Transcript
Marshall Poe:
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor of the New Books Network, and you're listening to an episode in the Grinnell College Authors and Artists podcast. And today, I'm very pleased to say that we have Michael Mackenzie on the show, and we'll be talking about his book, Otto Dix and the First World War: Grotesque Humor, Camaraderie, and Remembrance. Michael, welcome to the show.
Michael Mackenzie:
Thank you, Marshall.
Marshall Poe:
Could you begin the interview by telling us a little bit about yourself?
Michael Mackenzie:
Sure, I'd be happy to. So, I'm an art historian. I studied art history in graduate school at the University of Chicago where I studied. I specialized in German modernism, so early 20th century German modernism expression, both before and after the First World War. And since then, I got my PhD in 1999. And since then, I've been teaching art history basically at small liberal arts colleges, first in Indiana, and then, two years ago I moved to Grinnell College and to Grinnell, Iowa. My wife, Anna Harris got a position here at Grinnell and is now the President of Grinnell College. And I just recently was awarded tenure.
Marshall Poe:
Oh wow. That's great. Congratulations.
Michael Mackenzie:
So now, I'm a tenured member of the faculty in the Art History Department. And so, I said that my specialty was German modernism. But of course, I've taught a wide variety of things, all kinds of modernism, 19th and 20th century European modernism. And also, soon, I will be able to say I teach two courses on the art of India and South Asia. And so, I really enjoy doing that. And my newest course will be a course actually on modernism in India and South Asia. So, the 20th century up to and including contemporary art.
Marshall Poe:
That's cool that you get to branch out into other things. I mean, I was a professor and I taught Russian history and I remember there was a certain point at which I was like, "I don't know if I really want to teach just this anymore."
Michael Mackenzie:
I will say it is one of the great advantages of teaching at a small liberal arts college is that we're able to, we have the privilege of, and are even encouraged to branch out a little bit, to stretch ourselves and to learn together with the students. That's really what I love about the job.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. That's great.
Michael Mackenzie:
I'm in the classroom learning with them.
Marshall Poe:
I was going to say I know and at least I think I know in the German system when you have a PhD, what we call a PhD project, and then you have this second thing that I think is called [inaudible 00:02:54], it has to be about something else.
Michael Mackenzie:
It's something else within the same field.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, right. We don't do that in the United States. But anyway, I should also say that I never took an art history class when I was at Grinnell, but I audited several. And I loved auditing classes when I was there because you can go here to these smart people to talk about these smart things, and it fit into my schedule and I just really enjoyed doing it. I think I learned a lot, which is how I know who Otto Dix is. So, this leads me to my next question. Why did you write this book about Otto Dix and the first World War?
Michael Mackenzie:
Well, so Otto Dix, for those who don't know, Otto Dix is probably one of the most important, yeah, I would say one of the most important artists of the postwar period in Germany, post First World War, so in the 1920s. And he was a representative, he's a good example of what the Germans called Neue Sachlichkeit, new objectivity. So, really dispassionate, disabused, non-idealistic representation of contemporary life and all of its kind of false glamour. And he loved to expose the falsity of the glamor a little bit. And so, he got some notoriety for that.
Oftentimes, he did a lot of portraits and his portraits were often just bordered on caricature. And you really look at these portraits of fancy people and you wonder how it could be that they actually paid him to paint their portrait. And some of them actually said, some of them were mad. Some of them said like, "No, I'm not paying for this." So, it's always a good idea to look at the work of the person you're hiring to paint your portrait before you.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, that's good.
Michael Mackenzie:
And so, he's a fascinating person, contradictory, cantankerous, sharp to the point of caricature. And he had fought in the First World War, and I knew that this isn't necessarily the most important part for most people of his work, but he painted a lot of pictures in the 1920s about his experiences in the First World War. And it's pretty clear from looking at them that the experience made a big impact on him, emotionally, spiritually, of course, as it would have to. And in graduate school, I had the opportunity to write and publish some short catalog essays about some of these works and some of his other pictures. He painted a lot of watercolor portraits of prostitutes, it was another thing that he liked to paint pictures of, again, prostitution being an example of that false glamor of what we call Weimar Germany.
