When to Leave the Country: a Study of George Grosz
Lourie, Richard
My question is simple: is it possible for a man to know if his society is heading for a disaster he would just as soon avoid? The history of the 20th century shows this to be a rather...
...A well-known Polish joke will illustrate this: "Maciek is a little disturbed, you know, paranoid...
...The resurgence of interest in mysticism, the occult, and Eastern religions may well not be a good omen for our civilization...
...WE SHOULD NOT OVERDO the image of Grosz as seer...
...Popularity is the key factor here since, for us, a fascination with the East is as natural as a German's with Italy...
...Though he probably didn't share the zaniness of his fellow Dadaists, their mutual contempt for the cul ture that had flowered into war provided a bond...
...Grosz himself distrusted self-psychoanalysis and spent very little time analyzing his relationship with his parents in his autobiography...
...A feeling of despair has crept in because art seems powerless to help man by revealing to him the secret designs of his nature and fate...
...for him, man was a tiny and powerless creature when confronted with powers of such magnitudes, whose dreams were "the dreams of an ant...
...He doesn't think he's being followed...
...Yet though the question is limited, it can force our attention to potentially valuable areas...
...He was born July 26, 1893, in Berlin, the son of Prussian Lutherans...
...Deluged with puzzle pieces, he cannot see the reality for the information...
...If a society is approaching some critical passage one would not expect its sexual morality to become more severe and puritan, unless the danger could be isolated and people could unite against it...
...and a good deal of the utopianism of the present day can be seen as a reaction to the demonstrated brutality of man, a refusal to accept it, an escape into sociological hallucinations...
...Life's beauty, symbolized by the woman in his vision, was never completely eclipsed in his psyche, but only rarely did it shine into his consciousness and art...
...Thus there were objective conditions for a sense of rising power and great expectations, which even the Civil War did not undermine...
...Worst of all, we are unable to decide how much of this fear is paranoia and how much good sense...
...As we have seen, access to information alone is not the solution...
...Anyone who has ever witnessed a social upheaval, on whatever scale, knows that men with definite goals and definite ideas usually function better in such circumstances, because they have been trained not to let their minds become overloaded and thus weaken their will...
...His career as an artist and his subsequent fate were very deeply connected to his initial, conscious visual impressions...
...Murder was a favorite topic, especially sex murders...
...The dream, as he retells it, is too long to reproduce or thoroughly examine here...
...Many of his drawings appear done by a child, a child disturbed by having seen too much of what is bad in the world...
...Most of the mysticism that arises in such cases is feverish and not genuine, a nepenthe for weak spirits...
...A law of distortion operates in all social movements, and the new idea grows increasingly warped as it penetrates the minds of people unable to deal with it or willing only to exploit it...
...To wonder about their probable fate is intriguing—perhaps they will be swallowed up by the spreading mass society, RICHARD LOURIE perhaps they will colonize new planets when Earth becomes as unbearable as New York City...
...The third choice, that of leaving the country, is based on the realization that a given situation has passed the point of no return and has to run its course...
...All young artists were bohemians for economic reasons and Grosz enjoyed wearing the costume...
...The Nazi mystique offered the impatient man the security of merging with the warm, organic collective while at the same time slaking his angers with legal murder...
...In 1932 he visited his old friend Daubler who had discovered him and who was now in a sanatorium near Berlin...
...A recent popular book connected Berlin with black magic cults in Tibet, and there are, of course, scores of more sober attempts...
...But that is the realm of tangible history...
...Dada was many things: a concoction of cynicism and grief, a way to enjoy and exploit emptiness, laughter at the funeral of an age...
...For, after all, what do we artists, we insignificant little ants, have to say...
...a certain impatience results, whether for understanding and salvation or the satisfaction of hostility...
...there was space and opportunity and no serious obstacle between the thrust of the civilization and the Pacific Ocean...
...However, we did feel the growing heat and watched the violent seething...
...These are archetypal colors which arise from the organic processes of life— here, specifically, the processes of sickness and decay...
...When disturbances appear in all three areas at once it is hard to escape the conclusion that the society is in for serious trouble...
...His streets and bedrooms are full of negative sexuality...
...Vast, gloomy, deserted, at night it would suddenly spring to life in its subterranean bars and cellars...
...Only when such a phenomenon attains a great currency does it signal more than a passing craze...
...he hears thousands of voices, the voices of his own hopes and fears, the voices of politicians of every stripe, the bland objectivity of reporters, pictures, articles, words without end...
