One hundred years ago today,
fighting raged in the streets of Berlin. Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated in
November 1918, and a new socialist government, led by reform-minded members of
the German Socialist Party (SPD), had declared a democratic republic. Thousands
of workers and sailors, dissatisfied with the moderate stance of the SPD
leaders, demanded more radical policies, and revolted in Berlin in January. Not
yet demobilized soldiers, the so-called Freikorps, fresh from defeat in World
War I, were employed by the new government to destroy the revolt. The Freikorps
killed hundreds of workers and assassinated two leaders of the newly founded
German Communist Party, Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
The radicals tried again in
March to overthrow the SPD government – they called a general strike on March
3, which developed into renewed
street fighting. Again the much more heavily armed Freikorps were
dispatched by the government to put down the revolt. Gustav Noske, the new
Defense Minister, issued a fateful order:
“Any individual bearing arms against government troops will be summarily shot.”
The ruthless Freikorps,
led by extreme conservative officers who hated any manifestation of workers’
power, including the SPD government, hardly needed any encouragement. With few
losses, they killed over a thousand workers. When several hundred unarmed
sailors demanded back pay at a government office on March 11, twenty-nine
were selected out and murdered.
Berlin was relatively quiet
for a year. On March 12, 1920, the Freikorps, sporting swastikas
on their helmets, and other right-wing military formations marched on
Berlin in an attempt to create an authoritarian government. Military leaders on
the government side refused to fire on fellow soldiers. The SPD government had
to flee and a group of extreme conservatives declared themselves rulers of
Germany. Adolf Hitler flew into Berlin to support the coup. Across Germany,
army commanders and bureaucrats fell into line. This attempt to end the life of
the new German democracy finally brought all leftist parties together in a call
for a general strike, in which millions of workers paralyzed the country as
protest against the so-called Kapp putsch. After four
days, the putsch collapsed and the SPD government returned to Berlin.
The conspirators were treated
leniently in comparison to the leftist rebels. Kapp and the other leaders were
allowed to leave the country. Most participants were given amnesty. The
Freikorps were eventually dissolved and many of their members later joined the
Nazi Party.
Its violent birth severely
weakened the first German democracy, the Weimar Republic. The far left
continued to advocate revolution. The far right was never reconciled to
democracy and used violence against its representatives. The Nazi Party, while
never gaining a majority among voters, was tolerated and supported by business
and military leaders and conservative politicians, and was able to overthrow
Weimar democracy bloodlessly in January 1933, and later murder
96 members of the German parliament, the Reichstag.
The city of Berlin is now
commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the revolution of 1918-1919 with a
broad palette of museum exhibitions, educational events, discussions, and tours
under the title “100 Years of
Revolution – Berlin 1918-19”.
One of the most striking
changes triggered by the November Revolution in Germany, and more generally the
revolutions in eastern Europe provoked by the Russian Revolution, was the
conquest of the art world by a radically new conception of the nature of visual
expression. The political revolution encouraged and was welcomed by young
German artists, who sought to overthrow the traditional reliance of visual
artists on more or less realistic representations of the material world.
Calling themselves the Novembergruppe,
an “association of radical fine artists”, they, like their colleagues in the
new Soviet Union, rejected most accepted artistic conventions and called for a
radical rethinking of what art meant. Breaking out of the stultifying
traditionalism of German official art, the Novembergruppe offered artistic “freedom
for every pulse”. But their ambitions went beyond aesthetics to seek the “closest
possible mingling of the people and art”. “We regard it as our principal duty
to dedicate our best energies to the moral construction of this young, free
Germany.”
Among the many “pulses” that
the Novembergruppe promoted was a rejection of all forms of artistic realism in
favor of pure abstraction. Following the lead of Russian innovators like Kazimir Malevich, the painters Wassily Kandinsky, Otto
Freundlich, Walter
Dexel and others created non-objective works of color and form. They
invited the Dutch abstractionist Piet
Mondrian and the Russian Lazar El Lissitzky
to exhibit with them in Berlin.
Also exhibiting more
recognizably political works challenging the German economic, military, and
religious elite, the Novembergruppe caused outrage in the early 1920s. By the
later 1920s, they had achieved astounding success. Their paintings, sculptures,
and architectural drawings became accepted and copied. The innovative artists
of the 1920s revolutionized our conceptions of the nature of art. In nearly
every cultural field, forms of creative expression which had been deemed
distasteful, even repulsive, by the cultural elite became first acceptable and then
dominant. Without the innovations of the 1920s, it is not possible to
understand contemporary music, painting, or architecture.
Yet the broader ambitions of
the German cultural radicals of the 1920s fell flat. Their radical ideas had
little appeal to broader masses of the population, who still sought traditional
forms of beautiful art. Art did not transform life. Their radical politics had
restricted appeal. After 1933, the Nazis exploited popular preference for
traditional art to categorize the Novembergruppe as “degenerate”.
In modern society, we are
used to political art. Artists often express political beliefs through artistic
creations as a means of influencing popular opinion. Some are individually successful,
such as Margaret Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale or Norman Rockwell’s painting about school integration “The Problem We
All Live With”. But a collective ambition to remake society through art has
been absent since the idealism of Russian and German artists of the 1920s ended
in disaster in the 1930s. The social vision of the Bauhaus has been subsumed in
capitalist commercialism at IKEA. The Novembergruppe’s radical manifestoes are
now museum pieces on display at the Berlinische Galerie for 10 Euros.
Steve Hochstadt
Berlin
March 5, 2019
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