The German graphic designer and photomonteur John Heartfield erased any connection between his photomontages of the 1930s and the Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ; Worker Illustrated Magazine) – and, by extension, its editor and publisher, Willi Münzenberg, in the 1950s. Consequently, the East German public remained unaware of the original AIZ context of his montages until 1976, when the Deutsche Akademie der Künste (AdK; German Academy of the Arts, East Berlin) exhibited several Heartfield montages in their original AIZ context. This article situates Heartfield’s work within the German Democratic Republic ’s reception of worker photography to examine the selective framing of his work after his return from exile in London in 1950. However, Heartfield’s collective practice for the AIZ in the 1930s informed his collaboration with the German writer and theatre reformer Bertolt Brecht on the play Die Mutter (The Mother)at the Berliner Ensemble in 1950. Heartfield and Brecht together explored the postwar relevance of montage as a participatory and dynamic composition of spoken and sung words, still and moving images, and live actors. More importantly, this article aims to unmask the propagandistic illusions that have obscured the montage experiment at the heart of the play, eluding audiences from the 1950s to the present day.
Cristina Cuevas-Wolf (Thu,) studied this question.