Art in the Face of Fascism

On the Political in the Work of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis around 1930 to 1942

Stefanie Kitzberger

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‹the way it really was› (Ranke).

It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.

Benjamin,

I.

Two white chairs stand in a room in a pre-war apartment. The building: presumably in Vienna. The room: perhaps a space in which Friedl Dicker lived before 1933, when she emigrated to the former Czechoslovakia in the wake of her imprisonment for alleged passport fraud.3 In this interior space, someone—possibly Dicker herself— documented, one after the other, a total of nine panels made of wood fiber and plywood, around 1.2 � 1/0.9 meters in size,4 which were painted in various techniques, labeled, and on which cutouts of black-and-white photographs and snippets of text were pasted. These panels are six large-format photo collages by the artist Friedl Dicker � 200, which have been categorized as leftist visual political agitation. The surviving glass negatives,5 created using a view camera, thus preserve artistic works of Dicker’s that were obviously meant to address a larger audience, yet were here staged not in their ‹natural› environment—a political exhibition or a workers’ club—but instead in these private rooms.6

Except for one that shows a pair, each of the shots captures a single panel, rotated onto its side and resting on two chairs, the lower edges of the panel touching the seat, the relief of a wooden door visible behind its upper edges. To the left of some of the photo collages, a tiled fireplace can be seen, with a mantle stepped to the top. In the photograph of the double panel, a bed with a checkered bedspread can be made out all the way to the right.7 Above it are three plugs, from which an electrical cable hangs down. The panel to the left lies on two thin books, one of which is an edition of Friedrich Engels’s The Peasant War in Germany (1850). � 203 Though the photo collages disappear shortly after they were documented, and with them any information on the concrete circumstances in which they were created (assignment, function, place of exhibition), Friedl Dicker’s friend Anny Wottitz-Moller will preserve the glass negatives throughout the National Socialist era. Beginning in the 1990s, along with other works of the artist that have survived, her inheritors will make these negatives accessible to a broad public, in so doing also allowing them to be subject to detailed art historical study for the first time.8

The constellation sketched here in which Dicker’s photo collages appear and disappear speaks to the manifold precarity of her entire work: here, we encounter an artwork whose material substance has been lost, which survives only as a reproduction, and for which hardly any primary sources that could speak to the contexts in which it was produced and received remain. This is also true of all the built architecture (with the exception of a few pieces of furniture) that the artist designed in her long-time collaboration with Franz Singer; it has been destroyed and is today recorded only in fragments, via photographs or design drawings. Most of the contextual information in the literature comes not from written documents but from oral testimonies by contemporary witnesses delivered to the art therapist and Dicker-Brandeis biographer Elena Makarova. However, the latter published this information in the form of a narrative of Dicker-Brandeis’s life lacking precise commentary on or critical evaluation of her sources.9

Nevertheless, the reproductions of the photo collages themselves reveal a great deal about the conditions of their own production and thus offer a framework important for their social- and art-historical interpretation. For the domestic space in which these works were staged, which has till now gone without much notice, turns out to be more than just another piece of evidence that the biographer can invoke in weaving a story. A place of social reproduction and of unpaid, ‹feminine› labor, outside of the public sphere10—in which it is still marginalized in today’s political economy—this setting reflects the specific living and working conditions in which the collages were produced by their creator in 1930: as a Jewish woman from a petit bourgeois background who long remained unmarried, from childhood she would have had to navigate classist, racist-antisemitic, and misogynist discrimination. Although she knew important intellectuals and figures within and outside of the art scene, she never managed to anchor herself within an institution, affiliating herself—apart from cooperating with the dramaturg Berthold Viertel and the architect Franz Singer—with none of the wellknown artistic groupings of the European avant-garde and thus profiting from none of their transnational dissemination strategies.11 Furthermore, having no inheritance or savings to draw on, she had to make a living through her own work—a necessity that was massively complicated by the National Socialist coup in Germany in 1933 and the so-called ‹annexation› in 1938, and was rendered entirely impossible by her deportation to Terezín.12

These private and political ‹circumstances› in which Friedl Dicker-Brandeis lived (barely) in the 1930s up to her deportation to the Terezín Ghetto have written themselves into the form of her artistic works, seemingly by accident, as at the borders of the photographs described above: the ‹private setting› emerging from the background of the photographs gives us occasion to reconsider our understanding of the ‹private› as something external to the work and opposed to the political. In the following investigation of the relation between art and politics in Dicker-Brandeis’s later work, I would

