Trechos de George Grosz: An Autobiography (1946).
What is there to say about the First World War in which I was an infantry soldier? Of a war that I never liked from the start and with which I never identified? I was interested in politics, but had grown up in the spirit of humanism. War meant horror, mutilation, annihilation.
Of course there was some sort of mass enthusiasm in the beginning. And it was real. But the intoxication soon blew over, and what was left was great emptiness. The flowers on the helmets and gun barrels quickly faded. War then meant anything but enthusiasm; it became filth, lice, stupor, disease and mutilation. The heroism of some idealists and their complete devotion to their country did exist, but these virtues had their reverse side too, and they finally came out even. "Enthusiasm is not simply a herring that you can pickle," said the people.
Then, when it all bogged down in defeat a few years later, when everything collapsed, nothing was left for me and most of my friends but disgust and horror. After all, my fate had made an artist of me, not a soldier. The effect the war had on me was totally negative. It had never been the "liberation" felt by some. It is true, of course, that war not only arouses suppressed forces slumbering in us, but also really does liberate some people, be it from a hated environment, the slavery of daily work, or the burden of one's own personality. That is one of the mysteries that will perpetuate wars forever.
- - -
Belief? Ha! In what? In German heavy industry, the great profiteers? In our illustrious generals? Our beloved Fatherland? At least I had the courage to voice what so many were thinking. Madness, probably, rather than courage.
I could write pages about this much discussed subject, but everything I have to say can be seen in my drawings.
- - -
In 1916 I was discharged from military service, but not quite. I was told it was a sort of furlough, and I would be called back again. The Berlin to which I returned was cold and grey. The crowded cafés and bars were in uncanny contrast to our dark, gloomy, unheated living quarters. The same soldiers who had been singing and dancing there and hanging tipsily on the arms of prostitutes in another time could be seen dragging themselves morosely through the streets, still covered with dirt from the trenches, going from one railroad station to the other.
- - -
The catastrophe had begun. The storm of war, so recently praised for its cleansing effect, had broken; the lovely phrases had become stale-smelling printer's ink on cheap, brownish paper and I lived in my own world, in my studio in Südende [Stephan Street, near Berlin], and drew.
I drew drunks, men vomiting, men cursing the moon with clenched fists, a murderer sitting on a packing case with the murdered woman's body inside. I drew wine drinkers, beer drinkers, gin drinkers, and a worried man washing his blood-stained hands.
I drew soldiers in action, using my sketchbooks from the war. I drew lonely little men running crazily through empty streets in flight from unknown horrors. I drew a transverse section of an apartment house: in one window a man attacking his wife with a broom, in another two people making love, in a third a man hanging from the crossbar of a window, surrounded by buzzing flies.
I drew soldiers without noses, war cripples with metal arms like crab claws; two medics strapping a raving private into a horse blanket; a one-armed soldier saluting a bemedaled lady with his remaining hand, as she takes a cookie from a paper bag and puts it on his bed. A colonel with an open fly embracing a fat nurse. An orderly emptying a pail with all sorts of bits of human bodies into a pit. A skeleton in uniform being examined for military fitness...
- - -
That breathing spell of 1916-17 was a fertile period in my life, both realistic and romantic. My favorite colors were a deep red and a blackish blue. I felt the floor swaying beneath me, and that showed in my pictures and water colors.
- - -
I met extraordinary people: writers, vegetarian scientists who were interested in astronomy, sculptors with persecution complexes, reformers with hidden vices, a ruined drinker who lived on translations, and painters, musicians and philosophers. What an extraordinarily interesting merry-go-round! There were night people, like moonflowers, like henbane that blooms at night near dungheaps and is poisonous, like moles who live under the earth, some of them invulnerable like salamanders whose tails grow back when cut off.
We all frequented the Café des Westens, we sat there in the late afternoon or late at night, and talked. Politically we did not agree. What we had in common - whether of "enlightened" or "religious" persuasion - was our dislike of the ruling military and industrial powers; and we knew as early as 1916 that this war would not end well.
- - -
I had to report for active duty again in mid-1917. This time I was to train recruits and guard and transport prisoners of war. But I simply could no longer bear it. One night they found me, almost unconscious, head first in the latrine...
