear as the aping of primitive or outsider art, but it is not merely an artistic affection. His cross-sectional surveying of a scene, marked by intersecting lines, suggests a sustained observation of a subject over time; despite looking like cartoons, they are not imaginary. Grosz’s fluid composition has added fluency in the era of the moving picture — his work unfolds across the paper. Harsh variance in line thickness, suggesting a depth-of-field, further emphasizes a cinematic perspective. In many works Grosz’s seemingly inexpert handling of facial features, the eyes and mouth in particular, gives each subject a distinct personality; however, his rendering of hands is most telling of all.

 
The gnarled hand featured in detail on the cover of the exhibition’s catalogue hints at what lurks within each work. They recall the contorted appearance of barbed wire, the impact of mustard gas on the nervous system, or the jittering recoil of a machine gun: suggestions of World War I’s lingering trauma. While an entire generation of men was lost or physically wounded, a tell-tale sign of the war’s immediate impact, the psychological toll was more easily repressed. Shell shock, what we now know as PTSD, was disregarded by prominent doctors at the time because it was viewed as a sign of weak will and no conclusive test could prevent anyone from claiming it. However, in extreme cases, PTSD did produce a physiological response, caught on film for the first time and shown in news reels — psychological trauma made indisputable.
 
While Grosz’s military service was brief — he was discharged after a month of service — it had a profound influence on his work. The catalogue text for the recent Dada exhibition at Museum of Modern Art mentions that Grosz “may have suffered shell shock.” After some internet sleuthing, I found that he did, in fact, suffer from shell shock towards the end of the war in 1917.
 
Grosz’s own words describing the mental turmoil he suffered on the battlefield:
 
““My nerves broke down, this time before I could even get near the front and see rotting corpses and barbed wire … Nerves, down to the tiniest fiber, nausea, revolt — pathological, maybe —anyway, a total breakdown, even in the face of omnipotent regulations”
 
 
As Grosz’s experience suggests, shell shock is much more than a temporary condition caused by exposure to shock waves from bomb blasts. Shell shock, or PTSD, is a lasting impression left by any sort of exposure to the grotesqueries of war. PTSD is a suitable condition to ascribe to Germany itself post-WWI, made all the more relevant by the fact that Hitler’s experience with the disorder is suggested to have led to his radicalization. Unfortunately for the world, Hitler did not recover through cathartic mark-making like Grosz.

Caricature serves as perfect metaphor for a mind off-kilter, Grosz reduces Weimar society to a few discernible lines, and each stroke provides him a platform for airing his grievances. His restraint is at once raw and elegant, a calculated vacillation between astute draftsmanship and unrestrained gesture, offering a level of psychological insight we risk losing with increasing dependence on computer intervention between the artist and object. Grosz’s pen and ink on paper drawings provide indelible intimacy with a mind maimed by war.
 
George Grosz in Germany, curated by Karen Wilkin, is on view at the New York Studio School Gallery (8 West 8th Street, Greenwich Village, Manhattan) until January 4.
 
The Shock and Awe of George Grosz. By  Robert Cicetti. Hyperallergic, December 12, 2013.

  

The heirs of German artist George Grosz are demanding the return of works that were stolen during the Nazi era and now hang in museums. They want to exhibit the works in a Grosz museum, but their legal status is murky.

 A rear apartment building in Berlin's Wilmersdorf neighborhood; a studio on the top floor; a journey to the past: Art historian Ralph Jentsch holds photos that are more than 90 years old. "Unbelievable," he says. The radiator is still the same, and so is the door. "This is the way it looked when George Grosz painted in this room."

 It was in this studio where Grosz, the great expressionist, Dadaist and social critic, created the art that made him world-famous -- paintings and drawings of fat speculators, cynical military officials and extravagant prostitutes, of the maimed victims of war and the emaciated poor. Until 1932, Grosz painted in the studio, with its five-meter (16-foot) ceilings, where an artist from Moscow paints today.

 When stormtroopers broke down the door of Grosz's live-in studio on Jan. 31, 1933, the day after the Nazis came to power, the artist and his family were already in New York. "I very much doubt I would have made it out of there alive," he later wrote.

