Es ‘steht ein kleiner Pavillon, und welches Wunder, er ist fertig schon’[1] – ‘There stands a little pavilion, and what a wonder, it’s already done’ – sang the cabaret artist Hermann Leopoldi on the occasion of the opening of the Austrian pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair in June 1937. He had thus taken his share in the ‘image construction’[2] of the Austrofascist regime, by hailing one of its landmarks. While civil war was shaking Spain, Stalinist terror was raging in the Soviet Union, and fascist Italy and Nazi Germany had suppressed almost all resistance, Austria appeared consolidated and peaceful. The uprising of the Social Democrats in February 1934 had been crushed, all parties since been banned, the rule of law been eliminated. Nevertheless, communists and socialists continued to resist, and illegal, yet tolerated Nazis successfully undermined the state. The Austrian ‘Ständestaat,’ the Corporate State, as it called itself, was unable to completely control cultural activity; while censorship and repression were nevertheless present, best described in Robert Musil’s words as an ‘evil spiritlessness.’[3] But even if a subliminal counter-reformation, with its emphasis on the Baroque and the sacred, was the state’s cultural leitmotif, a moderate modernism remained possible. The hesitant toleration of it, combined with a recourse to the imperial past, furthered the contradiction between defining Austria on its terms and seeing it as the better Germany, characterised the ambivalence of Austrofascist cultural politics.[4]
Tag: anti-fascism
Artwork of the Month, April 2023: Mánes streamlining the caricature exhibition by Adolf Hoffmeister (1934)
On 26 April 1934, the Prague-based satirical magazine Simplicus published a caricature on its cover addressing the growing international influence of the National Socialist Party on foreign cultural affairs. The caricature, drawn by the avant-garde artist Adolf Hoffmeister (1902–1973), shows an exhibition setting, in which portraits of National Socialist figureheads Adolf Hitler, Josef Goebbels, and Franz von Papen are on display. Below them, members of the Mánes artist association selection committee stand around a photograph by Hermann Goering. The caption below the image adds a comment by the German ambassador in Prague, Walter Koch, whose backside is turned towards the viewers: ‘Gentlemen, this one is perhaps still a bit too sharp.’ The main joke of the image is, of course, that the works discussed in the selection process are not caricatures but portrait photographs, presented as caricatures in an act of ridicule.
Artwork of the Month, September 2020: This Is What It Looks Like, My Child, This World by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (c. 1933)
This is what it looks like, my child, this world, that is what you have been born into, there are those born to shear and those born to be shorn. That, my child, is what it looks like in this world of ours and that of other countries, and if you, my child, do not like it, then you will just have to change it.
Set above a busy photo-collage of a newborn baby surrounded by newspaper cut-outs, these words call out for action in a world of political tension. Together with the images below it, they show a violent and turbulent world in which the baby seems already lost in its first moments of life. Forming part of a series of six photo collages created in Vienna in the early 1930s, This Is What It Looks Like gives a glimpse into anti-fascist photographic work in interwar Austria.