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sabotabbyYou asked for more art history posts so I'm afraid that you have no one to blame but yourselves for yet another lengthy dip into the early 20th century avant-garde. If anyone had "Sabs holds forth about John Heartfield" on their bingo card, congrats, you are correct, and your prize is that you get to read about me holding forth about John Heartfield.
But first! Happy Easter to my Christian American peeps!
As they said during the time that we acknowledged the covid pandemic, "Easter will look a little different this year." Which is to say, despite ostensibly electing Trump because of the high cost of eggs, the price of eggs has not come down and in fact has gone up, leading the regime's propagandists to pen numerous articles suggesting that Americans instead dye potatoes, turnips, and marshmallows. What was supposed to be an American golden age of economic prosperity is in fact, more of the same, with the change that you probably no longer have a job.
And while for another week or so I can laugh from over here in Canada at the irony that America can't even properly produce eggs, literally one of the easiest things in the world to produce, it's a little horrifying to see how quickly the failed state has managed to trash the economy. The right wing tends to talk a good game about economics, but that's only because your average slob doesn't understand how economics work. I include economists across the political spectrum in that "average slob" designation, by the way, which is to say that the vast majority of economists believe in a critically dangerous fiction—that of infinite growth. Only those on the extreme left and the extreme right acknowledge that line can't go up forever on a planet with finite resources. This is self-evident but society as we know it would crumble tomorrow if anyone acknowledged it. The extreme left proposes extreme left solutions like "maybe we shouldn't keep burning fossil fuels and redistribute the existing wealth better than we currently do," while the extreme right proposes practical, reasonable solutions like "if we purge all the immigrants and transes, you can live in the houses they were forced to abandon and get all their stuff and thus we can keep burning fossil fuels until we get to Mars." For whatever reason, most people in the Anglosphere are suckers for the latter approach.
Interestingly, despite all of Trump's rhetoric around the return of factory jobs, most MAGAs don't actually want to work in factories themselves. Nor do they want to pick blueberries, judging by a since-deleted post with hilarious comments by a farm desperate for workers now that the mass deportations have started:
My favourite comment on the post: "Y'all better ask Chat GPT to pick them bluberries😂😂😂😂."
It would seem that the right doesn't actually buy their own propaganda on the economy. As it turns out, conservatives, let alone fascists, are predictably awful at managing money (unsurprising; their economic model is the casino, which they're also not good at); not only will the trains not run on time, but the planes will fall out of the sky.
So if all of these Trump voters knew deep down that he wasn't going to make their eggs any cheaper, why did they vote for him? What is the promise of fascism?
We often characterize fascism as a quest for stability, but as I said in my last art history post, the roots of fascism are radical. Fascism promises not stability, but excitement. Revenge on your enemies—you know damn well the immigrants weren't living in nice suburban houses that you'll get to keep once they've been delivered to the gulag in El Salvador, and you sure as fuck don't want those jobs they stole, but at least you get to watch them suffer. There's an element of nostalgia to it for sure—fascism promises to return you to a particular time in your life, one where you felt safe and protected, say, when your parents met all your material and emotional needs. That's why I think that the Cybertruck looks like a toy; perhaps even why Trump and Elon (who killed 10-year-old Peter Donde) dress like oversized children themselves, in sloppy suits that are too big and hoodies and baseball caps. Fascists want to return to Mommy's teat and Daddy's certainty.
But more than that, they wish to be important. In fact, the only time male fascists ever felt important to a women they loved was when they were children, and the centre of Mommy's world. Hence you see the desire for a subservient child-bride—I will be important to her because she's wholly dependent on me and has no power to resist. Fascists want to be main characters; they want to live in the most important part of history, in which they are the most important person. This is the promise that fascism makes to mediocre men.
And once the veneer of a lower cost of living is wiped away, you see beneath what the price of living at the most important time in history is: suffering. And rather than deny the suffering, the fascist in short order makes the suffering—even that of his own followers—the entire point. Main characters suffer, after all. This was what you wanted all along.
Enter our hero, John Heartfield. I'm not being sarcastic; he really is one of my heroes. He was born Helmut Herzfeld in Berlin to two socialist activists. His parents eventually disappeared, persecuted for blasphemy, and he and his siblings were abandoned in the woods, eventually rescued by an aunt. As a child, he was sent to a reformatory for a "students' revolt" in elementary school.
