George Grosz: “Shut up and continue to serve”

What do Munich and Vienna have in common, as does Hanover and Düsseldorf, but also Meiningen? And what makes these cities different from Berlin? Well, the capital of the Federal Republic, where people have a lot of ideas about local cultural life, does not have a theater museum. Which is at least highlighted as a defect from time to time. Even if there is currently no one – not God, not the state and certainly not the Cultural Senate – who can find a way to remedy this. Here you can consider yourself lucky if at least none of the opera houses are closed.

It is all the more gratifying that the Small Grosz Museum, which was founded on a private initiative, can step into the breach. Of course, this is not a museum for the performing arts, but rather a permanent and so far four special exhibitions are dedicated to the work of its namesake, the graphic artist and painter George Grosz. The most recent special exhibition, which opened last week, is entitled “What kind of times are these? – Grosz, Brecht & Piscator” and shows the working relationship between the two theater people Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator and the formative visual artist of the Weimar Republic.

The museum owes its distinctive location on Berlin’s Bülowstrasse to the Swiss gallery owner and collector Jueg Judin. In the 2000s, he had a Shell gas station converted into a residential and studio building. And this striking building is now home to The Little Grosz Museum.

Here, the mutual relationships of the three workers in the quarry of Enlightenment art – Grosz, Brecht, Piscator – are examined, and the curators succeed in this with a manageable but cleverly designed exhibition that primarily shows visual works by Grosz, as well as some unknown documents and archives brought to light and made plausible through short but instructive accompanying texts.

The three came together for a single joint work that was to make history: “The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schwejk” based on the novel by Jaroslav Hašek, premiered in January 1928 at the Piscatorbühne in the Theater am Nollendorfplatz (not far from the museum). Hašek’s material, a novel about the rogue Schwejk, who navigates the war with wit and cunning and, as if in passing, shows us the depravity of the army and the senselessness of war deaths, fit well into the Weimar years, into the short time between the wars. And, just by the way, reading it would do some people good even today, given the longing for heroes and new enthusiasm for military affairs.

Piscator, multimedia artist avant la lettre, drew as director. Brecht, who was soon working on his play “Schwejk in the World War,” eagerly wrote the stage version. And Grosz became the stage designer for the production. He made parts of the play’s staff as figurines, which he and Piscator marched on stage on treadmills. Grosz’s drawings were projected behind the scenic event, forming a cartoon. The exhibition also gives an impression of this. Both the use of moving images and the extensive use of previously unknown stage technology are innovations that Piscator first introduced in Germany.

If you look at the black-and-white photographs of the production in the exhibition, you can sense how difficult it is to reconstruct the ephemeral art form of theater profitably for a broad audience. But, in short: Grosz’s graphics for the “Schwejk” complex exude a multiple of the esprit that a photographic documentation is capable of, and so you get an impression of the pace and liveliness of what was to be seen on stage must. And also about how the artist’s quick, reduced strokes, the tendency to typecast, the search for the striking in the figure all meet the stage art.

Grosz’s practical works for the theater had a remarkable afterlife. For the premiere of “Schwejk,” Grosz published a portfolio of drawings for the material, which he simply titled “Background.” This in turn led to the longest art process in the Weimar Republic. Ultimately, the artist is right: the folder is allowed to appear, but individual sheets in it fall victim to a ban.

Among them is Grosz’s opus “Shut Up and Continue to Serve,” also known as “Christ in the Gas Mask.” In addition to the clear anti-militarist message, this work is particularly impressive because of the economy of means and the artist’s ability to create scenes with just a few strokes. The depiction of Christ on the cross, an extremely brutal image not only in Grosz’s work, has an obvious addition: the Savior is equipped with boots and a gas mask, which may only be noticed at second glance. And the questions quickly arise in the viewer’s mind: Who is dying here for whose sins? For whom is the martyrdom? A ban was ultimately the logical consequence.

The exhibition focus “Schwejk” is supplemented by drawings for a later collaboration between Brecht and Grosz. In 1932, Grosz became the illustrator for Brecht’s children’s poetry collection “The Three Soldiers”, which eked out a shadowy existence within Brecht’s oeuvre. A children’s book that would hardly be recommended by educators today because of its unadorned preoccupation with the war.

Finally, The Little Grosz Museum also shows the previously largely unnoticed correspondence between Brecht and Grosz, which bears witness to a lasting mutual interest and also to a friendship at and despite distance. The fact that the letters and counter-letters are printed together for the first time in the – extremely elegantly designed – exhibition catalog does not make it a substitute for the highly recommended visit to the museum, but it does add some value to it.

»What are these times? – Grosz, Brecht & Piscator”, The Little Grosz Museum, Bülowstraße 18, Berlin, until November 25th.
The exhibition catalog with the same title is published by the bookstore Walther and Franz König, 292 pages, hardcover, €35.