I lay for a fairly long time in the infirmary. All of a sudden, they said I was well. But I wasn't; my nerves were shot; I refused to get up. In fury, I physically attacked the medical sergeant. I will never forget with what lusty enthusiasm seven of my ambulatory "comrades" fell upon me. One of them, a baker in civilian life, jumped with his whole weight onto my cramped legs, happily shouting: "Gotta step on his legs, gotta keep on trampling on his legs, that'll calm him down." It did. But that incident was burned indelibly into my mind; how these harmless, ordinary people beat me up, and how they enjoyed it. There was no personal animosity. It was an unconscious principle: we are not protesting, so you can't protest either. "Let him have it, step on his legs!" Later, we probably continued peacefully to play cards, drink beer, smoke, and tell dirty stories.
That happened in 1917, a time when nobody believed in anything anymore, and we in the infirmary were fed dried vegetables, coffee made of turnips and artificial honey that affected our stomach walls. I had never really believed in the solidarity of the masses and never desired to live with the masses. [...]
I no longer have any hope for the underprivileged. I never did participate in the worship of the masses, not even at the time when I toyed with certain political theories. The war was like a mirror, reflecting all virtues and vices. But as an artist tests his drawing in a mirror, the faults stood out more clearly.
One day I was lying in the military infirmary with a heavy head, heavier than usual, and I dreamed of a straw hat and walking stick instead of a helmet and trench spade. I dreamed of a cool corner at Kempinski's and belched a bit, because the artificial honey made my stomach rebel; that luminous greyish-green, when spread on grey wartime bread, reminded me of the background of old Italian paintings. In the bed next to mine was a coachman from Berlin who had lost part of his stomach. "Look," he mumbled, half under the influence of the injections that he was constantly getting.
- - -
They said I was to be executed as a deserter. Fortunately, Count Kessler heard about it. He intervened for me, with the result that I was pardoned, and sent to a mental home for war casualties. Just before the end of the war I was discharged for the second time, but with the proviso that I would soon be recalled.
I thought the war would never end. Perhaps it never really did? Peace was proclaimed, but not everybody was drunk and happy. Fundamentally, people had remained the same, with a few differences: the proud German soldier had become a beaten, weary soldier; the people's army had fallen apart just like the uniforms and ammunition pouches made of poor ersatz material. I was not disappointed that this war was lost. I was only disappointed that people had borne and suffered it so long, and that nobody had followed the few voices that were raised against that mass slaughter.
- - -
I went back to live in Berlin. The city looked like a grey corpse made of stone. There were cracks in all the walls. Plaster and paint were crumbling. The dead, dirty, hollow windows seemed still to be mourning those many for whom they had looked in vain. Those were wild years. I threw myself madly into life, and teamed up with people who were searching for a way out from this absolute nothingness. We wanted more. Just what this "more" was to be, we could not tell. But my friends and I saw no solution in negativism nor in the fury of having been cheated, nor in the negation of all previous values.
In no time I was head over heels in politics. I made speeches, not really from conviction but rather because there were people standing round all day long arguing and my previous experiences had not taught me any better. My speeches were silly repetitions of liberal banalities, but as my words flowed as smoothly as honey, I ended up by believing the nonsense myself, intoxicated by the noise of my own voice. Once I was even hoisted on a man's shoulders, amid shouts of "Long live the proletariat!" As usual, I had been propounding a subject of which I knew nothing: academic freedom.
- - -
I totally forgot who I was. The "movement" influenced me to such a degree that I considered all art senseless unless it served as a weapon in the political arena. My art was to be gun and sword; I considered my pencils as nothing but straws unless they served the battle for freedom. What sort of freedom? I never wondered about that.
- - -
In reality, the times were tired and not at all funny. Tired and not at all funny, the soldiers crept back into town, sometimes with a red cockade on their caps.
I remember my old friend and brother-in-law Otto Schmalhausen returning from the Eastern front. I went to meet him at a Berlin railway station. The streets were dark, as the powerhouse was on strike or occupied by Reds. And anyhow, there was an eight o'clock curfew, after which nobody was supposed to be in the street. A feeling of civil war was smoldering in the air.