Stefanie Kitzberger

like to turn to this aspect. Through close attention to the content and form of her works, I offer an example of a kind of interpretation that spells out the aesthetic mode of the political in the works of Dicker-Brandeis and brings it into concrete relation with the ‹private› biography of the artist, in order to challenge the apparent distinction between politics, art, and private life, a distinction particularly specious in the case of marginalized persons such as Dicker-Brandeis. In the course of this argument, I would also like to try to sharpen the artist’s vague categorization as ‹communist› or ‹leftist› within contemporary developments in social and party politics by attending closely to details of the form and content of her artistic work. This investigation raises the question of how Dicker-Brandeis dealt with the rapidly deteriorating conditions of production, distribution, and dissemination particularly for Jewish socialists in the 1930s and 1940s, and the ways these efforts concretely articulated themselves in her artistic strategies and forms of expression.

II.

While Dicker’s early work is most often considered with a view to formal-aesthetic aspects and the reception of visual strategies from the international avant-gardes at the Bauhaus, it is in descriptions of her later work that the designation of ‹political› most often appears, first and foremost in reference to the abovementioned photo collages as well as the Interrogation series � 152 created directly after Dicker’s emigration to Czechoslovakia in 1933. While it is true that the artist only began to bring her political orientation into her artistic production explicitly in the 1930s, she came into contact with leftist perspectives much earlier. Already in the 1910s, she was beginning longterm friendships with figures connected to the Viennese Zionist-Socialist Jugendbewegung [Youth Movement] around Siegfried Bernfeld.13 In those years, Dicker appears at first to have harbored sympathies for leftist movements within social democracy.14 However, contemporary witnesses primarily speak of Dicker’s activities in communist circles, which she continued and possibly even intensified after her emigration. In Czechoslovakia, she became involved in a circle of leftist emigrants that met regularly in the city center at the bookstore Schwarze Rose [Black Rose] owned by the communist Lizi Deutsch.15 A glance at Dicker’s professional network—the mostly communist

Warenüberfluss [Commodity Overflow] (detail), 1932–33

Inv.no. 15.590/3/FW

Photo Collages

1932–33

Today, the original versions of Dicker’s photo collages are thought to be lost or destroyed. Only eight negatives preserved on glass plates reproduce these presumably colored collages now in grayscale.1 The plates show six photo collages that were all photographed in the same domestic interior—in the backgrounds, the same bed can be recognized. In light of her impending emigration to the Czechoslovakian Františkovy Lázně at the end of June 1933, it can be presumed that, with these hurried photographs, Dicker intended to document works that she could not or was not permitted to take with her. Possibly the artist herself destroyed the originals due to their decidedly leftist political contents.2 The Communist Party had been banned on May 26, 1933 under Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß, barely a month before Dicker’s flight.3

It seems reasonable that the creation of the photo collages is related to the agitprop division of the KPÖ [Austrian communist party], which carried out strategic agitation against fascism and propaganda for communist agendas.4 That the works originated in Vienna is suggested not only by the German-language text cutouts employed in them, but also by a newspaper clipping to be found in the collage Gegenwart und Zukunft des Kindes [Present and Future of the Child], whose dating to 1932–33 lends a terminus post quem. The size, estimated to be around 50 � 40 cm, implies large-format posters, possibly for the purpose of agitation or exhibitions.5 In their figurative dimension, the images feature a high density of collected news material, while in their textual dimension, they contain both montaged lines from newspapers as well as fonts designed by Dicker herself. Although each image features a clear and arranged composition, Dicker’s photo collages do not allow for an instantaneous apprehension of the contents of the image.6 Formally, their fragmented structure reminds of such Dadaist photo collages as those of Hannah Höch (1889–1978) or Paul Citroen (1896–1983) from the early 1920s. Similarly, Dicker’s works represent photo collages based on a mixed technique—since liquid dyes and resizing and retouching techniques nevertheless appear to have been used. Thus, the scissor cut so typical of collage or pasted paper [Klebebild] often cannot be perceived because it has been painted over or because the figure has been taken in its entirety. Dicker had completed

1 The historical storage medium of the glass negative was already an outdated medium around the turn of the century and was mainly used by trained photographers. Because the heavy glass plate was less convenient for everyday use than the flexible rollfilm, it was gradually replaced entirely by the negative film; see on this Willfried Baatz, Geschichte der Fotografie (Cologne: DuMont, 1997), 65.

