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Iron Muse: Photographing the Transcontinental Railroad

includes some detailed discussion of Heartfield’s technical working methods – those painstaking stages in the montage’s meticulous construction that increasingly produced not rupture, but ‘a smoothed, sutured reality’ or, in some cases ‘a hallucinatory counterreality’. Kriebel’s third chapter (a version of which was published in 2008) focuses on the last, urgent and conflict-ridden year of the doomed Weimar Republic – 1932 – and the role of photomontage on both the left and the right in the political struggles and multiple elections that preceded the consolidation of National Socialism and the collapse of German democracy. There are challenges to writing about the politics of many of Heartfield’s montages. It can be argued that the challenges of writing about his humour are greater. Almost anyone who has looked at Heartfield’s montages will have had cause to laugh (or at least to smile) and yet their comedic value is inextricable from the ‘disgust’ that they increasingly articulated. One of the most distinctive and compelling chapters of Revolutionary Beauty is the fourth, entitled ‘Left-Wing Laughter’. It begins with a consideration of a montage by Heartfield showing the steel magnate Fritz Thyssen toying with a miniature jumping jack in the image of Adolf Hitler. This provides the opening for a rich and intricately crafted analysis both of the nature of Heartfield’s humour and of the ‘repulsion and repugnance’ it draws on and produces. Nodding to Freudian models of comic pleasure and negotiating theories of the grotesque and the carnivalesque, Kriebel shows how Heartfield’s pictorial vocabulary increasingly accommodated ‘the accelerating rhetoric of purity versus impurity’. Kriebel cites in this connection the appearance in the Weimar-period AIZ of Socialists and National Socialists as ‘predatory animals at the top of the food chain – a shark, a hyena, a tiger’, whereas during Heartfield’s later Prague exile, ‘hirsute and larval insects crawl into the magazine as fascist embodiments, joined by dwarves, nonhuman primates, a warty toad, fowl, mice, degenerate humans’ – and more. The chapter develops a sophisticated and convincing reading of the complex processes, aesthetic and political, by which Heartfield’s montages and his ‘holy hate’, ‘produced and reinforced a community of left-wing laughers’. Kriebel’s final chapter, the title of which is lent to the book itself, is no less ambitious. It considers Heartfield’s ‘revolutionary beauty’ in the light of his connections with Paris and Surrealism and begins to bring the whole study to its conclusion by exploring the implications for Heartfield’s practice of ‘an irrational language of the collective unconscious’ combined with ‘the accessibility and historical totality demanded by Socialist Realism’. Kriebel’s work on Heartfield, photography, propaganda and politics at this critical time in European history is both theoretically rigorous and historically timely. These books will make it onto more bookshelves than coffee tables. Nonetheless, they are both tastefully packaged and generously illustrated, Zervigón’s having just the edge in terms of glossy picture quality. Detailed notes and a solid bibliography augment both volumes. Both authors write in a fluent and engaging manner, admirably marshalling their complex material into a series of compelling and satisfying essays. Both writers stake out the individuality and ownership of their respective arguments – not least through a liberal and assertive use of the first person. There are, however, some stylistic differences between the two authors’ voices. Personal preference will determine which is more of a pleasure to read. Zervigón’s writing has a brisk, sachlich clarity and zips along in an easy, sometimes conversational tone that makes it highly accessible, even when he is dealing with complex concepts and material. Kriebel’s prose is painstakingly crafted and rich with adjectival vocabulary in particular that will be as satisfying to one reader as it may be too much for another. What is clear is that the appearance of these two books should be a cause for celebration. Heartfield matters. That he is still the subject of serious work by searching and committed scholars is fitting. In the course of the heated ‘Expressionism debate’ among Marxist intellectuals in 1938, the philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote: ‘Heartfield’s satirical photo-collages were so close to the folk that many educated people do not want to have anything to do with montage’. Today the reverse may bemore the case, but Heartfield remains vital and centrally relevant – as his practice and these meticulous studies make clear.