The Black/Jew in the Racial State

Extreme racist opinion in Germany, exemplified by Theodor Fritsch, asserted that Jews were a negroid mix. This continued in the works of, for instance, Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Each individual Jew, according to John Beddoe, the pigmentation expert, contained the negroid and Asiatic type. The Jew was a chameleon in this respect. Rudolf Virchow conducted a research project in which skin color was presented not as an objective fact but rather as something to be intuitively felt. The general consensus, even among Jews, was that Jews were dark, yet the research showed the contrary. Jews in the liberal arts and poetry of the Weimar period often constructed Jews as dark or black, as in the work of George Grosz. The Swiss-French race theorist and anti-Semite George-Alexis Montandon perceived the Jews as an ancient cross of Asiatic and negro and expressed this in his famous exhibition, “How to recognize a Jew.” The fear of cross-breeding became more intense in the Nazi period, along with sexual fear of blacks and Jews. Hitler attacked the “black disgrace” on the Rhine that was leading to a Jewish-inspired Vernegerung and would eventually produce in Germany something like the negrified French state to the south. Nazi polemical and propaganda literature habitually portrayed the Jews as black or dark. Nazis borrowed from American anti-black legislation. Fascist Italy had a similar fear of racial pollution by Jews and blacks, as can be seen in countless cartoons and illustrations in La Difesa della Razza. Cultural pollution by Jews and negroes was equally feared.

Grosz, George (1893–1959)

George Grosz was a leading artist of Germany’s early 20th-century expressionist, Dada, and New Objectivity movements. His works from this period remain celebrated examples of the modernist avant-garde. Grosz began his career as a student at the Dresden Academy of Art in 1909. In 1912, he moved to Berlin, abandoned the academic rigor of his earlier work, and became part of the Expressionist avant-garde. His paintings and drawings soon adopted the fractured planes, vivid color, and psychologically troubled content of Expressionist art. Grosz became politically radicalized by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He helped to found Berlin Dada during the war years. His irreverent cut and paste Dada collages of this period assailed not only the concept of ‘‘art,’’ but also the vaunted notions of culture, militarism, and national pride that were part of a German social order Grosz had come to despise. At the end of World War I, Grosz joined the German Communist Party and became its leading artist. He fled to the United States in order to escape persecution after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933. Grosz settled in New York, where he pursued his art under the utterly changed circumstances of exile.