He changed his name during World War I in protest of anti-British sentiment in Berlin. Running through his biography is a deep shame in his country, a deep rage at the failure of his fellow citizens to make better fucking choices. He got himself out of the army by feigning insanity. He joined the Communist Party and the Dada movement, supported strikes, built sets for Bertolt Brecht and designed book covers for Upton Sinclair, was interned as an "enemy alien," and ultimately died in East Berlin.
Oh yes, and he invented photomontage, despite dying two decades before the advent of Photoshop. Collage was a common medium amongst the Dadaists, most notably Hannah Hoch, but his work has a particularly startling realism to it despite the limited technology.
And now I'm back to the price of eggs. Because I can't look at those headlines celebrating the ingenuity of Americans painting turnips without thinking of Heartfield's most famous work, "Hurrah, die Butter ist alle!" ("Hurray, the butter is gone!"), 1935.
It depicts a German family, seated around a dinner table by a portrait of Hitler, surrounded by swastika wallpaper, eating the products of the Nazi war machine. It is based on a speech Hermann Göring, quoted at the bottom of the image. It reads: “Ore has always made an empire strong, butter and lard have made a country fat at most.”
The fascist may pay lip service to your future prosperity; in the end, he only wants you to celebrate your own suffering. You knew you would never regain the safety and security of Mommy; what remains is the sadomasochistic thrill of being whipped by Daddy.
Happy Easter everyone, and enjoy your painted turnips!
P.S. If you need a chaser, of course Heartfield also had a big influence on industrial music, so here is is name-checked along with Hoch (and Marinetti) by Einstürzende Neubauten:
But first! Happy Easter to my Christian American peeps!
As they said during the time that we acknowledged the covid pandemic, "Easter will look a little different this year." Which is to say, despite ostensibly electing Trump because of the high cost of eggs, the price of eggs has not come down and in fact has gone up, leading the regime's propagandists to pen numerous articles suggesting that Americans instead dye potatoes, turnips, and marshmallows. What was supposed to be an American golden age of economic prosperity is in fact, more of the same, with the change that you probably no longer have a job.
And while for another week or so I can laugh from over here in Canada at the irony that America can't even properly produce eggs, literally one of the easiest things in the world to produce, it's a little horrifying to see how quickly the failed state has managed to trash the economy. The right wing tends to talk a good game about economics, but that's only because your average slob doesn't understand how economics work. I include economists across the political spectrum in that "average slob" designation, by the way, which is to say that the vast majority of economists believe in a critically dangerous fiction—that of infinite growth. Only those on the extreme left and the extreme right acknowledge that line can't go up forever on a planet with finite resources. This is self-evident but society as we know it would crumble tomorrow if anyone acknowledged it. The extreme left proposes extreme left solutions like "maybe we shouldn't keep burning fossil fuels and redistribute the existing wealth better than we currently do," while the extreme right proposes practical, reasonable solutions like "if we purge all the immigrants and transes, you can live in the houses they were forced to abandon and get all their stuff and thus we can keep burning fossil fuels until we get to Mars." For whatever reason, most people in the Anglosphere are suckers for the latter approach.
Interestingly, despite all of Trump's rhetoric around the return of factory jobs, most MAGAs don't actually want to work in factories themselves. Nor do they want to pick blueberries, judging by a since-deleted post with hilarious comments by a farm desperate for workers now that the mass deportations have started:
My favourite comment on the post: "Y'all better ask Chat GPT to pick them bluberries😂😂😂😂."
It would seem that the right doesn't actually buy their own propaganda on the economy. As it turns out, conservatives, let alone fascists, are predictably awful at managing money (unsurprising; their economic model is the casino, which they're also not good at); not only will the trains not run on time, but the planes will fall out of the sky.
So if all of these Trump voters knew deep down that he wasn't going to make their eggs any cheaper, why did they vote for him? What is the promise of fascism?
We often characterize fascism as a quest for stability, but as I said in my last art history post, the roots of fascism are radical. Fascism promises not stability, but excitement. Revenge on your enemies—you know damn well the immigrants weren't living in nice suburban houses that you'll get to keep once they've been delivered to the gulag in El Salvador, and you sure as fuck don't want those jobs they stole, but at least you get to watch them suffer. There's an element of nostalgia to it for sure—fascism promises to return you to a particular time in your life, one where you felt safe and protected, say, when your parents met all your material and emotional needs. That's why I think that the Cybertruck looks like a toy; perhaps even why Trump and Elon (who killed 10-year-old Peter Donde) dress like oversized children themselves, in sloppy suits that are too big and hoodies and baseball caps. Fascists want to return to Mommy's teat and Daddy's certainty.
