John Heartfield

Origins and early life

John Heartfield was born Helmut Franz Josef Herzfeld in Berlin on 19 June 1891, the son of the writer Franz Herzfeld, who published as Franz Held and came from a Jewish family of cotton manufacturers on the Rhine, and of Alice Stolzenberg, a textile worker and socialist militant.

Work and career

The parents, persecuted for Franz Held's political writing, fled to Switzerland and then Austria and abandoned the four children in 1899 near Salzburg, where the local mayor took them in. Helmut studied at the Munich school of applied arts, and in 1916, in protest at the war-time chant 'Gott strafe England', he anglicized his name to John Heartfield, a gesture of defiance that he kept for life. With George Grosz and his brother Wieland Herzfelde he was a founder of Berlin Dada and of the Malik publishing house, and around 1919 he and Grosz developed the photomontage, cutting and recombining photographs so that the picture told a truth the camera alone could not.

From 1930 to 1938 he made 237 montages for the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, the mass-circulation illustrated weekly, including 'Adolf, the Superman: swallows gold and spouts junk' (1932), the swastika made of axes, and 'The Meaning of the Hitler Salute', which showed a giant capitalist slipping banknotes into the Führer's raised hand. A member of the Communist party from 1918, he was on the Nazis' list from the first day.

He fled to Prague in April 1933 as the SA broke into his flat, and to London in 1938, where he was interned as an enemy alien. His Jewish origin on his father's side is stated plainly here because it was part of what made him a target, though he himself always defined his fight in political terms. He returned to East Berlin in 1950, was viewed with suspicion by the regime for years, became a member of the Academy of Arts in 1956, and died on 26 April 1968. Every political meme that uses a cut-up photograph descends from him.