...Previously, people did not abandon America for political motives...
...For modem man, society has replaced nature as his chief danger...
...Any solutions to them must come about as they have in the past, by wars, revolutions, the building of new societies, the creation of new religions...
...men who had murdered women, sitting on their coffins playing skat...
...aggression...
...Locating the roots of fascism in thwarted sexuality, a la Wilhelm Reich, would find abundant support in Grosz's work...
...My cousin, who had been released from the army later than I, brought me a machine gun one day...
...Still, they have great appeal to the imagination and to our common sense...
...The decision to flee is never a happy one, and the courage of men like Amalrik is as admirable as it is rare (but, it should also be noted, Amalrik views the present regime in the U.S.S.R...
...The streets became dangerous and were markets for prostitution, murder, and cocaine deals...
...Everyone must cross the street and in Grosz's drawings and paintings they all cross at once,—corrupt bankers, murderers on the way home, whores flashing their hard cunts at men with twisted hands...
...Behind the slouch-hat facade there was a sensible, industrious young man who despised neither money nor middle class values...
...It was especially fitting that most of the action should happen in the street, Grosz's symbol of the collective...
...WHEN TO LEAVE THE COUNTRY II hat art in recent times has taken a nose dive is no great secret...
...The novel has been pronounced dead as many times as God...
...Though Grosz was to have some Marxist leanings later on, they could not have gone very deep, for his faith in the common man had been devastated...
...Where is our influence...
...Perhaps Grosz found some happiness in America, or at least some comfort and peace...
...He describes it in the same mystical, portentous manner as he did the horror-panoramas: "It is as if someone—I do not know who—had showed me an allegory, showed me something eternal...
...Though our civilization may be sexually neurotic and though the struggle against superstition in this area is a worthy cause, we should not let ourselves be deceived...
...Like all dreams a combination of personal, cultural, and universal symbols, it is shot through with enormous anxiety and takes place in dark streets, passageways, cellars...
...This is what was disturbing George Grosz when, in his autobiography, A Little Yes and A Big No, he wrote: The best thing for art is for it to be treated as a hobby, an incidental thing...
...The next morning, after Grosz told his wife the dream, a cablegram arrived from America inviting him to spend the summer at the Art Students League...
...The public has new sources of information, instruction, and entertainment, and art, to its own disadvantage, must compete in the market for attention...
...First, a word must be said about the moods of civilizations at different phases of their development...
...It has been said of Kafka that because his neuroses and private obsessions coincided with realities to come he was a prophet instead of just an interestingly haunted man of letters...
...and then that critical period was over, the borders were closed, passports no longer issued, trains inspected by the secret police...
...A great deal of what Grosz produced in the '20s is social art, though there is no denying its completely personal quality...
...Art like Grosz's can serve as an early warning system, a means for studying the collective, and a strop on which to hone new instincts...
...The sexuality we have been denied, or have denied ourselves, was not simply "free" sexuality, but one connected with our thwarted humanity and one that cannot be experienced except with a greater sense of our humanity...
...In 1917 he was recalled, but thistime WHEN TO LEAVE THE COUNTRY there was no hysteria to numb his response to war...
...It must be admitted that the question under examination here is a rather specialized one, since the lives of most people are still so fixed and limited by economic poverty and/ or poverty of the imagination that such things are simply beyond their scope...
...Revolution is the logical choice for a man of conscience in such a case (of course, the large numbers of people who bury their heads in the sand, whatever their convictions, have already assumed the proper position for execution...
...Grosz's style has the familiar, primitive ugliness of the sexual drawings found on the walls of public lavatories...
...To draw like Norman Rockwell was his ambition, to live like Rockwell's characters his secret hope...
...In normal times these two factors work out the compromises known as morality and hypocrisy, but in abnormal times the split becomes pronounced, and the idea of personal salvation becomes increasingly attractive in proportion to the sense that the times are disastrously out of joint...
...For a Soviet man the problem is especially difficult because he must attempt to put together a puzzle with a good half of the pieces missing...
...I won't give this individual any definite features other than to say he is someone for whom the idea of a free and responsible life has not vanished...
...Where our significance...
...Little leaders of diverse political groups lorded over their courts, their scepters the bloody legs of a broken chair...
...as "senile" and thus considers it less dangerous than others, like Kuznetsov, might...
...We did not see those who fed the flames...
