A wedding announcement, drawn in acid

The title is a whole sentence, and worth reading start to finish: “Daum” Marries Her Pedantic Automaton “George” in May 1920, John Heartfield Is Very Glad of It. It announces a wedding. The bride is “Daum,” the groom is a “pedantic automaton” (an automaton is a clockwork machine built to move like a living thing) named “George,” the date is May 1920, and a man named John Heartfield is glad about it. Every piece of that is true, and every piece is also a joke, because the man who painted it was getting married himself that month, and the automaton named George is George Grosz, the painter, drawing himself as a robot at his own wedding.

George Grosz (1893–1959) had come home from the First World War to a Berlin that had lost it. Germany was defeated; the Kaiser had fled; a shaky new democracy, the Weimar Republic (named for the town where its constitution was written, because Berlin itself was too violent to meet in safely), was trying to hold a country that kept erupting into street-fighting. The pavements were full of war-cripples, men rebuilt from crutches and prosthetic limbs, begging beside well-fed profiteers. Grosz hated all of it: the generals, the war, and above all the comfortable, hypocritical German middle class he held responsible for the whole catastrophe. His drawings were already notorious for their venom.

In 1919 Grosz joined Berlin Dada. Dada was the anti-art movement born in neutral Zurich in 1916 as a howl of disgust at the war (the name Dada means nothing on purpose, a scrap of baby-talk chosen because it refused to mean anything sensible). But the Berlin branch was different in temper from the Zurich original. Where Zurich Dada played nonsense games, the Berlin circle, Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Richard Huelsenbeck, and the brothers John Heartfield and Wieland Herzfelde, aimed the same scissors-and-nonsense spirit straight at German militarism and the bourgeoisie.

This was not a safe pose. The summer of 1920 brought the First International Dada Fair, the movement’s loudest moment, and it ended with Grosz and his fellow organisers hauled into court and fined for insulting the German army. Berlin Dada’s enemies were real enough to prosecute it.

The friend named in the title, John Heartfield, was Grosz’s closest ally in that circle. (He was born Helmut Herzfeld; he anglicised his name to John Heartfield in protest against German anti-British war fever, a small act of Dada in itself.) Heartfield and Grosz were pioneering political photomontagetogether, the art of making pictures by cutting up and reassembling printed photographs, and Heartfield’s brother Wieland ran the left-wing Malik-Verlag that published Grosz. So the title’s closing clause, “John Heartfield is very glad of it,” is an inside joke between collaborators: a wedding announcement aimed at a friend, the way you might dedicate a private cartoon.

And there was a real wedding. On 22 May 1920, Grosz married Eva Peter (the surname is recorded as both Peter and Peters). His pet name for her was Maud, and the bride in the title, “Daum,” is an anagram of “Maud”, the same four letters, rearranged. So the picture is, on its surface, a wedding portrait: Maud, scrambled into Daum, marrying her automaton George, in the very month it happened. What makes it a Dada picture rather than a keepsake is what Grosz does with that occasion, which is to turn his own marriage into a savage diagram of everything he thought was wrong with the men of his class.