 Grosz had consigned most of his paintings and drawings to his art dealer. But the dealer, who was Jewish, also had to flee the Nazis and took only some of the works out of the country. In connection with their campaign against so-called "degenerate art," the Nazis confiscated 285 of Grosz's works in museums, some of which they sold. (Most were burned.) About 70 paintings vanished without a trace. Ralph Jentsch, visibly moved as he looks around in Grosz's former studio, is the managing director of the painter's estate. He wants to "make up for the injustice" that the Nazis inflicted on the artist. He says: "They plunged him into misery."

 When Grosz learned that the Nazis had burned a large share of his life's work, his wife Eva wrote after the war, "there was a complete collapse," and he began to suffer from "anxiety, particularly nightmares" and "to drink without moderation." In July 1959, shortly after his return to Berlin, Grosz was found in a stairwell one morning, unconscious from a drinking binge. He died a short time later.

 Of course, it's impossible to make up for Grosz's tragedy half a century later. Jentsch knows this. He has spent 20 years assembling a catalog of Grosz's works, a compilation of about 14,000 photos and seemingly endless lists. "At least the stolen pictures should be returned to his family," says Jentsch.

 Grosz was a prolific artist. He created about 450 paintings and more than 15,000 works on paper. Pictures from his Berlin days are worth millions today, and Jentsch has traced some of them to prestigious museums in New York, Vienna, Tokyo and Bremen. But their directors are opposed to returning the works to Grosz's heirs. They see themselves as the rightful owners.

 This claim, however, is at least up for debate. Since the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, there has been international agreement that works of art stolen or "confiscated as a result of persecution" during the Nazi years should be returned to their former owners. In the Grosz case, this would be his son Marty, 78, who lives in Philadelphia, and his sister-in-law Lillian, in Princeton, New Jersey. The Grosz heirs agree that they do not want to place restituted works on the market. Instead, they hope to exhibit the paintings and drawings confiscated in the Nazi era at a George Grosz museum, and they are considering Berlin as a possible location.

 Grosz has undoubtedly earned a museum of his own -- particularly since not a single art collection in the world contains more than two of the Berlin native's works. This is ironic, because Georg Ehrenfried Groß, as his name appears on his birth certificate, was one of the most prominent German representatives of modernism. His first solo exhibit, in Munich in April 1920, provoked angry criticism. The Bayerischer Kurier newspaper warned against the "witch's cauldron from which this mad, caterwauling brew emerges, in rutting ecstasies of wild, unbridled instincts." It didn't take long before the public prosecutor's office began charging Grosz, a Dadaist and radical provocateur, with insulting the Army of the Reich, disseminating obscene writings and blasphemy.

 

Not Jewish, but Persecuted

 In 1926, Grosz signed a contract with gallery owner Alfred Flechtheim, the most influential art dealer in the Weimar Republic, who also represented Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee and Ernst Barlach. Their business relationship ended when the art market collapsed during the Great Depression, and Flechtheim cancelled the contract in 1931. It was a heavy blow to Grosz. Though museums were buying his paintings, he was chronically broke and depended on Flechtheim's advances. The situation was "grim, at least as far as the (German) mark is concerned," Grosz concluded. "My source of income is gone."

 His socially critical art made Grosz, a leftist and pacific, a hated figure of the right. An officer shot at him in a restaurant, but hit a waiter instead. He received anonymous threats on a regular basis, and he once found an iron pipe in his studio with the following note attached: "This is what you'll get, you old Jewish pig, if you continue what you're doing."

 Unlike Grosz, Flechtheim, the art dealer, was Jewish. So he was also at risk when the Nazis came into power, and when he fled to Paris in 1933, Flechtheim left at least 70 paintings by Grosz and many more watercolors and drawings in Berlin. Before an insolvency administrator could take over the company, Flechtheim managed to move about half of the Grosz works to Paris, where he tried, unsuccessfully, to sell them.