...Grosz lived a solitary life, like a Steppenwolf, painting the world around him with "utter contempt": I drew drunkards...
...A second choice is to hold that the evils of a given moment are greater than can be as sumed solely from the weakness of human nature and the ways of the world—and so must proceed from a system, social or political...
...But when Grosz really wished to 514 horrify, he did not draw murderers in the act, or immediately after, but rather chose to show them in their everyday lives, crossing the street, having a drink, as murderers do...
...But, for a start, that may be enough...
...The Berlin to which Grosz returned was a bizarre city...
...If man cannot greatly alter the proportion of evil in the world, he must develop a new set of instincts as sharp as those he once used for surviving in the jungle...
...But, as with modern poetry, too often one is left with ambiguity, a demonic confusion of possibilities, nothing solid on which to plant one's feet...
...Charles Manson was such an enthralling figure to lost souls because he combined in himself these three forces in a darkly powerful trinity...
...After several useful but dreary years in art academies, Grosz discovered the wild Expressionist paintings of Emil Nolde which opened up a new world to him, one very much like the world within him...
...The effect he achieves is that of the kaleidoscopic simultaneity peculiar to public places...
...Please give me your word that you will leave Germany at once...
...Furthermore, there are obvious protofascist elements in the radicals' behavior that disturb those who cherish civil liberties but who also realize that their foundation is a reasonably stable society...
...Here he describes an initiation into the mysteries of sex, but a purely visual one...
...The signs will be there for those with eyes to see and ears to hear...
...I drew soldiers without noses...
...All that we have experienced today as gruesome reality seems to have been anticipated in these horror pictures . . . the violence inherent in these pictures seemed to forecast race and class hatred, concentration camps and mass murder...
...Finally, after many twists and turns of the nightmare, a little man dressed as a diplomat shouts to Grosz: "Hurry up before the stench gets worse," then asks, "Why don't you go to America...
...Grosz was a man who fled in time...
...I was not one of them...
...Explanations of Nazism have ranged over an incredible spectrum...
...A sense of chaos and lateness stokes the hunger for immediate gratification...
...When another Soviet writer, Anatoli Kuznetsov, chose to defect and seek freedom in the West, he was berated by Amairik who saw the Soviet writer's responsibility to remain at home and continue the struggle...
...And he wondered:] Since I can describe these horror scenes and their effect so minutely, they must have influenced my later life and maturity...
...Sex Murder on Ackerstrasse shows the headless torso of a woman on a bed while the murderer hurriedly washes his hands, a demented look on his face...
...But to move to the country is one thing, to leave one's native land quite another...
...But—and this is most important— reality for Kuznetsov and Amalrik is not the same thing, and a man in any modern society has no other resource but his own frail sense of what is real and what is to come...
...He did not see much if any combat and, like Brecht, was to learn the horrors of war in hospitals...
...The dead are buried, Warsaw is rebuilt from rubble and brick dust, and Western Germany enjoys a higher standard of living than victorious England and France...
...Before the Russian Revolution mysticism flourished in Russia (Rasputin, Gurdjieff, Madame Blavatsky), and drug use, particularly cocaine, was also widespread...
...In 1959 he returned to Germany and died of a heart attack a few months later...
...For a man in the West this situation has a reverse twist...
...By then he was in America...
...There is something ironic and pathetic about Grosz's years in America...
...He treats the rest of his childhood quite cursorily except for the chapter entitled "The Vision...
...Many other factors will influence any given outcome...
...He chose wisely...
...woman as the source and continuity of our species forever and ever...
...His father died when Grosz was seven...
...There is a range of colors inherently repulsive to the human eye —the colors of rotten meat, dried blood, unhealthy skin—and these make up Grosz's palette...
...Alexander Blok, the greatest poet of that era, claimed he could literally hear the world crumbling and ripping around him...
...he took their technique of viewing an object from many sides at once and used it in his street scenes to express his vision of collective insanity...
...Grosz became a Dadaist...
...To comfort himself he will adopt a sort of practical Manichaeism that allows him to see good and evil involved in constant struggle—the balance may tip one way or the other for a time but neither force can overwhelm the other...
...There are other people, simply people, whose innate ties with the spirit of free life does not permit them to function well in mass societies—they can be found in the virgin lands of Siberia and the American Pacific Northwest...
...The joke would have equal validity for an American Negro who could not be certain if it is racism he encounters or his own paranoid projections, created, of course, by that very racism...