2 A hint of Dicker’s communist orientation is also supplied by a copy of Der Deutsche Bauernkrieg by Friedrich Engels, which was used for a photograph to straighten the photo montage Gegenwart und Zukunft des Kindes [The Present and Future of the Child].

3 Walter Baier, Das kurze Jahrhundert. Kommunismus in Österreich. KPÖ 1918 bis 2008 (Vienna: Edition Steinbauer, 2009), 37.

4 Dicker joined the Austrian communist party around 1931. There are no concrete sources on her joining the party, only the recollections of contemporaries recorded by Elena Makarova; see on this Katharina Hövelmann, Bauhaus in Wien? Möbeldesign, Innenraumgestaltung und Architektur der Wiener Ateliergemeinschaft von Friedl Dicker und Franz Singer (Vienna/Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2021), 133.

5 Angelika Romauch, «Friedl Dicker. Marxistische Fotomontagen 1932/33. Das Verfahren der Montage als sozialkritische Methode,» (unpubl. thesis, University of Applied Arts Vienna, 2003), 100.

6 See on this aspect a comparison with contemporaneous photo montages of John Heartfield (1891–1968) in Elena Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Ein Leben für Kunst und Lehre. Wien— Weimar—Prag—Hronov— Theresienstadt—Auschwitz (Vienna/Munich: Christian Brandstätter, 2000), 22, as

Fürchtet den Tod nicht [Do Not Fear Death], 1932–33 Inv.no. 15.590/7/FW

Invitations to the 1st and the 8th Bauhaus Evening

«For the artist of the written hand, the contents of his writing are only a pretense, just as the motif of an image is for its painter.»1 With this statement, the GermanJewish writer Else Lasker-Schüler (born in Elberfeld, today Wuppertal, in 1869; deceased in Jerusalem in 1945) introduces her essay Handschrift [Handwriting], in which she addresses the «art of the letter.»2 In the design of two invitations to Bauhaus Evenings3 with Lasker-Schüler and Helge Lindberg, Friedl Dicker, too, takes as her primary concern the figurative or calligraphic qualities of writing. It is in this spirit that Dicker utilizes a variety of invented fonts in the design of these invitations, both of which are composed with lithographic flat printing techniques.4 In both designs, although the written word retains its linguistic value, its figurative function is nevertheless forcefully accentuated in some places, in which the writing takes on such purposes as those of ornamentation or of shading. One could say that writing undergoes a process of spatialization. In addition, Dicker’s graphic characters rarely develop linearly, following no culturally predetermined directions of writing such as from left to right, but rather spreading across the paper in free trails. This playful and free form corresponds entirely with the stylistic features of her lithographic designs of the time. The polymorphism of lines and shading represent one of the primary design principles of all of Dicker’s lithographs, a principle that is augmented by the multiplicity of fonts as a result of the textual dimension of the invitations. The lettering of both of these invitations discloses nothing other than the first and last names of the protagonists of the respective evening.

For the recto of the invitation to the reading by Else Lasker-Schüler on April 14, 1920, Dicker produced her design using lithographic ink or pen.5 At that time, the writer had already achieved a measure of renown through publications in Der Sturm and Die Fackel as well as a series of her own volumes of poetry.6 Dicker incorporates Hebraic motifs, which Lasker-Schüler in her poetry often allows to «uniquely blend» with the Indian, «Egyptian, Arabic, quite generally ‹Oriental.›»7 Thus, for instance, the five-pointed star of David can be seen twice,8 once in a frayed style over the palms9—«the heavens are one single

1 Else Lasker-Schüler, «Handschrift,» Der Sturm, 39 (1910): 309.

2 Lasker-Schüler, «Handschrift,» 310.

3 Walter Gropius, «1919: Manifest und Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar,» in Programme und Manifeste der Architektur des 20. Jahrhunderts. Bauwelt Fundamente 1, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2013), 49. Initiated in 1920 and taking place every Wednesday, the Bauhaus Evenings were a series of events involving lectures, readings, and concerts. Already in 1919 Gropius had incorporated participation in public life as a part of education in the program of the Bauhaus. On this see also Peter Bernhard, «Die Bauhaus-Vorträge als Medium interner und externer Kommunikation,» in Bauhaus Kommunikation. Innovative Strategien im Umgang mit Medien, interner und externer Öffentlichkeit, ed. Patrick Rössler (Berlin: Mann, 2009), 171–185.

