John Heartfield

John Heartfield – Difficult circumstances marked his childhood

John Heartfield was born Helmut Herzfeld in Schmargendorf, Germany, on 19 June 1891. His father, the anarchist and writer Franz Held, also did not like the family name and replaced it with a pseudonym. This did not save him from a conviction for blasphemy, however, and so fled with his family – his wife Alice Stolzenberg also cultivated anarchist ambitions – via Switzerland to Salzburg. The parents abandoned not only the prevailing state order, but for unexplained reasons, also their children. John Heartfield and his siblings were thus places in the care of the mayor of Aigen, Ignaz Varschein. Although his uncle Joseph Herzfeld was his actual guardian, the German politician is said to have taken little interest in his relatives. A further guardian was the writer Franz Halbe, who was highly regarded in the Nazi dictatorship. John Heartfield’s father, Franz Held, was eventually admitted to the former Valduna state asylum in Vorarlberg. 

Art studies in Munich and Berlin; foundation of Malik publishing house

In 1905, John Heartfield began an apprenticeship as book dealer, but was not completely satisfied with this. He thus studied from 1908 to 1911 at the Königlichen Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich and worked for a time as a commercial printer. Also finding little fulfilment there, he started another course at the Kunst und Handwerkerschule in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Heartfield was called up at the start of the First World War but was able to avoid the unpopular military service by feigning a nervous illness, and in the first year of his enlistment made the acquaintance of the German-American painter George Grosz. During the war, he changed his name from Helmut Herzfeld to John Heartfield in protest against the hostility towards England that was rife in the German Empire – an immediate reaction to the hate songs of the playwright Ernst Lissauer. He founded the Malik publishing company with his brother Wieland Herzfelde, with a portfolio of drawings by George Grosz as one of their first publications. The brothers, together with Grosz, also published the magazine Neue Jugend.

Artist engagement against war and National Socialism

John Heartfield joined the Communist Party and established himself as an important protagonist of the Berlin Dada movement. As Monteurdada, he participated in the First International Dada Fair together with his friend Grosz and Raoul Hausmann. The pamphlet Der Kunstlump, of which Heartfield was one of the editors, caused a sensation. He created numerous dust jackets for the Malik publishing house using the photomontage technique, which were so well received, that they were even sold without the accompanying books. He increasingly used his mastery of photomontage for artworks with a political message; the first of these works was the war-critical picture Väter und Söhne in 1924. In 1929 he designed the satirical picture book Deutschland, Deutschland über alles by Kurt Tucholsky. Heartfield subsequently became involved in the move against the rising National Socialism and caricatured even Adolf Hitler with mass-produced picture montages. He was forced to flee Germany in 1933, initially to Czechoslovakia, then to France, and finally England. He lived in the GDR from 1950 where he was denied the membership in the SED that he had sought. Thanks in no small part to the public advocacy of Stefan Heym, Heartfield managed to become a member of the Akademie der Künste in the GDR in 1960, despite certain reservations about the artistic value of his montage technique. 

John Heartfield died in East Berlin on 26 April 1968.