This image comes from a portfolio of six woodcuts in which Constantin von Mitschke-Collande illustrates Walther Georg Hartmann’s 1919 short story “Der begeisterte Weg” (The Inspired Path), which Hartmann dedicated to “the dead, living, and future heroes of the righteous revolution.” The story follows a soldier who leaves the front, encounters a revolution in progress, and joins the side of the revolutionaries. Freedom (Freiheit) depicts the moment the revolutionaries enter the city. Sharp diagonals created by outstretched arms and acute rooftop angles generate an energy that converges around the upraised hand of the figure rallying the masses below and toward the celestial body on the upper right, harmonizing the earthly and extraterrestrial. Mitschke-Collande’s brand of Cubo-Futurist abstraction is deployed for the purpose of creating an image of collective action—the mass consolidated into a single powerful unit.
Born into a wealthy aristocratic family, Mitschke-Collande became an ardent member of the Communist Party after the German Revolution. With Otto Dix and Conrad Felixmüller, he cofounded the Dresden Secession, a politically active and socially critical group of Expressionist artists. Hartmann’s story and Mitschke-Collande’s illustrations epitomize the metaphysical side of revolutionary Expressionism, in which the ideological and spiritual were treated as equivalent. The soldier in Hartmann’s story is ultimately killed by counterrevolutionary troops, but his spirit returns to discourage violence and advocate love, a utopian resolution to the question of armed resistance. In Collande-Mischke’s final illustration, the soldier’s spirit departs the earth with the words “Die Zeit ist reif” (the time is ripe). Many believed the revolution would dramatically remake society and resurrect a renewed German culture from the ashes of war. However, few practical political prescriptions were attached to those sentiments.
Erin Sullivan Maynes
2022 (adapted from Pressing Politics: Revolutionary Graphics from Mexico and Germany, 32)