...For some the draft was the deciding factor, and the black Americans who live in Paris or Stockholm belong to a different but related category...
...RICHARD LOURIE Grosz, himself no theoretician, kept his art and himself alive by trusting his eyes and his instincts, and rejecting comfortable illusions or sophisticated justifications...
...The difference lies in a relationship to time and the course of events which is almost physical...
...I expect exactly nothing from the people...
...The same goes for what a man reads on the faces of people in the streets, what he picks up from voices jammed by paranoia...
...The poet of that epoch, Walt Whitman, put that spirit into long, powerful lines forming a cheerful Bible of self-confident energy...
...In both cases the internal structure of laws, morality, and ideals created within an individual by his culture begins to weaken...
...Do we change the general picture in the slightest...
...LOOKING BACK over the past 50 years we see that the decision to leave was, at certain times, the proper one for anyone wishing to remain alive...
...Can any such knowledge of the collective be obtained, or must we resign ourselves to its mysterious and overwhelming might...
...Let us choose one example and follow it through...
...They have the good sense to move away from the centers of power into areas where they can live on their own terms...
...The depiction of the life of the street is the closest one can come to depicting the collective without resorting to symbolic methods...
...As a movement it couldn't last long—the serious men moved on to other things, and the crackpots retired to Swiss farms to pursue their wistful lunacies in peace...
...Even in retrospect he admitted that he had only the faintest glimmerings of what was to come, and none at all on the eve of World War I. "Those who were not enjoying life craved war...
...In 1916 he was honorably discharged, suffering from brain fever and dysentery, and subject to recall...
...A few months later Grosz's studio was raided by the police...
...There is no reason to doubt their veracity but, as always, the problem is how to evaluate their relative significance andthen assess coming trends...
...Unfortunately, a society cannot deal with such problems through legislation, because these are phenomena that arise when legal and moral powers are no longer deeply respected...
...The first of these is that they will never be able to make a proper judgment in a crisis situation merely by reviewing information...
...Perhaps his despair at the uselessness of art was not wholly justified...
...Both are probably in the sleep between incarnations...
...America in the 19th century was young and strong...
...Sneaking up to a friend's bedroom window, he accidentally caught sight of that friend's aunt undressing...
...Thus, three elements indicate the coming of bad times—chaos in religion...
...Sex murders attracted his brush more than once in a period when hatred had replaced love as the emotional accompaniment of sex, and it must have been very painful for Grosz, whose image of life's beauty was a woman's body, to draw those dirty nipples and dead cunts...
...Through the intervention of influential admirers of his art, he was placed in an asylum for "war-crazed, shell-shocked, and insane soldiers...
...SCANNING THE WORLD in a moment of crisis, our hypothetical individual has only three choices when all is said and done...
...Grosz escaped with his life because obsessions reaching back to his childhood forced his attention onto the violence, morbid sexuality, and feverish mysticism around him...
...The same may be said of other places, other struggles—one only has to think for a moment how many of the outstanding scientists and artists of the 20th century spent a portion of their lives in voluntary exile...
...For those people who escaped in time there was a critical period in which the danger grew increasingly obvious, the battle between the instinct to flee and the strength of one's roots grew sharper...
...For a while he kept his art alive by dredging up images from his memory, but what he desired trom America was nothing less than a rebirth into middle-class innocence...
...He thought I might pay for it on installments...
...Grosz, however, had learned his lessons well and always RICHARD LOURIE preferred careful craftsmanship and precisely constructed designs to chaotic outpourings of emotion...
...When he chose to portray the coming cataclysm it was always in terms of immense releases of energy and his metaphors were the great natural forces, volcanoes, blizzards...
...He had been looking in the right places for a long time and looking hard...
...sexuality...
...bombs and bayonets take more lives than floods and tigers ever did...
...Morality as such no longer existed...
...When Jung speaks of the collective it sounds arcane, when Grosz draws a few people passing on different levels of the same street we get a real glimpse of what it's all about...
...Outrageous that such a condition should be tolerated by the authorities," thought Grosz in the dream but, of course, the authorities wanted their enemies stuck in Germany, the easier to do away with them...
...Evil, he may reason, is part of the very nature of our lives, arising from our appetites, the shortness of life, the limits on supplies, and so forth...
...some people die of diseases from which others recover...
...Many writers and painters long for a society in which their work is valued and appreciated and throw half-envying glances at the Soviet Union where artists are at least taken seriously enough to be punished...
