Leon Trotsky (1879-1940): Ukrainian Jew, cosmopolitan intellectual, founder of the Red Army

1. MANY LEFT-WING INTELLECTUALS THRILLED TO THE SLOGANS OF THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL BUT SENSED AT SOME POINT THAT THE SOVIET UNION STIFLED ALL DEBATE AND CREATIVITY

2. Joseph Vissarionovich Jugashvili, code-named “Stalin” (1878-1953):photographed with Lenin in 1922

3. Leon Trotsky (1879-1940): Ukrainian Jew, cosmopolitan intellectual, founder of the Red Army

4. Stalin secured the exile of Trotsky in 1927 and soon ordered the rewriting of history, as in this retouched photo of Lenin addressing Red Army recruits in Moscow’s Red Square in May 1920

5. “We will smite the kulak who agitates for reducing the cultivated area”(USSR, 1930)

6. “Religion is poison. Safeguard the children”(USSR, 1930)

7. “Imperialists cannot stop the triumphal march of the Five-Year Plan”(USSR, 1930): Industrialization was needed, Stalin declared, because an Imperialist onslaught was ever more likely….

8. “We will smite the lazy workers!” (USSR, 1931)

9. “RAISE HIGHER THE BANNER OF LENINISM, THE BANNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION” (N. Kochergin, 1932)

10. THE COMINTERN RECRUITED MANY ARTISTS AND WRITERS TO SUPPORT A “HELP RUSSIA” ANTI-FAMINE CAMPAIGN IN 1921/22(poster by Käthe Kollwitz) But George Grosz was disillusioned when he met Soviet leaders on a tour of the USSR in 1922: “Many acted like living, red-bound brochures and were proud of it. Naturally they sought, since it was supposed to be the time of the masses, to suppress entirely their little individuality, and would have preferred to have faces of gray cardboard with red numbers on them instead of names.”

11. George Grosz,“The Pillars of Society”(1926):Kurt Tucholsky wrote, “I know no one who has grasped the modern face of the holders of power right down to the last alcoholic veins as Grosz has. The secret: he not only laughs, he hates.”

12. George Grosz,Manhattan(1934):He settled in New York in 1932, even before the Nazi seizure of power

13. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) travelled to Moscow in 1927 to pursue love and a career but learned that the avant-gardewas being shut down….

14. Bruno Voigt (1912-1988),“Anti-War Demonstration”(1932):Art in the style of “socialist realism” imposed by Stalin as official Soviet policy in 1932

15. Bruno Voigt,“Attack” (1932):The crowd demands “Jobs and Bread”

16. Bruno Voigt,“Street Fight”(1932)

17. Bruno Voigt,“Capitalism Has Reached Its Zenith!”(1932)

18. John Heartfield, “Fathers and Sons,” 1924 (born Helmut Herzfelde in Berlin, 1891; name change in 1916

19. John Heartfield, “Corpses in the Ditch/ The Last Hope of the Rich” (1932): According to the Comintern, big business could see no way out of the Great Depression except an arms race….

20. Heartfield,“His Majesty Adolf:I will lead you to glorious slimes!” (1932)[by changing a Z to a PL, the Kaiser’s promise of “glorious times” becomes a promise of bankruptcy].

21. John Heartfield,“The True Meaning of the Hitler Greeting.‘Millions Stand Behind Me!’A Small Man Requests Large Gifts”(1932).Heartfield toured the USSR in 1931/32 but chose NOT to flee there in 1933

22. Rudolf Schlichter,“Portrait of Bert Brecht”(1926) 1898: Born into a prosperous Augsburg family; his Protestant mother taught him the Bible 1917/18: Evaded war service by enrolling for medical study 1919:Drums in the Night, set in a bar during the Spartacist uprising 1922: In the Jungle of the Cities (inspired by Upton Sinclair) 1926:Man Equals Man (inspired by Kipling) 1927: Brecht collaborates with Erwin Piscator, Kurt Weill, and the dissident Communist theorist Karl Korsch

23. Act II of DRUMS IN THE NIGHT (Berlin premier, 1922): The denizens of a bar are wrapped up in their private miseries as the Spartacists attempt their uprising

24. In the Jungle of the Cities (Chicago production from 2010):“You are in Chicago in 1912. You are about to witness an inexplicable wrestling match between two men and observe the downfall of a family that has moved from the prairies to the jungle of the big city. Don’t worry your heads about the motives for the fight, concentrate on the stakes. Judge impartially the technique of the contenders, and keep your eyes fixed on the finish.”

25. Erwin Piscator(1893-1966) was an educated bourgeois, pacifist combat veteran, and KPD member. His “New Playhouse” in Berlin deployed slideshows, film, elevators, etc. Brecht, Grosz, and Heartfield all worked here in 1927/28 to help create a “political theater”

26. Delugeintegrated film clips of insurrectionary crowds into the live action (dir. Piscator, premier on February 20, 1926) Piscator designed a tiered stage to mirror the class divisions of German society

27. Rasputin, the Romanovs, the War, and the People that Arose Against Them,directed by Piscator, co-written by Brecht; premier on November 10, 1927.Brecht found such overt political didacticism tiresome, but he began to study the writings of Marx and Lenin with Karl Korsch.

28. “The Piscator Stage,” caricature in Simplicissimus, January 1928.“Piscator, the priest of the new deus ex machina, whips the revolutionary spirit forward with the cry, ‘Make money!’”

29. BRECHT, photographed in 1927

30. Design by Caspar Neher for the last scene of THREEPENNY OPERA

31. Stars of the original stage production of The Threepenny Opera, Berlin, 1928: Harald Paulsen as Macheath, Roma Bahn as Polly, and Erich Ponto as Peachum, the Beggar King

32. Will Mackie Messer hang???(Tiger Brown at right):The KPD reviewer declared that this play contained “not a vestige of modern social or political satire.”

33. Brecht sought to educate Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries with The Measures Taken (Dec. 1930), but it failed to please the KPD

34. Only with The Mother(January 1932) did Brecht winunqualified applause from the Comintern