And so, I was fascinated by these, but I had never really wanted to write a book about him. He's the most important figure of the period. It's out of fashion to write monographs books about just one individual artist in art history anyways. And so, I never wanted to do this. But I read something along the way while I was teaching that really sparked my interest and made me rethink his work, made me go back to it and rethink it. And I felt it gave me a new insight from an unexpected direction, from an unexpected source about his work. And so, I dug into it a little bit deeper. And that's another story, I could tell that story.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, I mean, I wish you would. You said you'll, I'll speak in the modern [inaudible 00:07:03], you had a different take on it or you gained some insight about it that made you want think, "Oh, I can actually make a contribution." That's always a very interesting point in a scholar's life. If you could talk about that, that would be great.
Michael Mackenzie:
Yeah. And an exciting one, and one that doesn't necessarily for me anyways, because I don't have graduate students. I'm not doing research on one individual topic all the time. I'm not thinking about this. I'm not thinking about German art in the 1920s all day long. And so, it was exciting for me to go back to this period and do this work. At one point about 12 years ago, maybe more, my wife Anne and I, we'd had three children and our youngest was I think two years old. So, we had three kids, two, four, and six years old. And we were no longer completely overwhelmed by having infants in the house. For the first time in six years, we didn't have an infant in the house. And Anne said to me, "We should read something in the evening together after they go to bed, something intellectual."
And I said, "You know what? That's a great idea." And she suggested Mikhail Bakhtin, this Russian literary theorist from the 20s, really interesting person. And so, we read his book about language and humor and grotesque realism. And basically, the thesis of the book was that in the late Middle ages, the common people had a certain speech that they would use on market days and so on that was filled with grotesque imagery that was funny and based on the realities, essentially the realities of the human body. So, I mean, we're talking about fart jokes.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. He wrote a book that I think I maybe even encountered at Grinnell called Rabelais and His World. Is that it?
Michael Mackenzie:
Yeah. Yeah.
Marshall Poe:
And if people know who Rabelais is, they'll know exactly what you're talking about.
Michael Mackenzie:
Yeah. So, exaggeration, grotesqueness and humor. And Bakhtin's thesis was, all of this was in aid of warding off the fear of death. So, making jokes about the body and its fallibility, and it's the fact that it dies, that it gets sick, that it gives birth, that it consumes, that it defecates. All of these things where the basis of this humor that was there to ward off death. And it struck me like a thunderbolt. I said, "Otto Dix, that's what he's doing. He's making these exaggeratedly grotesque images of, for example, disabled veterans from the war, people who had been grotesquely wounded and lost limbs. But he makes these pictures of them that are in some way deliberately funny. And the humor comes from the grotesqueness."
And I always wondered, "Why would anybody do that?" And it struck me, it was to ward off the fear of death. And I thought to myself, soldiers in the trenches in the First World War, I bet they had a language that they developed, a slang that they developed amongst themselves that relied heavily on what Bakhtin called the lower bodily stratum. Everything from eating to defecating, to fornicating, all these things that you do that isn't your brain, that is the lower part of your body. I bet they had a language that was based on jokes made about the body in order to ward off death because who needed to ward off the fear of death more than they did?
And so, I looked into it and not only did they have, not only have they developed this sort of humorous slang, this language, but people at the time were fascinated by it. And so, all these linguists and just normal people wrote these books, these kind of glossaries of all of the sort of slang terms that soldiers, whether they were German or English or French or what have you, that they all developed these vocabularies and people published books about them, collections of them. And along the way, I found out. And so, I knew I had something. I knew that I was onto something.
And along the way, I found out that Otto Dix himself, even in his field journal at one point, just wrote down a whole list of these words, all the words that he could remember. One of the many times that he was wounded, he was recovering in the field hospital. And I guess, to entertain himself, he wrote down all of these terms that he could remember. So not only were people in general fascinated by it, but he was. And so, the thesis to the book is essentially that after the war, he developed a visual equivalent of this language. He translated these grotesque terms based on the fallibility of the body into humorous, grotesque images of the body in order to, I think, essentially reach out to other veterans and say, "Here we are. We survived. And you're looking at these pictures. I made these pictures. We all remember what this was like, and we're still here and we have this in common."
And importantly, this is an important part. Other people don't understand it. People who weren't there don't get it. They won't get this humor, but we get it. And so, I think he's communicating directly with fellow veterans, some of whom are fellow artists, some of whom are art critics. That was one of the things about the First World War is that because everybody fought that included artists, poets, writers, future art historians and art critics. So, I think he's talking directly to them in some of these humorous pictures.
