George Grosz' trip to Soviet Russia: Lenin as a small pharmacist

For the past six months, Berlin has gained a small museum.

"The Little Grosz Museum" was opened in a former gas station on Schöneberger Bülowstrasse.

The petrol station, which was remodeled by the architect Thomas Brakel, is surrounded by a garden with a water basin, in which a café is open in the summer, inviting people to take a break.

The museum is supported by the non-profit association "Georg Grosz in Berlin".

After the first exhibition, which showed early works by this artist, the second is devoted to Grosz's more than six-month, little-known trip to Soviet Russia in 1922. According to tradition, Grosz appeared in 1918 together with Wieland Herzfelde, John Heartfield and Erwin Piscator joined the KPD on the evening of its founding.

Allegedly, Rosa Luxemburg personally handed them the party books.

It was also Grosz who was one of the founders of the Berlin Dada movement.

History has gone down in history for the 1920 photo of Grosz and Heartfield with a poster proclaiming, in a nod to Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin, "Art is dead. Long live Tatlin's new machine art."

Lenin's panacea for everything

When Grosz was commissioned by the Malik publishing house with a trip to the country ruled by the Bolsheviks, during which he was to do illustrations for a publication by the Danish communist Martin Andersen Nexö, he immediately agreed.

He was also to take part in the celebrations of the fifth anniversary of the revolution and in the IV Congress of the Communist International as an official delegate.

After traveling for several weeks via Norway and Murmansk, he reached Petrograd.

Here he was personally guided through the city by the Petrograd Party Chairman, Grigory Zinoviev.

This shows the importance the Bolsheviks attached to Grosz's visit.

After all, he was the first visual artist to officially visit the Soviet Union.

During the congress he heard Lenin's speech, who, as he reported disrespectfully after his return, gave him the impression of a "very small pharmacist" who believed he had found "a panacea for everything".

He gave Trotsky a book of his drawings, which he found "more cynical than revolutionary," and met Karl Radek and Anatoly Lunacharsky.

His stay is meticulously documented in the exhibition with photos, newspaper clippings and publications.

Christian Hufen, the museum's research assistant, even found a hitherto unknown film showing Grosz alongside Clara Zetkin on arrival in Petrograd, as well as Willi Munzenberg, who was commissioned by Lenin to set up the Internationale and who ran the second largest publishing house in Germany .

And also a photo that shows Grosz in the presence of Lunacharsky and Zetkin at an opulent banquet, which, however, remained closed out of consideration for the starving population.

Despite the courtship, Grosz was a keen observer of what was actually going on in the country.

In his memoirs, for example, he reported on the ship that had arrived in the port of Petrograd the day before his arrival and that, on Lenin's orders, was supposed to deport more than two hundred unwelcome scholars to Germany.

He also mentioned a businessman who told him about "the new large slave armies of forcibly recruited proles and peasants".

He is, he writes, neither shocked nor surprised, because he entered Petrograd via areas in the north that are not frequented by the "beautiful writers" - where he saw many ugly things.

Grosz was also disappointed by Tatlin.

When he visited the studio, instead of a rational, constructivist machine builder, he found a "big fool" who surrounded himself with chairs you couldn't sit on, with suits nobody could wear, and who lived in his studio with free-ranging chickens .

For Tatlin was anything but a soberly realistic constructivist.

Also, the fact that the 69 drawings he intended to show in Soviet Russia were lost did little to gain his faith in “working people's paradise.”

Shaken by these experiences, Grosz became more and more alienated from the KPD after his return, from which he left in 1923, but continued to design posters for this party.

A whole series of posters from this period can be seen in the exhibition with appeals such as “Necessity knows a commandment.

Strike dead!“.

Drawings that Grosz made during his trip through Norway are also on display.

It is more than surprising why no drawings from Soviet Russia have survived, because they were actually the reason for his trip.

In 1933 Grosz emigrated to the USA.

But he continues to follow what is happening in Europe.

His sharp gaze does not leave him this time either.

Very early on he recognized Hitler and Stalin as like-minded people and predicted the Hitler-Stalin pact.

In 1946 he published his autobiography in New York, but at the urging of his left-wing friends without the Russia chapter.

This was not published until 1955 in the CIA-financed magazine "Der Montag" and was therefore viewed with skepticism by many.

It is therefore a great merit of this museum that the exhibition has illuminated the little-known chapter in the life of this committed artist with unusual care and documented it in an extensive catalogue.

George Grosz travels to Soviet Russia.

Small Grosz Museum, Berlin;

until March 31, 2023. The catalog costs 35 euros.