But more than that, they wish to be important. In fact, the only time male fascists ever felt important to a women they loved was when they were children, and the centre of Mommy's world. Hence you see the desire for a subservient child-bride—I will be important to her because she's wholly dependent on me and has no power to resist. Fascists want to be main characters; they want to live in the most important part of history, in which they are the most important person. This is the promise that fascism makes to mediocre men.
And once the veneer of a lower cost of living is wiped away, you see beneath what the price of living at the most important time in history is: suffering. And rather than deny the suffering, the fascist in short order makes the suffering—even that of his own followers—the entire point. Main characters suffer, after all. This was what you wanted all along.
Enter our hero, John Heartfield. I'm not being sarcastic; he really is one of my heroes. He was born Helmut Herzfeld in Berlin to two socialist activists. His parents eventually disappeared, persecuted for blasphemy, and he and his siblings were abandoned in the woods, eventually rescued by an aunt. As a child, he was sent to a reformatory for a "students' revolt" in elementary school.
He changed his name during World War I in protest of anti-British sentiment in Berlin. Running through his biography is a deep shame in his country, a deep rage at the failure of his fellow citizens to make better fucking choices. He got himself out of the army by feigning insanity. He joined the Communist Party and the Dada movement, supported strikes, built sets for Bertolt Brecht and designed book covers for Upton Sinclair, was interned as an "enemy alien," and ultimately died in East Berlin.
Oh yes, and he invented photomontage, despite dying two decades before the advent of Photoshop. Collage was a common medium amongst the Dadaists, most notably Hannah Hoch, but his work has a particularly startling realism to it despite the limited technology.
And now I'm back to the price of eggs. Because I can't look at those headlines celebrating the ingenuity of Americans painting turnips without thinking of Heartfield's most famous work, "Hurrah, die Butter ist alle!" ("Hurray, the butter is gone!"), 1935.
It depicts a German family, seated around a dinner table by a portrait of Hitler, surrounded by swastika wallpaper, eating the products of the Nazi war machine. It is based on a speech Hermann Göring, quoted at the bottom of the image. It reads: “Ore has always made an empire strong, butter and lard have made a country fat at most.”
The fascist may pay lip service to your future prosperity; in the end, he only wants you to celebrate your own suffering. You knew you would never regain the safety and security of Mommy; what remains is the sadomasochistic thrill of being whipped by Daddy.
Happy Easter everyone, and enjoy your painted turnips!
P.S. If you need a chaser, of course Heartfield also had a big influence on industrial music, so here is is name-checked along with Hoch (and Marinetti) by Einstürzende Neubauten:
no subject
Date: 2025-04-20 02:30 pm (UTC)IDNK who that is.
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From:🐆🐆🐆
Date: 2025-04-20 02:44 pm (UTC)Re: 🐆🐆🐆
From:Re: 🐆🐆🐆
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Date: 2025-04-20 03:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2025-04-20 08:53 pm (UTC)Way-hey! YouTube won't give it to me with the Heartfield cover, but I am contractually obliged to yes-and with Siouxsie and the Banshees' "Mittageisen" (1978).
leading the regime's propagandists to pen numerous articles suggesting that Americans instead dye potatoes, turnips, and marshmallows.
You won't believe the superfood boost of bark bread.
Elon (who killed 10-year-old Peter Donde)
I like this opposite of a z"l of yours, although not the necessity of it.
P.S. If you need a chaser, of course Heartfield also had a big influence on industrial music, so here is is name-checked along with Hoch (and Marinetti) by Einstürzende Neubauten
I do appreciate the chaser, since I am not enjoying this national experience of being nonconsensually smothered in mediocre dude's id.
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Date: 2025-04-20 09:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2025-04-20 11:02 pm (UTC)....I love him
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Date: 2025-04-20 11:28 pm (UTC)https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/03/tesla-cybertruck-protests-vandalism-elon-musk.html
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Date: 2025-04-21 02:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2025-04-21 05:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2025-04-22 01:22 am (UTC)I really love these antifascist art criticism posts a lot.
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