Marshall Poe:
Just to give a small anecdote, I have written a little bit about the Vietnam War, and I remember reading this transcript where some people who had committed a work crime, they said, "Well, we wasted him." And the people talking to him did not know that. They didn't have that expression. They really didn't know what it meant. And they said, "What do you mean wasted?" And he said, "Well, that means we killed them." And this was obviously a kind of ironic distancing, which meant we wasted his life, his life was a waste, and they had to have it explained to them. So, this Argo developed. And it doesn't surprise me at all that the Germans had such a thing. And another thing I want to just pause on for a second is the word grotesque. This has a technical meaning in art history, is that right?
Michael Mackenzie:
It actually has a couple of different meanings in art history. So, actually there's a moment in the book where I engaged in this tedious explanation of, I mean this, I don't mean that because it actually has several meanings. And the meaning that I'm using is exaggeration to the point of humor, essentially. And there's this great, Walter Benjamin, the critical German theorist in the 1920s and 30s who adored the French poet, Charles Baudelaire, a poet and sometimes art critic has this kind of reading of Baudelaire where he talks about grotesque humor and essentially slapstick, right? Because Benjamin is fascinated by Charlie Chaplin. Everybody loves Charlie Chaplin at this time.
And he said, "Basically, the humor here comes from us watching somebody trip and thinking to ourselves and we laugh and we think, I would never do that. I would never be so dumb as to trip over a crack in the sidewalk." And we'd always shouldn't laugh, but it's already too late because we've already laughed. And that for him is grotesque humor. And that's what means, right? Because he has these pictures of these veteran disabled veterans. They're sitting around after the war playing cards. This picture, for example, of three veterans sitting around playing cards, kind of reliving the good old times, how they used to play cards in their dugouts, in the trenches to while away the hours.
And they just look ridiculous, because for example, and the longer you look at it, the more humorous and ridiculous details you see. You realize one guy seems to be holding his cards in his hand, but he's lost both of his arms, so it's actually his foot that he's holding the cards and it's propped up on the table like a hand. But he's had his pant leg refinished as a sleeve, so it's got a cuffing and a cuff and the cuff of his jacket. And you don't realize at first that it's his foot and where his legs should be are actually the table legs and peg legs that look like each other. And that's funny too, and so on.
And of course, it was very important for a long time for art historians to say, "Look here, he's showing how badly they've been abused by the system, the system of militarism, and then the system that threw them away after the war." And it's his empathy that's presented as caricature. I might take on it as, no, he's not being empathetic to them. He's essentially laughing at them and saying, "I managed to come out without getting my legs blown off, my arms blown off." That's funny to him in a way and in a way that I think the rest of us cannot understand and shouldn't understand. Right?
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, I think that's right.
Michael Mackenzie:
And I want to be clear. I'm not justifying his humor. I think it's actually really an unpleasant aspect of his character, but the pictures are undeniably funny in a way that makes this really uncomfortable.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, I think that's a very good point. It is impenetrable to us, but to people who are there. And so, this is very interesting because I know I was doing some reading before this interview and sometimes people will compare his series of, I think it was prints called Der Krieg, The War to Goya's Disasters of War. So, you would say that's just not an appropriate comparison.
Michael Mackenzie:
I mean, yeah, it is.
Marshall Poe:
Yes.
Michael Mackenzie:
He clearly was trying to make an updated version of the disasters of war. There's no doubt about that. I do have a chapter about that portfolio. He made 50 etching prints of each one more horrific in the last images of the war. And it is one of the most powerful documents of the First World War or any war ever and it is often shown. But it's always exhibited as his kind of protest against the senselessness of the war. And I think actually, that's a misunderstanding of how the whole generation viewed the war. That's a post-Vietnam understanding. The idea that soldiers come out of the war and they think that the war was a census.
I'm not even sure that many Vietnam veterans feel that way about the war, but the general public thinks that that's how veterans feel is that they've been tricked. I often see that word that they were tricked into fighting the war and now they're bitter about it. And I think, actually, what happens, and at a lot of our historians have said, "This isn't my insight." But especially in Germany, because they lost, so the usual explanation for why we fought the war was because we were going to win it doesn't really, they don't have access to that easy explanation. So, they have to say to themselves, they have to find a reason why they fought it, why they did this. It has to be meaningful in some way. And I think that there are a lot of ways in which those prints, those 50 images are trying to stake out for Dickson people who thought like him. And I can explain what I mean by that, what the war meant for them, why it was meaningful for them, and what they take away from it.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, please explain.