 In a secret "Census of Leading Men of the System Era" compiled by the SS, Grosz was described as "one of the most despicable representatives of degenerate art, who works in an anti-German fashion." The document notes that he was "deprived of citizenship on March 8, 1933." Meanwhile, a despondent Grosz was in New York and didn't know what had happened to the paintings and drawings that had remained in Berlin. The loss made him "sad and angry," says his son Marty.

 In late 1952, however, Grosz discovered his painting titled "The Poet Max Herrmann-Neisse" at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, which the MoMA was proudly presenting as a new acquisition. Grosz wrote to his brother-in-law in Berlin: "The Modern Museum exhibited a painting stolen from me (am powerless to do anything about it). They bought it from someone who stole it."

 When estate administrator Jentsch and the family's attorney recently negotiated with the MoMA over a possible return of the painting, its attorney coolly noted that the museum considered itself the painting's rightful owner.

 David Rowland, a lawyer who specializes in restitution, successfully negotiated the controversial return of the painting "Berlin Street Scene," by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, one of Grosz's contemporaries. Rowland has proposed declaring the Grosz painting shared property of the heirs and the museum for three years. If the MoMA could not substantiate its property rights within this period, he argued, the painting should go to the heirs. The museum has recently rejected the proposal.

 Through painstaking detective work, though, Jentsch managed to trace much of the portrait's adventurous path to New York. After Grosz emigrated it was still at the Flechtheim Gallery in Berlin. In 1937, an art historian named Charlotte Weidler said she had inherited it from Flechtheim. But before he died in exile in London in March 1937, Flechtheim had designated his nephew as his sole heir.

 Weidler immigrated to the United States. In 1952 she sold the "Portrait of Max Herrmann-Neisse" to the MoMA through an agent. The museum paid $850 for the work. Today, that's dirt cheap. But before World War II, other Grosz works were unloaded for a fraction of this amount. In 1936 Flechtheim consigned more than two dozen works to Carel van Lier, an Amsterdam art dealer. After Flechtheim's death, van Lier contacted neither his wife in Berlin nor Georg Grosz in the United States, but held an auction instead.

 The auction was rigged in advance, and 24 paintings sold for an average of 15 reichmarks apiece -- about €150 ($203) today. Van Lier bought five of the most important paintings himself and re-sold them later for a substantial profit.

 The Kunsthalle Museum in Bremen has two of Grosz's works today: the painting "Pompe funèbre," one of the works sold off in the rigged Amsterdam auction, and "Still Life with Okarina," which was seized in Berlin.

 Six years ago, Jentsch wrote to Wulf Herzogenrath, the director of Kunsthalle Museum. Herzogenrath still argues today that the paintings were bought at auction in Amsterdam "during peacetime." "Besides," he continues, "they no longer belonged to Grosz, but to Flechtheim."

 Strong Resistance

 Other Grosz paintings were dispatched around the world from Amsterdam along similarly serpentine and legally contested paths. "Promenade" is on display at the Bridgestone Museum in Tokyo, and Vienna's Museum of Modern Art insists that it is the rightful owner of the painting "Keepsake -- The Alliance."

 Private collectors have proved to be more understanding than, for example, the restitution advisory panel of the Austrian Ministry of Culture. An American brought the painting "Ideas of the Time," which had been hawked in Amsterdam, to the Sotheby's auction house in New York. After Jentsch told the owner of the painting about its history, he returned it for a finder's fee. A similar arrangement is being negotiated with a German-American family that owns the painting "Still Life with Pipe and Okarina."

 But Marty Grosz continues to meet strong resistance at museums. "In theory, the Washington declaration on the return of art stolen in the Nazi era is very good," says the painter's son, but in practice, he adds, things are "pretty unfair." And the heirs lack the necessary funds to sue the museums for the return of Grosz's works.

 Marty Grosz is becoming increasingly skeptical over whether his dream of a Georg Grosz museum will ever become reality. "Suing would take forever," he says. "By the time the courts decide, I'll be long dead."

 

Re-Collecting George Grosz's Art. By Michael Sontheimer. Der Spiegel, March 26, 2009.

 

 

 

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