Esslingen, Germany

Three weeks ago I was visiting designer friends in this charming Swabian burgh… the after-dinner conversation swung towards influential German typographers and Gestalter such as John Heartfield—to my delight, when I mentioned his name our hostess jumped up from the table to fetch (after a bit of searching) a portfolio of Heartfield prints she had acquired back in the 1980s when she was a socialist activist in Berlin (all prints I had never seen before).

John Heartfield was born Helmut Herzfeld on 19 June 1891 in Berlin-Schmargendorf, Germany to Franz Herzfeld, a socialist writer and Alice née Stolzenburg, a textile worker and political activist. He changed his name in part as a way to protest World War I (and he even feigned madness to avoid returning to the service). During the Weimar period he became a member of the Berlin DADA group, where he used his collage work as a political medium, incorporating images from the political journals of the day. He edited “Der DADA” and organized the First International DADA Fair in Berlin in 1920. Sharply critical of the Weimar Republic, Heartfield’s work was banned during the Third Reich, then rediscovered in the German Democratic Republic in the late 1950s.

I’ve posted about John Heartfield before and have long been fascinated by him—his politically charged photomontages during the Nazi regime ended up influencing successive generations of artists and graphic designers.

Above: a small sampling of Heartfield’s diverse work; The hand has 5 fingers; Serenade; Adolf the Superman. Below: a 1971 stamp from DDR (East Germany) in Heartfield’s honour.