4 At the end of the same year, Dicker takes on numerous typography design tasks for Johannes Itten’s almanac Utopia, including the illustration of the chapter «Analysen Alter Meister» [Analyses of Old Masters]. According to Elena Makarova, she was given the task of «devising a font that would make reading itself into a meditation,» in Elena Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Ein Leben für Kunst und Lehre (Vienna: Christian Brandstätter Verlag, 2000), 16. See on this also a letter from the Bauhaus to Anny Wottitz from the end of 1920, in which the artist herself reports on her hours-long work on the typesetting and on the typography, Inv.no. 12.882/4/Aut.

9 Viktor Kraus (1887–?) worked in Reichenberg for the textile factory Carl Kraus Sohn Viktor. His fate is unknown.

10 Kindergarten teacher Hedwig Schwarz, née Fleischl (1892–1968), worked at the Montessori kindergarten in the Goethehof in Vienna, which the studio of Dicker and Singer designed between 1930 and 1932. When the teachers were dismissed under the Dollfuß regime, she initially founded a private kindergarten in Vienna and eventually fled to London.

11 This was the case, for example, with the TéryBuschmann (1929/30) and Reymers-Münz (1930) apartments.

12 These included an interior design for the home of Hans Heller’s cousin Karl Heller (1899–1980).

13 Hans Heller, Zwischen zwei Welten. Erinnerungen, Dokumente, Prosa, Bilder (Wels: Ovilava-Libri, 1985), 43.

14 Gisela Urban, «A Viennese Entertains,» Independent Woman 11 (1932): 400–401.

15 Amelia S. Levetus, «A Most Valuable One-Room Flat,» The Evening Standard, July 26, 1934, 18.

16 See the handwritten note on the back of the photograph; BHA, Photograph Collection, Franz Singer (Inv.no. 7751/8).

17 For more on Dicker’s textile works and her role at the studio, see Katharina Hövelmann, «Die Textilien der Bauhaus-Künstlerin Friedl Dicker: Raumgestaltung und Möbeldesign,» in Textile Moderne / Textile Modernism, ed. Burcu Dogramaci (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2019), 205–215; and Katharina Hövelmann, «Friedl Dickers Beitrag in der Ateliergemeinschaft mit Franz Singer. Eine kreative Zusammenarbeit,» in Friedl DickerBrandeis (1898–1944), eds.

Brigitte Reutner-Doneus and Hemma Schmutz, Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz (Munich: Hirmer, 2022), exh. cat.

18 Hajo Düchting, Farbe am Bauhaus. Synthese und Synästhesie (Berlin: Mann, 1996), 13.

19 Clark V. Poling, KandinskyUnterricht am Bauhaus. Farbenseminar und analytisches Zeichnen dargestellt am Beispiel der Sammlung des Bauhaus-Archivs (Berlin: Kunstverlag Weingarten, 1982), 43.

20 Theo van Doesburg, «Der Wille zum Stil. Neugestaltung von Leben, Kunst und Technik (Schluß),» De Stijl 3 (1922): 33–41.

21 After applying unsuccessfully for a teaching position at the Bauhaus, van Doesburg organized a de Stijl course in the studio of Bauhaus student

Karl Peter Röhl in Weimar in 1922 to teach the principles of the de Stijl movement to Bauhaus students.

22 See the handwritten note on the back of the photograph; BHA, Photograph Collection, Franz Singer (Inv.no. 7751/68).

23 Patent, Franz Singer, «Diwanbett,» Austrian Patent Office, 125629, filed: September 24, 1929; start: July 15, 1931; granted: November 25, 1931.

24 Walter Gropius, Bauhausbauten Dessau, Bauhausbücher

12 (Munich: Langen, 1930), 110.

25 Franz Schuster, Eine eingerichtete Kleinstwohnung (Frankfurt a. M.: Englert & Schlosser, 1927).

26 «Das richtige Wohnen,» Kölner Tageblatt, August 29/30, 1931.

27 Wilhelm Lotz, «Möbel und Wohnraum,» Die Form. Zeitschrift für gestaltende Arbeit 2 (1931): 42.

28 Hans Heller to Franz Singer, 1934, private collection of Georg Schrom.

29 Heller, Zwischen zwei Welten, 49.

30 Ibid.

31 Peter Heller to Matthias Boeckl, February 10, 1993, private collection of Georg Schrom.

32 Selim O. Chan-Magomedow, «Design, Architektur, Agitations- und Gebrauchsgraphik im Schaffen Alexander Michailowitsch Rodtschenkos,» in Rodtschenko. Aufsätze, Autobiographische Notizen, Briefe, Erinnerungen (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1993), 44.

