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John Heartfields Insects and the Idea of Natural History

Cristina Cuevas-Wolf

The twentieth-century belief in a predetermined evolutionary progressiontowards a better life was based on the assumption that scientific andtechnological advancement would lead the way towards Social Democracy.That this belief prevailed in guiding the Weimar Republics politicaldevelopment was the consequent catastrophe that both John Heartfield andWalter Benjamin identified as the state of German society in the early thirties.This coincident focus on catastrophe in both Benjamins critical-theoreticalwritings of the early thirties and Heartfields montage German Natural Historyof 1934 provides the opportunity to read Heartfields montage throughBenjamins critical, dialectical idea of natural history.

Benjamin and Heartfield knew that the idea of natural history relied

on the belief that human artifice can dominate nature and recreate theworld in its own image. They were also aware of how new techniques,such as photographic enlargement and montage, could invert this cognitiveexperience of transformation to visualize instead the metamorphosis ofan active, rebellious nature. It is this inversion of cognitive experience thatinterrelates Heartfields montage German Natural History with Benjaminsaxiom of the way to avoid mythic thinking (Buck-Morss 62). Heartfieldsmontage transposes natural evolution with mythical metamorphosis in orderto produce a new cognitive experience within the representational space oftheArbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung(The Worker-Illustrated Newspaper,AIZ), the site ofits publication in 1934.1This new image of reality presents the paradox ofprogress, the German Lefts failure to create a social democratic republic and

the farce in the picture of Nazism, as tragicomedy (Marx and Engels 40).

2

For Heartfield, photomontage exposed the paradox of ideology byrevealing the contradictions inherent in the juxtapositions of photographs(Mrz John Heartfield 27). He therefore conceived of himself as a publicist(MrzJohn Heartfield 23), who corrected the inverted image of ideology insidethe black box of the camera by exposing the imperceptible montage in themodern camera-image (Ash 302).3For Benjamin, literary montage exhibitedthe material and construed the detail as a commentary to demonstrate


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Cristina Cuevas-Wolf338

historical understanding as a new reality produced out of what had beenunderstood. Both graphic artist and literary critic grasped the constructionof history out of what Benjamin called the smallest, precisely fashionedstructural elements (Benjamin, N 48) to carry the montage principle overinto history.

This essay therefore centers upon Heartfields montage as both hisresponse to and his visual configuration of the crucial years from the endof the Weimar Republic to the rise of German fascism. Scholars have eitherfocused on Heartfields dadaist phase or his photomontages of the thirties,

overlooking the visual interrelationship between these two decades of work.To tie together Heartfields critique of rationalization in the twenties withhis critique of evolutionary progress in the thirties is to address the parallelhistorical and thematic interrelationship between the twenties and thirtiesin Germany. This interrelationship also builds upon Buck-Morsss assertionthat Heartfields allegorical interpretation of German Natural HistoryexpressesBenjamins critical idea of natural history (Buck-Morss 5960). Furthermore,my reading of Heartfields montage in relation to its nineteenth-centuryprecedent and in the context of theAIZs 16 August 1934 issue emphasizesHeartfields critical views on revolution and progress. Finally, this essayconcludes with Heartfields critique of theNeue Sachlichkeit(New Objectivity)in photography and its failure to create a critical readership.

THEIDEA OFNATURALHISTORY

In July 1935, around the time of a major exhibition of Heartfieldsphotomontages at the Maison de la Culture in Paris, Heartfield and Benjaminmet and had a very interesting conversation about photography (Benjamin,Correspondence 494). Although this undocumented conversation did notcontribute to Heartfields conception and execution of his German NaturalHistory. Heartfields montage, however, aided Benjamin in thinking throughthe relation between objectified phenomena and history.