Michael Mackenzie:
And that was great, important to people. You can't do that and then spend the rest of your life saying, "Well, that was senseless and I was tricked into doing that." No, it has to have been meaningful in some way.
Marshall Poe:
And so, how did they make this statement of meaning? You said how Dix did it. How did they do that?
Michael Mackenzie:
Yeah. Well, so a little bit about Dix. He grew up in an industrial part of Southern Germany in Saxony. And he grew up in, actually he grew up in a working-class family. And that's actually pretty unusual for artists, most of them, because it takes a certain amount of privilege to pursue that career, to be trained that way. So, most artists in that time weren't working class. So, he was a little bit unusual in that. And most people from that milieu, he was a social democrat, or rather, he didn't identify as a social democrat, but that was what everybody around him did. His family, everybody he knew. And social democrat in Germany at the time, that was a pretty mainstream party, right?
Marshall Poe:
Yeah.
Michael Mackenzie:
This was a mainstream party. It's not like in America today where we think people want to accuse social Democrats of somehow being on the fringe. That's a pretty center left party then and still today in Germany. And so, part of how I wrote this book was to look at what other social democrats, what veterans groups that identified as social democratic veterans groups, how they talked about the war and what it meant to them. And what it meant to them was a kind of working-class camaraderie, that was particular to enlisted men and did not include officers who were generally middle class or aristocrats.
And the meaning of the war didn't come from hating the French or hating the British or anything, any opposition to the enemy. If anything, they felt that kind of solidarity, even with the soldiers on the other side, because they were all working class soldiers. They were essentially doing the work of war. They had been employed by the capitalist class to do the work of war and under arduous circumstances. And so, they built this camaraderie that came from that.
And I see a lot of ways in that imagery, especially in the war portfolio, which he did after the grotesque caricature collages that I was describing a minute ago. I see a lot of imagery in that portfolio that speaks, that echoes the way that social democratic veteran groups talked about camaraderie and talked about the war. And for example, this is an example from three images that I analyzed in the book. There are a lot of images of exhausted soldiers in that portfolio. Not a whole, there are very, very few images of people fighting, almost no images of actual hand combat or violence, nobody firing weapons, but lots of imagery of soldiers being exhausted.
And that was something that the social democratic veteran groups allowed themselves to acknowledge was that they could be exhausted by their experiences or just physically and mentally and spiritually exhausted by it, but they were very proud of this. They never broke, they never laid down their arms, they never just gave up. They continued to fight, not because of a cause they believed in, but essentially because they had each other's backs. So, they stuck together through this exhaustion. The far right in Germany in the 1920s, they never acknowledged physical exhaustion.
To them, their story of the war was that they lost the war, not because it was mismanaged and certainly not because they gave up, because they were stabbed in the back by various groups. This is the famous stab in the back legend, right? Whether it was social Democrats or Jews or industrial profiteers or profiteers, whoever it was, they stabbed them in the back and that's why they lost. Dix and social democratic veteran groups, they never believed that. They never talked about that. They talked about their own physical exhaustion. And so, you see a lot of that actually in the imagery.
Marshall Poe:
How was Dix's work received at the time? Let's hold off on the Nazis for a second. We'll get to that. But what did people think about his work when it first came out?
Michael Mackenzie:
It was controversial. It divided people. And this is to me, an important part of this story that I'm telling. Again, this was known, but for me, it fits in with this larger puzzle that I'm trying to put back together. A lot of the critics who hated his pictures of the war were older, too old to have fought in the war. And a lot of the critics who then came to his defense and said, "No, no, this is what it was like." They were fellow veterans. And so, they recognized, I think what he was trying to do. And they said, there's this great line that one critic used in writing about, He said, and I'm going to translate the German term French swine, the sort of pig at the front to the American word grunt said, "That's just how a grunt at the front paints. That's what it looks like from our perspective in the trenches."
And what they were arguing about was the kind of exaggeratedly grotesque realism to use Bakhtin's word, right? Grotesque realism and its humor. Yeah. So, older critics hated that. Later, critics on the right hated that. And his fellow veterans, especially left of center, they got it. I would just say they got it and they came to his defense about it.
Marshall Poe:
So, let's move on to what happens in 1933 and so on and so forth. What happens to Dix once the Nazis come to power? How does he react to it? What does he think about it?
Michael Mackenzie:
Well, so actually before, let's hold the Nazis off for now.
