At the end of World War I, Germany’s former government and military propaganda office was reinvented as the Werbedienst (Publicity Office) and tasked with promoting the needs of the new government. Its director, Paul Zech, commissioned work by Expressionist artists in the belief that the modern artistic style would project an image of the government itself as progressive and forward-looking. This poster by César Klein is arguably one of the Werbedienst’s most successful. All of its elements project a utopian vision of social unity and cohesion. Individuals of different professions and class backgrounds are grouped together, some joining hands, all raising their right arms in a show of solidarity. The text appears in a series of abbreviated banderoles that weave together, their up-and-down movement echoed in the rise and fall of the ground below. The thick black band on the horizon is, on closer inspection, an unbroken chain of bodies, individuals that have fused into a unified mass.
The impetus for this aspirational image of national community was the first election to the National Assembly, scheduled for January 19, 1919. Citizens were to elect leaders responsible for drafting the first constitution of the republic. The new government’s legitimacy depended upon voters turning out in large numbers. This image of unity was not merely imaginative projection: the vote would be more inclusive than any in German history, with women participating for the first time and the voting age lowered from twenty-five to twenty. Ultimately, however, the Communist Party boycotted the election; committed to the cause of revolution, they refused to recognize the new government.
Erin Sullivan Maynes
2022 (adapted from Pressing Politics: Revolutionary Graphics from Mexico and Germany, 56)