Benjamin came across German Natural Historyat the Heartfield exhibitionin Paris. This exhibition was organized as a gesture of solidarity for Heartfield,who had been exiled by Hitler in 1933 and whose 1934 exhibition in Praguehad become a political issue. In 1936, Benjamin referred to Heartfieldsmontage in a critical comment on bourgeois intellectual development sinceImmanuel Fichte: The revolutionary spirit of the German bourgeoisie hasbeen transforming itself into the chrysalis from which the Deaths Head Mothof National Socialism later crawled (Scholem 64). In this one statement,


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John Heartfields Insects and the Idea of Natural History 339

Benjamin delineates the history of German nationalism from its formation inthe 1870s to its demise in the 1930s.

Unintentionally, Heartfield provided Benjamin with an image to visualizehis critical idea of natural history. Heartfield fathomed an origin of NationalSocialism, from its beginning to its decline, in the facts of natural evolution.The natural evolutionary process is described as bourgeois prehistory, out ofwhich all manifestations of life under National Socialism and all life todayunder modern democracy emerged.

For Benjamin, the history that exhibited things as they really were was thestrongest narcotic of the century (Benjamin, N 51; Benjamin, Illuminations25364; Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 691704).4 Benjamins methodadopted from contemporary scientific theories and discoveriesblasts apartthe constitutive metaphors of evolutionary nature and social organism toexpose natures ontological properties as probabilistic and contingent. This isevident in his essay Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress in which,as he metaphorically refers to the emerging quantum mechanics in the mid-twenties, he compares his method to the splitting of the atom (BenjaminGesammelte Schriften 51), thus expressing the belief that it is in the small

Fig. 1. John Heartfield (18911968), Deutsche Natur-geschichte(German Natural History), 1934. Berlin:Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ, 16 August 1934), back cover.Berlin: Akademie der Knste. Artists Rights Society(ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.


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moments, in the visible ur-phenomena, that the totality of an historical event is tobe discovered. Benjamin borrows from Georg Simmel the Goethean conceptof the ur-phenomenonto overcome the separation between the particular andthe general. This concept made possible a new understanding of transienthistorical objects in relation to theoretical knowledge. Such objects visiblyexhibited their developmental, conceptual nature and thereby pictured theory.Heartfields dialectical image is Benjamins theory of natural history appliedto the actuality of everyday life and the political and historical developmentsthat shaped it in 1934.

GERMANNATURALHISTORY

The critical point of Heartfields montage (fig. 1), Buck-Morss asserts, wasto point out that the belief in evolutionary progress as synonymous withsocial historys natural course was a myth, in the sense of an illusion, an error,and an ideology (Buck-Morss 62). Heartfields powerful dialectical image ofprogress and catastrophe identifies this error with Social Democracy, whichcauses the Weimar Republics radical evolutionary truncation.

Heartfield presents this radically truncated evolutionary process as a fable

in the form of a modern-day emblem for both a moral and a political didacticpurpose. Here the archaic form of allegory renews itself in the moderntechnological medium of the photograph. Heartfield produces a temporalconstellation that allows the photographs to be seen as allegorical rather thanas merely verifiable. He also views photography with suspicion and dissociateshimself from this medium of empirical history by nesting it in a constellationof historical precursors: the archaic myth of metamorphosis, nineteenth-century natural history, and the symbol of the oak branch.

The montage of the words nature and history in the German wordNaturgeschichte (Natural History), used in the title, meaningfully plays on thehuman-animal comparison visualized in the montage of natural forms andhistorical figures. The oak branch, a symbol of the German nation, is thestructure Heartfield builds upon in order to represent the three evolutionarystages of the Deaths Head moth. The branch is almost bare, except for afew leaves, some vestiges of life. It is presented against a neutral background,reminiscent of the pictorial format of scientific specimens, lending the imagethe veracity of a document. The three stages of the zoological developmentof the Deaths Head moth correspond to the three key stages of the historyof the Weimar Republic: Ebert, Hindenburg, and Hitler. All three politicianswear top hats, marking them as Social Democrats. Ebert, represented as a