Marshall Poe:
Okay. All right.
Michael Mackenzie:
Let me tell this.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, please go ahead.
Michael Mackenzie:
The story about a really big painting that he made clearly intended for public display, and this is part of my story too, is that if I can just back up here a little bit.
Marshall Poe:
Sure.
Michael Mackenzie:
This is often written about as though he were an isolated, individual who's just wrestling with his own demons or preoccupied with his own preoccupations in his studio, kind of occupying this moral high ground about the war. The point of my book is actually to return him to the public discussion about the war in Germany and about what the war meant. So, it's really a book about what happens in the 1920s and early 1930s. And I think at every step, at every moment in his career where he makes another major work about the war, Dix is intervening in some public discussion specifically about what it meant to people.
And his position, again, isn't a unique one. It isn't an unusual one. It's actually one shared by a lot of center left veterans groups. So, it makes sense that he paints a big painting to be displayed in the public eye. So, he paints this big painting called The Trench, and it is a picture.
Marshall Poe:
Oh, I know this. Yes, I know this.
Michael Mackenzie:
All these dead bodies lying at the bottom of the muddy bottom of a trench. Nobody's alive in the painting and it's pretty awful. It's lost now. And I'll come to that. So, we only have black and white reproductions, but apparently the color was lurid. The way it was painted was lurid. And he manages to get this very, very important museum in Cologne to buy it and to display it. And there's this public outcry, there's this huge controversy about it. And some people, some critics on the right actually get ahold of this. And this may sound familiar, but they're pursuing these culture wars. They make political hay out of these cultural issues about what kinds of pictures get exhibited about the war. And they managed to get it taken down. They managed to force this museum in Cologne to sell the picture back to him, to Dix.
And his dealer, his art gallery dealer, shops this painting around for a long time. One of the things that he does with it is he send it to exhibitions organized by pacifists. And so, that's how Dix gets this reputation that is so important after the Second World War of having been a pacifist, of making anti-war art because he's a pacifist. And he himself said, "I am not a pacifist. That makes no sense." And that was a pretty fringe position in Germany at the time, even after the Second World War, even First World War.
Anyways, but it gets exhibited with these in these pacifist exhibitions. And then finally, when Dix gets a job teaching, painting, history painting in Dresden, the museum in Dresden agrees to buy the painting, and they immediately put it in storage. And so, the painting isn't then seen basically for another 10 years. It just goes into storage and nobody ever sees it again. And people forget about it. But when the Nazis come to power, they hate Otto Dix's art for a lot of reasons. It represents everything that they don't like about the Weimar Republic because he represents prostitutes, because he represents this sort of false glamour, this cosmopolitanism, and not least of all, because his depictions of the war don't celebrate the virtues that they, Otto Dix doesn't find the same meaning in the war that they want to find. He doesn't celebrate the virtues that they want to celebrate.
And so, militarism, ethnonationalism, he's not interested in that. So, they hate his work. And so, they drag this painting out of storage and they put it on exhibit. The Nazis do this interesting thing. They organize these exhibitions of what they called degenerate art, and they take it all out of public collections. And it's basically a kind of cultural war issue for them where they say, "Oh, the kind of cultural elites who run the museums, they're putting one over on us. They think they're better than us because they like this modern art, and normal people don't like modern art."
And so, they make a lot of political hay out of these exhibitions of modern art in which they essentially say, "This is everything that's wrong with the Weimar Republic is you've got people spending public money to put this kind of bad modern art in public museums and forces it down our throats because they're elitist and they think they're better than we are." And they get this painting, The Trench out and they put it on display. Nobody has seen it in 10 years. They have to dust it off and reminding people how much they were supposed to hate this painting and remind people of the controversy. But some of them never forgot, and they never forgave him for this. And in the end, they probably burned this painting. They had a bonfire for a lot of books and paintings they didn't like. And they probably burned this painting, and that's why it's gone.
Marshall Poe:
It's tragedy.
Michael Mackenzie:
We only have black and white reproductions of it.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, I've seen them. Yeah. It reminds me a little bit of the controversy over the Vietnam War memorial when it first went up, because it's not representational in a direct way. You have to think about what, it is representing something if you look at it carefully.
Michael Mackenzie:
Yes.
Marshall Poe:
But it's not representational in any kind of heroic way. And there was a big kerfuffle over it when it went up. Now, it's quite beloved, but it was a political football for a time.