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/1CqfkYINpnG75vzA5MFMHkumttqPygZpI
http://www.moma.org/artists/2374
http://www.abcgallery.com/G/grosz/grosz.html
Of course there was some sort of mass enthusiasm in the beginning. And it was real. But the intoxication soon blew over, and what was left was great emptiness. The flowers on the helmets and gun barrels quickly faded. War then meant anything but enthusiasm; it became filth, lice, stupor, disease and mutilation. The heroism of some idealists and their complete devotion to their country did exist, but these virtues had their reverse side too, and they finally came out even. "Enthusiasm is not simply a herring that you can pickle," said the people.
Then, when it all bogged down in defeat a few years later, when everything collapsed, nothing was left for me and most of my friends but disgust and horror. After all, my fate had made an artist of me, not a soldier. The effect the war had on me was totally negative. It had never been the "liberation" felt by some. It is true, of course, that war not only arouses suppressed forces slumbering in us, but also really does liberate some people, be it from a hated environment, the slavery of daily work, or the burden of one's own personality. That is one of the mysteries that will perpetuate wars forever.
- - -
Belief? Ha! In what? In German heavy industry, the great profiteers? In our illustrious generals? Our beloved Fatherland? At least I had the courage to voice what so many were thinking. Madness, probably, rather than courage.
I could write pages about this much discussed subject, but everything I have to say can be seen in my drawings.
- - -
In 1916 I was discharged from military service, but not quite. I was told it was a sort of furlough, and I would be called back again. The Berlin to which I returned was cold and grey. The crowded cafés and bars were in uncanny contrast to our dark, gloomy, unheated living quarters. The same soldiers who had been singing and dancing there and hanging tipsily on the arms of prostitutes in another time could be seen dragging themselves morosely through the streets, still covered with dirt from the trenches, going from one railroad station to the other.
- - -
The catastrophe had begun. The storm of war, so recently praised for its cleansing effect, had broken; the lovely phrases had become stale-smelling printer's ink on cheap, brownish paper and I lived in my own world, in my studio in Südende [Stephan Street, near Berlin], and drew.
I drew drunks, men vomiting, men cursing the moon with clenched fists, a murderer sitting on a packing case with the murdered woman's body inside. I drew wine drinkers, beer drinkers, gin drinkers, and a worried man washing his blood-stained hands.
I drew soldiers in action, using my sketchbooks from the war. I drew lonely little men running crazily through empty streets in flight from unknown horrors. I drew a transverse section of an apartment house: in one window a man attacking his wife with a broom, in another two people making love, in a third a man hanging from the crossbar of a window, surrounded by buzzing flies.
I drew soldiers without noses, war cripples with metal arms like crab claws; two medics strapping a raving private into a horse blanket; a one-armed soldier saluting a bemedaled lady with his remaining hand, as she takes a cookie from a paper bag and puts it on his bed. A colonel with an open fly embracing a fat nurse. An orderly emptying a pail with all sorts of bits of human bodies into a pit. A skeleton in uniform being examined for military fitness...
- - -
That breathing spell of 1916-17 was a fertile period in my life, both realistic and romantic. My favorite colors were a deep red and a blackish blue. I felt the floor swaying beneath me, and that showed in my pictures and water colors.
- - -
I met extraordinary people: writers, vegetarian scientists who were interested in astronomy, sculptors with persecution complexes, reformers with hidden vices, a ruined drinker who lived on translations, and painters, musicians and philosophers. What an extraordinarily interesting merry-go-round! There were night people, like moonflowers, like henbane that blooms at night near dungheaps and is poisonous, like moles who live under the earth, some of them invulnerable like salamanders whose tails grow back when cut off.
We all frequented the Café des Westens, we sat there in the late afternoon or late at night, and talked. Politically we did not agree. What we had in common - whether of "enlightened" or "religious" persuasion - was our dislike of the ruling military and industrial powers; and we knew as early as 1916 that this war would not end well.
- - -
I had to report for active duty again in mid-1917. This time I was to train recruits and guard and transport prisoners of war. But I simply could no longer bear it. One night they found me, almost unconscious, head first in the latrine...