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caterpillar, was president of the Weimar Republic during a period of economicdislocation and counterrevolution. Hindenburg, represented as a larva,succeeded Ebert as president, and dedicated himself to symbolic politics tomaintain his historical reputation and image as the figure of national unity.5He was then followed by Hitler, represented here as the Deaths Head moth,who proclaimed himself chancellor and president when Hindenburg diedin August 1934. The skull or deaths head on the moths back signifies itsbestial nature and refers to the Freikorps symbol,6 later inscribed into theNazi symbolism of the Sturm Abteilung. The skull is counterpoised againstthe swastika, signifying the insects embodiment of both death and fascism.Together, these signs delineate the development of Nazism from autonomous,paramilitary groups to an organized entity. Hitler is also shown taking flightsince he ingeniously used the metaphor of flight to propagate a godlike imageof himself as Fhrer above everyday political conflict.

The caption informs us that metamorphosis has three meanings: onefrom the discourse of nature, zoology: the development of some animalsthrough larvae forms and caterpillars; one from that of history, the WeimarRepublic: the straight succession of Ebert, Hindenburg, and Hitler, andone from the discourse of myth, the metamorphosis of human beings intotrees, animals, stones. This use of mythology explains the representation andprovides a critical judgement of the referent (Buck-Morss 62).

Nature as a mythical sign has as its referent the historical moment of1934. Its meaning metaphorically and literally builds upon the idea of death:Hindenburg, the legendary national war hero, is politically outmaneuvered byHitler, who ascends to power at the moment of his factual death. The allegoryof death in relation to natural history demarcates the boundary betweenphysical nature and symbolic meaning.

Heartfields transformation of photography, the metaphor of history,into an allegory of death originates from his dadaist images of a grotesqueexchange between the idea of death and playfulness. An example of such animage is the advertisement for the Small-Grosz-Portfolio inNeue Jugend(TheNew Youth, 1917). The conventional representation of a skull with crossedbones, a sign for poison, signifies life as a macabre buffoonery and death

mass (Hugo Ball qtd. in Bergius, 58) and reveals the interrelationship betweenstreet, society, and murder. In the 1924 montage After Ten Years: Fathers andSons, death takes on a demonic, yet fantastic character in the line-up and brutalillumination of soldiers skeletons. Death, madness, and war are nouns thathelp define the reality of the postwar era in Germany. Embodied as skull andskeleton, they reappear in the 1930s in montages such as The Face of Fascism(1928) and The Seeds of Death(1937) to describe the deadly danger of fascism.


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It is through the allegory of death that these montages activate processesof consciousness meant to shock the viewer and oblige him or her to fightfascism (Pachnicke and Honnef 59).

All the symbolism of death that appeared in Heartfields previous workis concentrated upon the image of Hitler as Deaths Head moth in themontage German Natural History: from the skull on the back of the mothshead to signify war and the strategy of murder, to the swastika on the mothstail end to symbolize the destructive power of fascism. This juxtapositionof symbols across the back of the moth implicates Nazi leadership in the

Weimar Republics political disintegration. This outcome gave credence tothe German Communists criticism of the Ebert government for holdingon to old forms of powerthe military and the powerful eliterather thaninstituting a wider, democratic political base.

Heartfield interweaves the concept of metamorphosis with referencesto the Nazi regimes characterization and persecution of humans as animals.The montageThe Bug as Exterminator(1933) refers to the 33 German leftistintellectuals whose citizenship was revoked on 7 September 1933. WilhelmFrick, the Reichs minister of the interior, instigated and implemented theNazi policy to eliminate any enemy of the state (Smelser et al. 8089, esp.84). Heartfield himself had his citizenship revoked on 1 November 1934.In this montage, he represents the anti-Semite Frick as a bug-exterminator

who is out to clear his house of unwanted pests. The beetles body is labeledwith a swastika to identify its type.7The spray can is labeled as though it werea product manufactured under the Frick name brand. Heartfields montagebrings full-circle theAIZs critical attacks against the National Socialists useof biological premises and causes in the sphere of politics.8