Michael Mackenzie:
Yeah. But part of what's made it possible, just to digress, I think part of what made has made it possible for that to stay and to become beloved is that other figurative representations of the war have been created on [inaudible 00:33:53].
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, they've been added. Yes, that's right. They have. So, you can both [inaudible 00:33:56].
Michael Mackenzie:
And so, people are satisfied by that, but nobody's moved by those sculptures the way they are by my [inaudible 00:34:05] Memorial.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, no, that thing is quite amazing. They are people that they remember.
Michael Mackenzie:
No, it's quite something. I mean, it's often the case that in small towns in America that you find war memorials with names all over them, and they're all powerful. Sometimes, they are nothing other than a granite slab with names on it.
Marshall Poe:
Well, and that was pretty standard after the first World War too.
Michael Mackenzie:
Yeah, actually. That was a pretty standard sort of form of memorial. And to come back to Otto Dix, some of the really big works that he was able to paint after he got this teaching position. So, in the second half of the 1920s and into the early 1930s, I think that they were his attempts at creating a public memorial. He even had this fantasy that he shared once and he said, "I'd love to put this," he painted a Triptych, right? A three-part painting of the war that looked like a, it had Christlike elements to it and so on. And I think he said, "I'd love to have this be a public memorial, but you would go into, into a bunker below ground to look at it." It would be like in a bunker and a trench. That's how you would look at it to bring people to this."
But he wanted to intervene in the public debate about the meaning of the war. And that debate changed over time. And his art changed, I think, in response to it. Again, people want to present him as this isolated figure. But no, he's very, very much in dialogue with what people, the debates about public memorials in Germany and there were a lot. It's often said that Germany, the Weimar Republic is capable of creating a war memorial. There wasn't a national memorial, but there were lots and every town had its individual memorial. And some of them were modern, and some of them were traditional, but they were all sculpture. He wasn't a sculptor, he was a painter.
So, to come back to the Nazis, how they got the revenge on him at the end. As soon as they came to power, they did fire him from his teaching position, even though he had tenure. I want to repeat that from my academic audience. Even though he had tenure, they fired him. And of course, they found their bureaucratic excuses for doing it because they were very, very attached to their bureaucracy. And so, they didn't want to do things necessarily on bureaucratically, but they found a way to do it. And at the same time as an academic, he was a civil servant. He was a state employee.
And so, this kind of old vicious Nazi who had been put in place as the governor of the state that the Dresden Art Academy was in, they sent him, the head of the art department, sent him a note saying, "I'm trying to fire him. I tried to reach him. Nobody wasn't there. I think he's visiting his parents. Anyways, in any case, I wrote the letter and I delivered it to his office."
And this Nazi, who was the governor of the state notoriously just wrote this remark in the margin of this note and said, "Why is that swine still alive?" And this was a guy who had actually been responsible for assassinating politicians during the Weimar Republic. So, when he said, "Why is somebody still alive?" He actually literally meant that, right? So maybe, Dix was lucky to get off. He was just being [inaudible 00:37:58].
Marshall Poe:
So, what did he do then?
Michael Mackenzie:
Losing his tenure track, his tenure position?
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. So, what did he do then?
Michael Mackenzie:
What's that?
Marshall Poe:
I said, what did he do then?
Michael Mackenzie:
So, he had married well at that point. So, I think his wife had a little money, and he lived a very bourgeois, very middle-class life at that point, which was actually really important to him. You see, there was a class aspiration to his career. And so, they built themselves a villa essentially on the shores of Lake Constance in the very southern edge of Germany. People often say so that he was close enough to Switzerland that he could just slip across the border if it came to it. I'm not sure about that. And he essentially tried to make ends meet by painting portraits again. He went back to portrait painting. And I think financially, it was a struggle until the war was over. And then of course, despite being relatively old at that time, at the very end of the Third Reich, as Germany was collapsing at the end of the Second World War, they made all the old men and all the boys between the ages of 13 and 14. They made them all put on uniforms and defend their hometowns.
And so, Dix got drafted again. He was put in uniform again and sent to defend against the advancing armies and was captured. He was made a prisoner of war by the French and spent the last months of the war in a prisoner of war camp where the commandant to the camp knew who he was and gave him some studio space and let him paint some pictures. But he ended the Second World War as a prisoner of war.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. So how, I want to use the word rehabilitation, but that doesn't sound quite right. After the war, how did people see his work?