...BUT HERE the attempt is to see the world through the eyes of an individual trying to determine his relation to the world around him...
...In turn, these conservative officials view the radicals as Communists (or their dupes), or as anarchists who create the very situations in which a confused public will support the strengthening of the state to ensure domestic tranquility...
...Such a predisposition has as much effect on a man as a tyrannical father or sheltering mother...
...I feel that I am standing on the rim of a vast ignorance, armed with only a simple question and a single example...
...men with clenched fists cursing the moon...
...Many intellectuals accommodate themselves to tyranny, and many help in its creation...
...In fact, one should not necessarily assume that these people are intellectuals...
...More than ever before there are large WHEN TO LEAVE THE COUNTRY numbers of Americans discussing whether to leave the country or not, and others, whose numbers are statistically vague, who have already done so...
...Guns and shells could be purchased practically anywhere...
...The underground sources report violations of human rights by the state and examples of individual resistance...
...This is not meant as an intrinsic criticism of any of the philosophic orientations, such as Zen, Buddhism, astrology, theosophy, which all have become household words in our time—but it is distressing when large numbers of people reject the basic images their civilization has fashioned to give them a picture of life, time, and death...
...The psychological legacy of the Nazis is so great and enduring one is tempted to call the century theirs...
...Life as an infantryman quickly replaced whatever illusions he might have had with a loathing of mankind he was never able to shake...
...The official sources are like difficult modern poems—they surrender their hidden meanings only to those who have schooled themselves in the art of reading between the lines...
...If we take the example of Russia in the years before 1917, we find that the chief writers of that brilliant generation shared a prophetic and tragic sense of things to come (though they were mostly wrong in the particulars) RICHARD LOURIE that is diametrically opposed to Whitman's...
...The arrest of Andrei Amalrik, the author of Will the Soviet Union Survive Unitil 1984?, is just as good a case in point...
...Obviously, our lives are bound up with that of the collective and yet at this point the rhythms and dynamics of the collective seem as massively unpredictable as nature seemed in the days when science had 508 not yet separated itself from divination and propitiation...
...The invitation was good luck yet it might not have been accepted but for the dream...
...Although it is true that intellectuals often have the most to lose when social situations reach a critical mess, this is by no means an absolute...
...So it would seem that the sudden appearance of popular mysticism indicates a slackening of interest in the world of daily affairs that arises from a feeling of helplessness in directing them...
...It is no wonder that men, overwhelmed by such anxieties, form parties, adopt dogmas and frozen stances on changing events...
...He was disturbed by the sense that though people had stopped killing each other, the war had not really ended...
...This legacy of Nazism, coupled with the confusion of values that marks our time, leads to a general sense of foreboding, of apocalypse around the corner...
...For Whitman and his contemporaries time was copious, spacious, whereas the Russians felt overwhelmed by the lateness of the hour and the crush of events...
...It is worthwhile to pause for a moment and examine the respective positions of an individual living inside the Soviet Union and one living outside it...
...Polls of national mood are often shallow and often simply wrong, as the recent election of Heath in England has shown...
...In great detail, after the space of many years, he describes her every movement and article of clothing as well as his own sensations of terror and rapture...
...There were also warnings...
...Grosz's famous collection of drawings Ecce Homo is a visual history of the German '20s, a vision that penetrated the surface and saw what was being prepared in the hearts of men...
...The chances are that such a vision will sponsor a restraint that is commendable in all but extremely limited crisis situations, the situations in which men perish or survive...
...Freedom, said Amalrik, was something to be found not in a bourgeois democracy but in the relationship between a man and his conscience...
...My concern is with the man who does not wish to fall into that trap, who prefers to assume responsibility for his own actions and refuses to abdicate the right of defining reality for himself...
...And that is how George Grosz got to America...
...puking men...
...Unlike places where men gather for specific purposes, the streets of big cities have something dreamlike about them, an unconscious flow that often makes people forget themselves, curse aloud, sing, talk to themselves...
...MI n our time the minimal model of the human psyche must take account of aggression, sexuality, and the need for meaning, a less distinct but equally demanding category...
...Toward the end of his life he recalled: A deep indelible impression was made on me by the tremendously alluring horror panoramapainting at the fairs and rifle-match fetes...
...Yet the situations of the Soviet and the Western man are not so dissimilar for, in the end, both must realize the impossibility of knowing reality solely by the processing and evaluation of information...