THEMODERNBESTIARY

Heartfields insects were drawn from a zoological source, unlike the otheranimals he had used in his montages as representations of death, thegrotesque, or of evil powers. They play on the tradition and the modernmeaning of metamorphosis.9 The tradition of metamorphosis combinedscience and fable and offered a basic parallel for the transformation of natureby art. With the rise of natural history in the eighteenth century, its fable-likedimension declined, while in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, naturalhistory transformed nature into a physiological object of study of humangeography or demography. Concomitantly, the modern bestiary representedthe physiognomy of man in the form of biological and racial categories.10


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tragedy of the Republic reveals itself in the visual constellation of Heartfieldsmontage German Natural History and its nineteenth-century precedent, DerPrsident (The President; fig. 2), published in the German satirical magazineKladderadatsch (1881).11 These two caricatures are antithetical images oforigin, emblems of the Lefts thwarted attempts to create a social democraticrepublic. Whereas the Parisian Commune of February 1848 brought to a headthe unresolved debate over the meaning of the republican ideal, the WeimarRepublic failed miserably in coming to terms with the new democratic order.It remained a constitutional aberration (Bessel and Feuchtwanger 1516).12

Eduard Fuchs contended that because the same utopian features underlay thewhole socialist movement in Germany, the pathetic allegoryas opposedto the sharp reality satireplayed a large role in its political caricatures(Hartwig and Riha 12021).

The caricature The Presidentdepicts key government proponents duringthe Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, the Commune provided an alternative vision of the ThirdRepublic that was politically democratic, socially egalitarian and looselyconfederated. The caterpillar at the top left wears the face of Adolphe Thiers,the president of the Third Republic, who was considered a prophet andincarnation of traditional France. Thiers presided over the destruction of theCommune, represented by the leaf the caterpillar endowed with his features is

about to eat. The second caterpillar wears the face of Maurice de MacMahon,the leader of the conservative republicans. Jules Grvy, represented as thechrysalis, became nominal head of the Republicans upon Thierss death.However, the real leader was Lon Gambetta, the butterfly. This triumphantrepublican abandoned his radical republican position for the sake of securingthe republic, while Grvy, a seemingly dormant being, waited for the rightmoment to burst forth onto the political stage as president, becoming the truerepublican (Hutton 1: 41011 and 43839).

The ideals and experience of the French Revolution served as a lastingmodel for German and Parisian insurrections, of which the Commune wasthe last. For Benjamin and Heartfield, revolution meant something differentthan it did for Marx (Witte 188), who understood the inevitability of a worldproletarian revolution as a natural historical process (Rees and Thorpe 118).This change in meaning transpired in Germany in December 1918. KurtTucholsky feared the Spartacus movement would end up destroying itself,as it happened in 1848, and Franz Pfemfert, who championed revolution,similarly worried. Revolution no longer meant that moment when societymetamorphoses into a new form appropriate to the state of economic andproductive conditions (Hartwig and Riha 17578); it now meant society at apoint of rupture in human history. In light of this critical view of revolution,


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Heartfields montage can be understood as a critique of the euphoria ofprogress under Lenin and Stalin as well as the betrayal of the working class atthe end of the Weimar Republic.13

For Heartfield, the historical moment of 1934 revealed the farce in Nazipropaganda. In the 16 AugustAIZissue, his montage German Natural Historyappeared on theback cover as a counterpoint to the front-page photographof Hitler as both national leader and commander-in-chief (fig. 3). The captionunder the photograph reads: Reichsfhrer Hitler, Oberbefehlshaber derReichswehr, er redet und redet vom Frieden ... Die Kanone vor ihm tut esauch! (Hitler, Leader of the Reich, Commander in Chief, he talks and talks

of peace The canons, standing before him, also do so!) This montage oftext and image plays on the fact that the image is an original photograph,which theAIZeditors are keen to document in small printso that readersdo not mistake it for a photomontage or false statement. The reproductionof Heartfields montages in theAIZblurred the distinction between originalphotographs and photomontage. This minute, yet significant editorialcomment emphasizes Hitlers hypocritical rhetoric of peace. Heartfieldsmontage provides a link between the Weimar Republic and fascism, and shows

Fig. 3. Anonymous, Reichsfhrer Hitler, Oberbefehls-haber der Reichswehr, er redet und redet vom FriedenDie Kanone vor ihm tut es auch! (Hitler, Leader ofthe Reich, Commander in Chief, he talks and talks ofpeace The canon, standing before him, also does so!).Berlin:Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung(16 August 1934),

front cover.


