“Diagnosis” – emigrant publications in Prague – A2larm
After the Nazis came to power, more than half a million refugees left Germany. People who were persecuted for their Jewish, sometimes political, or often descent for both at the same time fled the Third Reich. From the beginning, the Nazi regime persecuted especially those members of the left who were publicly active under the Weimar Republics. Among the first refugees were, in addition to the Social Democrats, Communists or trade unions, perhaps also artists. It was not just the nameless exiles, the whole culture was cast out. Among the artists were Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Max Beckmann, George Grosz and several other renowned artists. These artists did not hide in exile. They used asylum for the feverish often engaged work of the fascists.
Prague, the capital of refugees
After 1933, Prague became one large refugee shelter and at the same time a bastion of anti-fascist culture. The refugees came mainly from Nazi Germany and from here after the fascist coup in Austria in 1934. Bilingual and culturally developed Prague offered the best conditions especially for artistic and intellectual exile. Emigrants met in various associations and clubs, such as the Urania educational association (now the FAMU studio), the Bertold Brecht Club (located in the Crop Exchange building, now the Czech National Bank), the Municipal Library Club in Prague, the radio building and the communist and social democratic people’s houses. The German cultural elite then met the Czech one in cafes and Prague experienced a relaxed spirit of cosmopolitanism.
Heartfield escaped his Berlin apartment at the last minute. Just before his arrest, he climbed out of the window of his apartment on bound sheets.
One of the most important activities of refugees in Prague was publishing dozens of cultural and social magazines. The German picture magazine AIZ – Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung – was especially important. The AIZ editorial office was threatened immediately after the Nazis came to power due to their openly left-wing and anti-fascist stance. The last issue of Berlin was published under very dramatic conditions in March 1933. And then the AIZ editorial office moved from Berlin to Prague. In April, the well-known Helmut Herzfeld alias John Heartfield, who imprinted an unforgettable visual style for AIZ magazine, literally runs after them. Heartfield escaped his Berlin apartment at the last minute. Just before his arrest, he climbed out of the window of his apartment on bound sheets. He hid for several days, persecuted by the police, and eventually managed to cross the border into Czechoslovakia in disguise.
AIZ magazine in Prague
The editorial staff of the magazine, led by the Czech-German-Jewish editor Franz Carl Weiskopf, immediately set to work, even in limited exile conditions. The circulation of the periodical dropped from a respectable 350,000 to 12,000 copies, but it did not lose any of its progressiveness. He was even smuggled into Germany as a samizdat. Thanks to Heartfield’s genius and the photomontage technology used, the magazine was able to respond immediately to the current situation in Germany and reveal the hypocritical foreign policy of the Nazis, which in fact led to the next world war, because it also became weak diplomacy in France and England. In one collage, for example, the French Foreign Ministry Laval reassures the French public, symbolized by a Gallic rooster on a butcher’s counter, saying, “Don’t worry, Hitler is a vegetarian.” The collage was created in response to Herman Göring’s winged militaristic quote: “Weapons make us stronger, butter only makes us fat.” Heartfield’s provocative cartoons were often reproduced in other publications and became the forerunners of today’s political meme culture. His strategies are used by social magazines and newspapers to this day.
The magazine was renamed Die VolksIllustrierte in 1936. Heardfield still stands in his work thematizing the protection of Czechoslovakia – the country he accepted as his own. In the friendly Czech magazine Svět v obrazech, for example, he published a picture of fascist cancer invading and trimming the Czechoslovak state. After the Munich Dictate, the Czechoslovak government banned the magazine from being published in Prague, and the editorial staff moved to Paris. John Heartfield flew to England at the last minute, where he was later interned as a German and communist in a camp for “enemy invaders.” After his release, he continued his campaign against fascism. For example, he created the cover of a book on illegal German radio. As a refugee, Heartfield could not work legally or be politically active in England, so he did not authorize his work. Nevertheless, he signed in a way: The transmitter operator is himself. Watch the eighth episode of Antifascist Art.