...Besides, something new was in the air, something very bad, and that was what always drew Grosz's attention...
...usually it was to flee vulgarity, provincialism, as in the Lost Generation exodus of the '20s...
...In Germany he had been a prophetic genius because the horrors lodged in his visual memory were touched and stimulated by the events around him, but though America was having bad times, its problems were of a very different order than Germany's and the country seemed blessedly normal to Grosz...
...No matter what movements, artistic or political, he joined in the interlude between the wars, Grosz's painting was never free of the recent horror reaching out to touch the worse horror to come...
...How many such men there are on this planet I would not even attempt to guess, but wherever they are they share certain assumptions, attitudes, hunches...
...Academic cautiousness, the liberal tradition of uncertainty, and the failure of European and Western literature to take the problems of man seriously enough in the last two decades foster a sort of shallow ignorance...
...His earliest years were spent in Berlin and Stolp, a small town in Pomerania...
...The hospital, where they were fed "dried vegetables, turnip coffee and synthetic honey which corroded the stomach lining," was a modern hell, located not in remote metaphysical space but here on earth, at once boring and excruciating...
...Grosz was the official "propagandada" of the group, inventing slogans like "Dada Taber alles" and "Dada kicks you in the behind and you like it," which were printed up in sticker form and pasted all over Berlin, and on the coats of passing waiters as well...
...Many things caused him to leave, and in particular, an invitation from the Art Students League of New York...
...Grosz was no mystic, he gently mocked the occult in several places in his autobiography, and yet he always felt that some "Power" guided him at the crucial moments of his life...
...Had the Nazi experience happened a hundred years ago, we would feel that much better about it, but the fact is that the worst epoch in history belongs to its most recent phase and our minds, like children's, are most strongly impressed by example...
...It was rather faint but...
...He was the sort of child who could 512 pour over illustrated magazine for hours, fall entranced before a label on a cocoa can, lose himself completely in the details of historical paintings...
...He will take the stance of philosophic conservatism, telling himself, A man who isn't a liberal at 20 doesn't have a heart, and a man who isn't a conservative at 40 doesn't have a brain...
...But tomorrow is another day...
...That type of thinking was, in any case, alien to him, and he was more concerned with showing the reader the development of his visual imagination...
...in an alley a quick execution is taking place...
...Civilizations and societies are, after all, as much devices for structuring human psy 516 chological energies as they are instruments for the production and distribution of goods and services...
...His life and art will be treated here as one thing in an effort to find in the man's total experience some clues to the relationship of the individual to the collective in a time of great stress...
...The first is the most tempting—to decide that the evil around him is the same evil that has always been present in the world, but that its modern guises now prompt one to identify it as something peculiarly modern...
...The streets were sticky, covered WHEN TO LEAVE THE COUNTRY with glue...
...When the war was over Grosz felt only disappointment "because the people had tolerated it and suffered it for so long a time, refusing to follow the few voices that were raised against the mass slaughter...
...A poor Jew living in Galicia, with a half dozen children and only the foggiest idea of what was trans 510 piring in distant capitals, had little chance of altering his fate any more than the tribes of America, hunting and fishing in unimaginable oblivion, could have had any idea of what was to wipe them from the face of the earth...
...As always, the trick is to know where and when to look for signs, and how to read them...
...Crisis and conflict will define our immediate future just as they defined our immediate past...
...The zone of collective psychology must also be understood if we are to gauge the impact of the Nazis on us, living men, thinking and making our lives at this point in time...
...The 30 years that remain are uncertain, and not even the optimists are predicting clear sailing...
...A feast and a famine...
...Intellectuals inside the Soviet Union have three main sources of information— the official ones, the underground Samizdat, and whatever a man sees with his own eyes and hears with his own ears...
...Some radical American youths see fascism in every public official whose political orientation is more conservative than theirs...
...But he took to drink, and there was always a great restlessness in him, and when it tinges his paintings of nudes and landscapes they are the better for it...
...In our age the most atrocious acts are carried out by men carrying banners with lofty words and noble images...
...These hypothetical events need not be as dramatic as the invasion of Czechoslovakia or the war in Pakistan...
...Daubler told him: "When you walked in I saw something above your head...
...At this time of his life Grosz constituted something of a triple exposure...
...It kept him in touch with the world around him in a way that contributed to his survival...
...The sociological tools at hand in fact are unable to penetrate deeply into the collective and, what's more, very little effort is made in that direction...
