Produced for the government Werbedienst (Publicity Office), this poster promotes an antirevolutionary message through a revolutionary visual style. Its text cautions workers to reject the strike as a means to achieve their goals: “Workers, starvation approaches. Strikes destroy, labor restores. Do your duty, work.” The frenetic Expressionist aesthetic amplifies the panicked tone of the poster’s message. Text spins around the composition like a propeller; in the middle of this centrifuge is a colossal skeleton storming through a town, grabbing at the figures that flee beneath its feet. The skeleton wears sabots, a nineteenth-century peasant shoe associated with an anti-industrial workforce. The skeleton personifies both starvation and the striking worker, which, the artist suggests, together threaten the lives and livelihoods of the proletariat.
This is one of several Werbedienst posters made between January and March 1919 that promoted a return to order, as the communist left’s frustrations with the ruling Majority Socialist Party (MSPD) fueled mass strikes and social unrest throughout Germany. Government- and party-sponsored imagery constituted a “paper flood” of political graphics covering all public surfaces, as noted by one commentator: “Berlin’s streets rioted in color orgies, the houses exchanged their gray faces for agitated masks” (Bauer 1919: 166). Fuchs’s dense composition and sketchy line contrast with the straightforward style of partisan posters such as Gottfried Kirchbach’s Women! Same Rights—Same Responsibilities. Vote Social Democratic! (M.2003.114.34). The Werbedienst came under attack for spending government funds on posters that were both ineffective and unpopular, and the office was dissolved in September 1919.
Erin Sullivan Maynes
2022 (adapted from Pressing Politics: Revolutionary Graphics from Mexico and Germany, p. 84)
Bibliography
Bauer 1919. Ernst Carl Bauer. “Das politische Gesicht der Straße.” Das Plakat 10, no. 2 (March 1919); quoted in Ida Katherine Rigby, An alle Künstler!: War—Revolution—Weimar. German Expressionist Prints, Drawings, Posters, and Periodicals from the Robert Gore Rifkind Foundation (San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1983), 33.