Michael Mackenzie:
That's a great question. So, he winds up being important to both the East Germans and the West Germans. And he maintains...
Marshall Poe:
That's quite a trick.
Michael Mackenzie:
Yeah. And he maintained [inaudible 00:40:35] in both sides. He continues to live in his villa on the shores of Lake Constance in the south of what becomes West Germany. But he also has a studio in Dresden, which is in East Germany, that he spends time in painting large pictures. And so, he's a figurative, he never becomes an abstractionist. He's a figurative painter. At a time when abstract painting becomes almost a rigor in West Germany. And so, the East Germans like his work because he's still a figurative painter, they want to exhibit it and we were able to exhibit. Both sides had all German art exhibitions. So, he can exhibit his paintings in East German art exhibitions. And the West Germans like him because he's a facto, an anti-fascist and anti-Nazi artist because the Nazis hated him. So that's an easy argument to make, and he pays a certain professional and personal price.
And the Nazis had always said that his work was anti anti-war, that he was opposed to the war. And so, that suits the West German's ideological purposes very well. So, both sides like him. And it becomes really important for both sides, almost in competition with each other to claim him as a progressive and anti-war artist. That's when he becomes this isolated figure, a lone voice in the wilderness in Nazi Germany speaking out against militarism. Those become really good [inaudible 00:42:34] for his, as you say, rehabilitation. I don't know that he even needed to be rehabilitating. He becomes a very popular, an artist of the Weimar period. Nobody's really interested in what he's painting in the 1950s and early 60s. That's not so important to people. But his work from the Weimar Republic becomes a way of rehabilitating, a recapture, reclaiming that period as the part of the real German history.
Marshall Poe:
So, just to wrap it up a little bit. This might not be a fair question, but if you wanted to see an Otto Dix print or painting from the Weimar period, where do you go to do that? Are they all over the place or is there a museum?
Michael Mackenzie:
So, the ones I'm interested in right there, the really big Triptych is in Dresden. And so, as part of this claiming of Dix for East German history as an anti-fascist and anti-militarist, the museum in Dresden buys that big Triptych from him. And so, it's there and they've cleaned it up. It was given pride of place in the museum. That's great to see. The last big painting that he paints about the war, it's called Flanders, and it's in what had been West Berlin. It was always in West Berlin. So, it's in Berlin, the print portfolios, because they're prints, there were a lot of copies of them. So, they're in various places. There's one in the Smart Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Chicago. That's where I first saw it, even as a graduate student, when I was able to, like I said, write some and publish some essays about some of the prints.
There's a copy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There's a copy at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. So, you can go, and I will say this to your listeners, if you are going to one of those museums, contact the Prints and Drawings room and set up an appointment. It doesn't matter who you are, you don't have to be an art historian. You can just be a visitor to the museum during weekdays, business hours. Go and ask them. They will bring that out for you.
Marshall Poe:
Really, wow.
Michael Mackenzie:
And you go through those one by one, you can look at anything.
Marshall Poe:
That's cool.
Michael Mackenzie:
Yeah. If you've gone, you've exhausted the MoMA's collection or you're just really interested in etching and aquatint. And Otto Dix was a master. He is one of the best artists to ever practice this art form of etching and aquatint and engraving. He combines all three on most of the prints. I mean, he is right up there with Goya. And that was clearly his aspiration and he achieved it. Yeah. And so, if you're interested, you can go see any prints, but go ask for these. Go ask for the war portfolio. They'll bring it out and go through them one by one, all 50 of them. Each one is more gripping and more intense and more difficult, but more masterful in its medium than the last. A great way to spend an afternoon.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, I was going to say, I did not know you could do that, but that does sound like a plan.
Michael Mackenzie:
Yeah. There's a museum in Perone in France, which was along the one of the fronts, and it's called the Historial. It's a great museum. It's a museum that is mostly collections of artifacts. You can see all of the uniforms and equipment that soldiers from every army from both sides carried into the battle and all these. But lots also of propaganda posters, placed with the Kaiser's picture on them, that thing. They have a room in which they always have all 50 prints on display. And so, you can go there and you can just walk through and just look at them if you're ever in Peron, in France.
Marshall Poe:
Well, Michael, we've taken up a lot of your time and I really appreciate it, this is fascinating. I think I could talk to you for about another hour. Maybe I should come to Grinnell and take your courses. But let me thank you for that time and thank you for being on the show.
Michael Mackenzie:
That was my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
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