Everybody writes propaganda songs

Imagine some of the most daring and experimental artists of the era making propaganda for an authoritarian, militaristic regime. This is exactly what some of the brightest stars of German art did during World War One: John Heartfield went on to fiercely oppose Hitler; his brother Wieland Herzefelde published numerous books on Marxism and avant-garde art; and George Grosz produced some of the most outstanding paintings of the era, showing greedy corrupt businessmen and prostitutes who represented the corrupting forces of capitalism.

But in December 1917 Heartfield joined the German Foreign Office as a director of propaganda films, soon after followed by Grosz and Herzefelde. Perhaps they reckoned that making films for the government would be less trouble than dying in the trenches. Heartfield has already, in 1916 anglicised his name in protest against the war. And the German propaganda machine had shown itself open to the widest reaches of art, sending Expressionist paintings to Zurich for exhibitions held by the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire; the Italian government, on the side of Britain and France, competed by sending Giorgio de Chirico.

Preceding Goebbels' view that the most important thing for propaganda was to be entertaining, the Imperial German authorities felt that the best propaganda was the best art. Hence, the projects that the Heartfield/Herzefeld brothers and Grosz worked on were strange choices for propaganda: they made animations of the dark, violent Struwwelpeter stories, and considered adaptations of Poe's Masque of the Red Death and even Wilde's Picture of Dorian Grey. Sadly, none of their work appears to have survived.

After the war, Grosz and his friends went on to a very different kind of propaganda. Along with Max Beckmann and Otto Dix, Grosz produced some of the most brutal artistic critiques of the war and its lasting effects on German society. Heartfield fought in another kind of war, producing anti-nazi propaganda until he was forced to flee Germany. Grosz left for the USA in 1933; Heartfield and Herzfelde went via Czechoslovakia to the UK, and Herzfelde went on to the USA.

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They are not the only artists to answer the call to make propaganda in times of war. Britain has excelled at it, with artists from William Orpen to Henry Moore working as official war artists. Writers such as George Orwell produced propaganda broadcasts. The best of British film-making turned their eyes and hands to the war effort in World War Two. Leftist experimental documentarist Humphrey Jennings made two extraordinary films: the verite drama I Was A Fireman, and the brilliantly avant-garde Silent Village in which a mining community from Wales re-enacts the nazi's destruction of the Czech mining village of Lidice following the assassination of Heydrich. Brazilian-born Alberto Cavalcanti made Went The Day Well?, a satire about Germans taking over an English town aided by the nazi-sympathising upper classes.

Powell and Pressburger, then the leading talents in Britain, made some of their best work: A Matter of Life and Death, completed after the war, and the Hitchcockian thriller A Canterbury Tale, in which a British and an American soldier team up with an English girl to track down a sexual pervert targeting the wives of soldiers; it's a generally light-hearted picture, aside from one brilliant scene in which the main characters come across streets of bombed out houses, revealing the true devastation caused even in the most ancient corner of the English countryside.

The Spanish Civil War had perhaps changed the opinions of many; one war which was mediated through propaganda. But writers and artists will tend to defend their homeland. E M Forster may have said he'd rather betray his country than his friends; Orwell famously did the opposite.

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Main source: Andrés Mario Zervigón, 'A "Political Struwwelpeter"? John Heartfield's Early Film Animation and the Crisis of Photographic Representation'. New German Critique, Summer 2009, Issue 107, pages 5-51.

For more on propaganda in Zurich, see Hans Richter's Dada: Art and Anti-Art.