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Hitler as death to Socialist Democratic progress. Yet, this view is filteredthrough Communist policy, which, in the early 1930s, aggressively attackedthe Social Democrats as well as any united front with them (Pachnicke andHonnef 365). By the time the dadaist Heartfield launched his attack againstthe Social Democrats, he had become more steadfastly guided by directivesfrom Moscow. TheAIZeditors, however, strategically gave up the conceptof progress in view of the threat of war and fascism. Rather than strictlyconveying party policy, they aimed at eroding the common assumptions aboutprogress in Nazi Germanys socialist politics.

The fusion of a naturalistic materialism with social history spoke toGerman workers fascination with science and in particular, their familiaritywith Darwinism. Hence, the regular readers of theAIZwould have readilyunderstood Heartfields farcical inversion of natural evolution as theoverarching reason for disintegration. A satirical image they could relish,since theAIZwas smuggled back into Nazi Germany.14

THEMECHANICALEYEOFUNREASON

Heartfields allegorical interpretation of natural history exposed the ideologicalnature of progress.15 Nature, technology, and perception successfullysustained, through photography and its apparatus, a belief in a naturalizedtechnical order, visualized through neusachlich(new objective) signs of stabilityand continuity in a moment of cultural crisis.

Albert Renger-Patzsch, whose photographs quintessentially representthisNeue Sachlichkeit(New Objectivity), insisted in his photobook The Worldis Beautiful (1928) that photographs of both natural and industrial objectsoffer a school for seeing (Jennings 2356; Heckert; Renger-Patzsch). Thephotographs structure and guide vision; they intend to train the eye through apattern of vision to find meaning in the everyday world. For Renger-Patzsch,the essential purpose of photography was to reveal faithfully and immediatelythe essence of the object world. As Matthew Simms claims, to Renger-Patzsch the restoration of photography to its rightful being consequently

also becomes the restoration to legitimacy of that place from which the worldcan be taken in as a totality (Simms 198). The inclusive and varied characterof Renger-Patzschs book suggests an attempt to surmount the impossibletask of recuperating presence through serial representation, which by its veryrepetitiveness negates the notion of an authentic print. By grounding hisworld of pictures in the nineteenth-century analogy between the eye of thecamera and the human eye, Renger-Patzsch sustains a naturalistic vision ofthe world.


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In Germanys major illustrated magazines, images of modern technologyprevailed over this new way of seeing. For example, in the Berliner IllustrirteZeitung (Berlin-Illustrated Magazine, BIZ), technology itself became the objectof veneration and together with attractive photographic reproductionsprovided an optimistic view of social rationalization as in the switchboardof the huge electrical factory.16 The predominance of objective imagesof a prosperous everyday life furthered the assumption that technologicalprogress predetermined Social Democracy. Not even economic instabilitycould diminish this optimism, as the photomontage Deutschlands Wiederaufstieg

in den letzten Jahren (Germanys re-ascent in recent years; fig. 4) demonstrates.The illustrated magazines reliance on photographs and their captions

resulted in their non-objective (uncritical) reading; this was only the beginningof the unraveling of the new objective realism and its reputation as truthfulwitness. The contemporary critic Joseph Roth contended that the commonreader did not test a photographs authenticity, but simply trusted the captionunder the photograph (qtd. in Kaes, 62324, 65354, 658; Feldman andMller-Luckner 39192). Benjamin, sensitized by constructivist photography,

Fig. 4. Anonymous, Deutschlands Wiederaufstieg in den letztenJahren (Germanys re-ascent in recent years) Berlin: Berliner

Illustrirte Zeitung37, 46 (11 November 1928): 1957. 2006Ullstein Bild, Berlin.