33 Daniela Stöppel, «Falten, Klappen, Knicken als ästhetische Konzepte der Zwischenkriegszeit in Möbelgestaltung, Architektur und Grafikdesign,» in Modern Wohnen. Möbeldesign und Wohnkultur der Moderne, eds. Rudolf Fischer and Wolf Tegethoff (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2016), 135, 143–144.

34 Peter Heller to Matthias Boeckl, February 10, 1993, private collection of Georg Schrom.

Imprint

Stefanie Kitzberger, Cosima Rainer, Linda Schädler (Eds.)

University of Applied Arts Vienna, Collection and Archive

Director: Cosima Rainer

This publication was accompanied by the exhibition Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Workshops for Visual Arts (Exhibition Design: Robert Müller), University Gallery of the University of Applied Arts Vienna at Heiligenkreuzerhof in Vienna (September 23–November 26, 2022)

Further exhibition venue: Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. A Modern Artist, Graphische Sammlung

ETH Zürich (March 29–June 18, 2023)

University of Applied Arts Vienna, Collection and Archive

Postgasse 6, A-1010 Wien https://dieangewandte.at/en https://kunstsammlungundarchiv.at/en/

ETH Zürich

Graphische Sammlung

Rämistrasse 101, CH-8092 Zürich https://gs.ethz.ch/

Biography Friedl Dicker-Brandeis

Laura Egger-Karlegger, Eva Marie Klimpel

List of exhibitions, theater productions, song evenings, and lectures

Laura Egger-Karlegger, Eva Marie Klimpel

Production

Laura Egger-Karlegger, Sofie Mathoi

Image and reproduction rights

Lian Hannah Walter, Laura Egger-Karlegger

Reproductions of the holdings of the institute

Collection and Archive

Manuel Carreon Lopez, kunst-dokumentation.com

Book design

Martha Stutteregger

Proofreading

Jeanette Pacher

Translations into English

Caroline Durlacher, James Gussen, Stephen Lindberg

Image editing

Pixelstorm Litho & Digital Imaging

Printing

Holzhausen, die Buchmarke der Gerin Druck GmbH

Paper

Munken Polar 130 g/m²

Authors

Laura Egger-Karlegger, Julie M. Johnson, Stefanie Kitzberger, Eva Marie Klimpel, Cosima Rainer, Robin Rehm, Bernadette Reinhold, Linda Schädler, Christian Scherrer, Noemi Scherrer, Hamida Sivac, Daniela Stöppel, Mark Wigley

The Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich is part of ETH Library.

Concept

Stefanie Kitzberger, Cosima Rainer

Project Management «Edition Angewandte» on behalf of the University of Applied Arts Vienna Anja Seipenbusch-Hufschmied, A-Vienna

Content and Production Editor on behalf of the Publisher

Katharina Holas, A-Vienna

Editorial Management

Laura Egger-Karlegger, Stefanie Kitzberger, Eva Marie Klimpel

List of works

Laura Egger-Karlegger, Eva Marie Klimpel

Bibliography

Laura Egger-Karlegger, Eva Marie Klimpel

Thanks to Ann Adler, Tanja Aichberger, Dominik Buda, Judith Burger, Luisa Chmiel, Anita Dumfahrt, Nathalie Feitsch, Anette Freudenberger, Natalia Ganahl, Silvia Herkt, Katharina Hövelmann, Teresa Indjein, Rita Kersting, Konrad Krcal, Elena Makarova, Birgit Megerle, Evelina Merhaut, Robert Müller, Florian Pumhösl, Herbert and Katja Rainer, Kathrin Rhomberg, Angelika Romauch, Emanuel Scheib, Christian Scherrer, Georg Schrom, Anja Seipenbusch-Hufschmied, Daniela Singer, Jenni Tischer, Ines Turian, Heide Wihrheim, Georg Wolf, Gerd Zillner, Heidy Zimmermann, Heimo Zobernig

Cover: Friedl Dicker, Franz Singer, Design for the Apartment of Hans Heller: Color Study for the Floor in the Foyer, around 1927 (detail), Inv.no. 9394/5, © Collection and Archive, University of Applied Arts Vienna, photo: kunst-dokumentation.com

All works by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis from the Collection of the University of Applied Arts Vienna: © Collection and Archive, University of Applied Arts Vienna