I lay for a fairly long time in the infirmary. All of a sudden, they said I was well. But I wasn't; my nerves were shot; I refused to get up. In fury, I physically attacked the medical sergeant. I will never forget with what lusty enthusiasm seven of my ambulatory "comrades" fell upon me. One of them, a baker in civilian life, jumped with his whole weight onto my cramped legs, happily shouting: "Gotta step on his legs, gotta keep on trampling on his legs, that'll calm him down." It did. But that incident was burned indelibly into my mind; how these harmless, ordinary people beat me up, and how they enjoyed it. There was no personal animosity. It was an unconscious principle: we are not protesting, so you can't protest either. "Let him have it, step on his legs!" Later, we probably continued peacefully to play cards, drink beer, smoke, and tell dirty stories.
That happened in 1917, a time when nobody believed in anything anymore, and we in the infirmary were fed dried vegetables, coffee made of turnips and artificial honey that affected our stomach walls. I had never really believed in the solidarity of the masses and never desired to live with the masses. [...]
I no longer have any hope for the underprivileged. I never did participate in the worship of the masses, not even at the time when I toyed with certain political theories. The war was like a mirror, reflecting all virtues and vices. But as an artist tests his drawing in a mirror, the faults stood out more clearly.
One day I was lying in the military infirmary with a heavy head, heavier than usual, and I dreamed of a straw hat and walking stick instead of a helmet and trench spade. I dreamed of a cool corner at Kempinski's and belched a bit, because the artificial honey made my stomach rebel; that luminous greyish-green, when spread on grey wartime bread, reminded me of the background of old Italian paintings. In the bed next to mine was a coachman from Berlin who had lost part of his stomach. "Look," he mumbled, half under the influence of the injections that he was constantly getting.
- - -
They said I was to be executed as a deserter. Fortunately, Count Kessler heard about it. He intervened for me, with the result that I was pardoned, and sent to a mental home for war casualties. Just before the end of the war I was discharged for the second time, but with the proviso that I would soon be recalled.
I thought the war would never end. Perhaps it never really did? Peace was proclaimed, but not everybody was drunk and happy. Fundamentally, people had remained the same, with a few differences: the proud German soldier had become a beaten, weary soldier; the people's army had fallen apart just like the uniforms and ammunition pouches made of poor ersatz material. I was not disappointed that this war was lost. I was only disappointed that people had borne and suffered it so long, and that nobody had followed the few voices that were raised against that mass slaughter.
- - -
I went back to live in Berlin. The city looked like a grey corpse made of stone. There were cracks in all the walls. Plaster and paint were crumbling. The dead, dirty, hollow windows seemed still to be mourning those many for whom they had looked in vain. Those were wild years. I threw myself madly into life, and teamed up with people who were searching for a way out from this absolute nothingness. We wanted more. Just what this "more" was to be, we could not tell. But my friends and I saw no solution in negativism nor in the fury of having been cheated, nor in the negation of all previous values.
In no time I was head over heels in politics. I made speeches, not really from conviction but rather because there were people standing round all day long arguing and my previous experiences had not taught me any better. My speeches were silly repetitions of liberal banalities, but as my words flowed as smoothly as honey, I ended up by believing the nonsense myself, intoxicated by the noise of my own voice. Once I was even hoisted on a man's shoulders, amid shouts of "Long live the proletariat!" As usual, I had been propounding a subject of which I knew nothing: academic freedom.
- - -
I totally forgot who I was. The "movement" influenced me to such a degree that I considered all art senseless unless it served as a weapon in the political arena. My art was to be gun and sword; I considered my pencils as nothing but straws unless they served the battle for freedom. What sort of freedom? I never wondered about that.
- - -
In reality, the times were tired and not at all funny. Tired and not at all funny, the soldiers crept back into town, sometimes with a red cockade on their caps.
I remember my old friend and brother-in-law Otto Schmalhausen returning from the Eastern front. I went to meet him at a Berlin railway station. The streets were dark, as the powerhouse was on strike or occupied by Reds. And anyhow, there was an eight o'clock curfew, after which nobody was supposed to be in the street. A feeling of civil war was smoldering in the air.
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/1CqfkYINpnG75vzA5MFMHkumttqPygZpI
http://www.moma.org/artists/2374
http://www.abcgallery.com/G/grosz/grosz.html