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held that the caption promised to become the most important part of thephotograph as cameras became smaller and more ready to capture fleetingand secret moments whose images paralyze the associative mechanisms inthe beholder (Benjamin One Way Street256).17The caption, for Heartfield,highlighted what was characteristic in the subject pictured in the photograph(Mrz,John Heartfield181), while for Bertolt Brecht it was to narrativize thephotograph. While critics could provide a new sensibility as a way out of

the cultural predicament of the New Objectivity, photography itself seemedto offer only a new insensitivity as a response to a sick economy, facing aninescapable crisis (Feldman and Mller-Luckner 39192).

This criticism of rational objectivity appeared not only in the mass med-ia and propaganda of the late Weimar Republic, but also in photo-books andphoto-essays. Franz Roh and Jan Tschicholds photo-book Photo-Eye(1929)serves as an example of how the German avant-garde turned an insensitivephotographic realism against itself to critique the very social order it repre-sented. The 1929 depression proved rationalization to be a natural tech-nique. In Roh and Tschicholds book, Weimar appears as Atlantis and is swal-lowed up by the deluge: Laszlo Moholy-Nagys photograph Paris Draindepictsthe modern drainage system overwhelmed by urban runoff, and Heartfieldsbook jacket design for Upton Sinclairs book After the Floodof 1925 (fig. 5)visualizes a great wave swallowing a city. The avant-gardes sense of impend-ing disaster, here expressed in prophetic terms as a biblical deluge, is furtherelaborated upon in Heartfields montage German Natural Historywhich bridgesthese images of a doomed social and economic order with the specter of ut-ter political disintegration.

The critique of rationality during the Weimar Republic expresseddissatisfaction with science and concern about the psychological and socialconsequences of the mechanized and standardized experience of the individual.

Fig. 5. John Heartfield,After the Flood, 1925. Berlin: Akademieder Knste Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VGBild-Kunst, Bonn.


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It focused its criticism on the Cult of Technology and on Americanism.Siegfried Kracauers review of Adolf Seidels book Consciousness as Disaster(1927) further explains that enlightened scientific teachings of the time inmany ways are a cover for selfish drives. Consequently, Seidel argued, soul andlife are subverted, because they go against reasonor rather, a reasonableconsciousness (Kracauer 1113). Heartfields montage Die Rationalisierungmarschiert: Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa (1927; Rationalization Marches: ASpectre Goes around Europe) takes this critique to its anarchistic conclusionin the form of an industrious capitalism shown as a prosthetic humanoid

machine, devoid of consciousness, and running rampant across Europe.18Today Heartfields photomontages appear as mere signs of a slain

democracy or as a gesture of protest against capitalism. As Heartfield lived inexile in the 1930s, the photomontages he created represented the failure ofthe New Objectivity to produce a critical readership who could rely on theirown eyes and experience to discern the character of their social landscape andmake the painful choices dictated by the given and inherited circumstanceswith which they are directly confronted (Feldman and Mller-Luckner 122).

NOTES

1 This Heartfield montage appears in the 16 August 1934 issue of theAIZ. JohnHeartfield fled Germany in April 1933. TheAIZresumed publication in Praguein March 1933, twenty days after the last issue had been published in Berlin.

2 This mythical form of metamorphosis points to what Marx called the tragicomiccontrast between the illusions of these heroes about their achievements and theactual achievements themselves.

3 I borrow Rudolph Arnheims term imperceptible montage to refer to thehardly detectable cutting, pasting, and retouching of elements to construct thiscontradictory image of natural evolution as mythical metamorphosis. Arnheimclaimed that stroboscopic motion is in fact imperceptible montage. This is theprinciple that made it possible for Eisenstein to make stone lions roar in BattleshipPotemkin. (Arnheim 74ff.).

4 Benjamins Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress is distinct from theTheses on the Philosophy of History, which were completed in the springof 1940 and first published in Neue Rundschau61.3 (1950). However, there arepassages and thoughts from his Theses on the Philosophy of History whichoverlap with passages and thoughts in the Theory of Knowledge, Theory ofProgress (Konvolut NArcades Project).