...It is not difficult to link popular mysticism and assassination or sudden increase in murders, though the link is not a causal one...
...His decision to flee came in the most intuitive way, via a dream, yet it was no fluke...
...q RICHARD LOURIE...
...Every society gives form to those three basic currents of human energy, those needs, thereby forming the psychic underpinning of society...
...Theories of history describing the rise and fall of nations with metaphors of health, sickness, senility, and death are no longer fashionable since they are difficult to support with rigorous logic and documentation...
...My intention has been to explore and I don't wish to draw any conclusions more definite than these...
...there is no doubt about it being a rope and an axe...
...Now this problem is really a modern one and bound up with the relationship of the individual to the collective, something of which we are practically ignorant...
...In the last analysis, all men are isolated when it comes to the assessment of a situation in which a judgment leading to definite action is required, for one cannot accept another man's vision of reality without surrendering a power and a responsibility that keeps one human...
...My question is simple: is it possible for a man to know if his society is heading for a disaster he would just as soon avoid...
...He was found semiconscious, partially buried in a dung pit, and was to be shot as a deserter...
...WHAT, THEN, are the indicators in the world around us that signal the coming of madness and catastrophe...
...I resist the temptation of saying that Soviet man, deprived of information, is in a better position to listen to his instincts than his Western counterpart, since there are other factors at work there robbing him of assurance in his own perceptions...
...Was I specially selected to experience horror...
...By emigrating Grosz had made himself neurotic...
...the disaster happened, just to him alone...
...war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms...
...When a great historical enterprise is coming to its conclusion, no Whitmans appear...
...The new sexuality has its dark side, which is not shown in ads or movies that appeal to the fantasies of the viewer...
...Owing allegiance to values he has freely chosen he may in a given situation stay and fight, or leave the country —as he thinks best...
...It would appear that both the tragic Hamletism of liberals and the tragic cruelty of revolutionaries stem, in large part, from their reactions to the immense quantity of information produced by a high-velocity situation...
...My faith has been shattered...
...He lay in a hallway until someone found him...
...It follows that at certain times and in certain places the pressures will coalesce and erupt into social disasters, in the guise of revolutions, rightist coups d'etat, civil wars...
...This was the second visual revelation for Grosz and there were to be no others...
...The history of the 20th century shows this to be a rather practical question...
...In fact, this has become somewhat obligatory...
...Whether the appearance of large numbers of saffron robes is indicative of the coming demise of a social order is an open question, but linked with other phenomena it becomes a cause for greater concern...
...Everyday life and religious mysticism are very difficult to reconcile, and the usual result is something on the order of businessmen's optimism, a watered-down Calvinism without metaphysical depth...
...What precisely such signals indicate is hard to tell and may just as well be a symptom of an internal rearrangement of priorities, values, and directions as the harbinger of convulsion...
...Those who stayed in Germany after a certain point did not slow the war machine and some who did flee the Nazis were able to help in the struggle against them...
...But there was a further twist to Grosz's fascination—the horrible, the bloody, the macabre exerted a special power over him...
...But, to alter slightly Anatole France's remark, if 50 million people do a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing...
...Yet when war was declared he fell victim to the mass hysteria and volunteered...
...But at the very center of that personality was a core of vivid horror, the sun around which Grosz the bohemian and Grosz the good German revolved...
...Unlike the Cubists, from whom he learned much, Grosz was not merely interested in the destruction of traditional modes of perception...
...Henry Miller said of Grosz: "For his violent colors he blended arsenic, vitriol, cyanide of potassium with an admixture of vomit, shit, sweat and tears...
...Grosz wrote: "The world of the 1920s was like a boiling cauldron...
...Much the same is true of Grosz: stimulated by the hellishness of German society, the spellbinding images of horror he had absorbed as a child now began to shape his art...
...All those who sat on mountains to await the end of the world or fled California last year when it was supposed to fall into the ocean, or those who went to Australia in the '50s to buy time against the inevitable nuclear holocaust were, as of the moment, 100 percent wrong...
...We, who are nothing more than puffed-up frogs...
...Anyone wishing to taste the flavor of life in Berlin right after the war, and on into the '20s, could find few better firsthand accounts than Grosz's autobiography: Barbarism prevailed...
...The example of Nazism makes us afraid of the state, society, our fellowmen, both of reason and of passion, and of ourselves, if we are honest...
Vol. 19 • July 1972 • No. 3