5 The 16 August 1934 issue of theAIZalso included an article on Hindenburg:Legende und Wirklichkeit (Hindenburg: Legend and Reality).


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6 In 1920, the tanks on the streets of Berlin bore the Freikorps trademark deathshead. See Simmons, Advertising. Simmons addresses the response of formerdadaists in 192324 to the NSDAP Wahrzeichen, the swastika, in Mihaly BirosRed Man with the Hammer: Labours Image in the Struggle of Signs, a paperpresented at the conference Work and the Image that was held at the Universityof Leeds in April 1998.

7 Hitler conceived the swastikas use as the NSDAP emblem in May 1920 (SimmonsHand to the Friend 324).

8 The German government had designed all measures of racial welfare according

to the adoption of biological knowledge to statesmanship. A popular Naziexpression first coined by Fritz Lenz in 1931 was, National Socialism is nothingbut applied biology (see Kuhl The Nazi Connection 36). It is noteworthy howtheAIZalso reproduced images of insects as wonders of an insect circus forchildren and as scientific specimens for the study of evolutionary progressvery much attuned to positive applications of scientific research in Russia. Aphotograph of children amazed at the stunts in the insect circus appears in theAIZXII.37 (21 September 1933): 63839.

9 The theme of metamorphosis also found resonance among avant-gardephotographers and graphic designers such as Man Rays Natural History (seahorse)of 1930 and Herbert Bayers Metamorphosis of 1936. These two images ofmetamorphosis address the transformation of life into death, and nature intoscience.

10 One should keep in mind that biological categories were based on zoologicalcategories.

11 Roland Mrz first identified this visual affinity between this nineteenth-centurycaricature and Heartfields montage (Mrz, Heartfield montiert106). Kladderadatschwas one of the new illustrated journals published in Berlin after the MarchRevolution of 1848, which is understood as an imitation of the Paris revolt ofFebruary 1848. The Commune in turn served as a model in socialist caricature inGermany.

12 Arthur Rosenberg contends that the revolution of 1918 did not create a sufficientlydeep break from the established political interests and the social and economicstructures that determined the course of the Weimar Republic (see Rosenberg).

13 I wish to thank James Goodwin for pointing out this connection.

14 The German secret police reported on 21 May 1933 that, in addition to theillegal Communist newspapers produced in Germany, illegal newspaperswere produced outside of Germany, printed in German and then, smuggledinto Germany, such as die Wochenschrift AIZ, das Ruhr-Echo, das FreieWort, und die Antifaschistische Front. See Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde(Microfiche). Reichssicherheitshauptamt: R/58/3218, Nachrichten de GeheimenStaatspolizeiamtes, Berlin, 21 May 1933, fol. 96. As late as 1935, small versionsof the AIZ were sent through the mail to German contacts in Germany to


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be distributed, along with other communist publications. See BundesarchivLichterfelde, Reichsjustizministerium: R 3001/RJM AG Illg 1 6695/37, fol. 52.

15 The paradigm of scientific naturalism corresponded to a belief in photographyspseudo-natural, rather than technical genesis. This binary relationship betweennatural history and technology structured the visual field of reality in terms ofa naturalized technical order. Therefore, scientific advancement (technologicaldeterminism) could be easily construed as the progress of mankind. Civilizationcould appear to be successfully combating death.

16 Das eindrucksvollste Symbol unserer technischen Zeit: Die Schalttafel des Riesenkraftwerks

(BIZ37. 40, 1709; 30 September 1928; The most impressive symbol of our time:the switchboard of the huge electrical plant).

17 The caption, in relation to constructivist photography, was understood tounlock what had been arrested at the approximate moment of the taking of thephotograph.

18 Amelia Jones refers to this 1927 montage to illustrate how Taylorism and Fordismrationalize bodies by making humans into machines through repetitive labor.Heartfield depicts this concept through a figure he constructs out of fragmentsfrom machines and factories, striding (as a symbol of the march of socializedindustry) across an urban, industrial landscape (Jones 14).

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