John Heartfield’s Satirical Piccie of Weimar President Von Papen – Parallels with a Certain D. Trump, Perhaps

John Heartfield was a radical German artist of the Weimar period, who settled in Britain after the War. He didn’t draw or paint, but used photographs. During his career he worked for a number of publishers producing book covers, as well as political posters reflecting his Communist, anti-racist and vehemently anti-Nazi political beliefs. It was Heartfield who produced the famous picture of Hitler standing there, his hand flung back in the lazy Nazi salute he used to do, palm flat, being handed money from a much bigger banker standing behind him. The caption for this pic read, ‘Small Man requests big donations’. I’ve also seen a version with the caption, ‘Millions stand behind me’.

But I was struck by this image of the right-wing German president Von Papen standing with his trousers rolled up and a gigantic ladle, like King Cnut, trying vainly stop the flood that’s about to overwhelm him. The caption reads, ‘Papen, what are you doing?’ ‘I’m draining the Bolshevik swamp’.

Draining the swamp? Now where have we heard that before? Oh yes, it was Donald Trump, who in fact made it much worse and far more fetid. They’re now trying to present him as somehow non-racist. He may personally have been, but some of his friends were firmly members of the Alt- and far right.

Workfare Before the Nazis

Members of the Reichsarbeitsdienst, the Nazi compulsory ‘voluntary’ work organisation used to end unemployment.

I’ve already blogged on the strong similarities between the Coalition’s workfare and the Reichsarbeitsdienst established by the Nazis. This, like workfare, was a form of voluntary work, which had been made compulsory and extended in order to combat the massive unemployment resulting from the Great Crash of 1929. By January 1932, the year before the Nazi Machtergreifung, unemployment in Germany had reached 6,042,000.

Franz von Papen, the German Chancellor, had also attempted to lower unemployment by encouraging the German industrialists to take on more workers. Those that did so were rewarded with tax vouchers, and allowed to cut wages by up to 50 per cent. The trade unions naturally denounced this as stimulating the economy ‘at the expense of the workers’. His predecessor, Bruning, had similarly tried to create more jobs, but had suffered from the hostility of the country’s leading industrialists, to whom von Papen’s grant of tax breaks and wage cuts were intended to make the policy more acceptable.

Von Papen was an aristocrat from Westphalia. Although he was formally a member of the Catholic Centre party, he was no democrat and led a government in which members of the aristocracy were so predominant that it was mocked as ‘the baron’s cabinet’. When Papen led the coup against the Prussian government, he was described as a member of the DNVP, the Conservative Deutsche National Volkspartei. The Prussian government was led by three of the main democratic parties, the Socialist SPD, the Roman Catholic Centre Party and the DDP, one of the German Liberal parties. They were brought down by a referendum organised by the DNVP, the Nazis and the paramilitary Stahlhelm. Before this, Papen, and his predecessor, Bruning, had seen the exclusion from power of first the SPD and then the Catholic Centre Party, until only the parties of the Right remained.

This is another point of similarity to contemporary Britain. The Coalition is similarly aristocratic, with Cameron, Clegg and Osborne all true, blue-blooded, Eton-educated members of the aristocracy. They have similarly come to power in a right-wing coalition that has been brought to power through an international financial crisis. They have also tried, albeit ostensibly, to solve the problem of unemployment through a series of measures including cut wages, and indeed, no wages at all, for the unemployed compulsorily placed in the Work Programme.

Those measures were harsh and unjust then, just as they are harsh and unjust now. Workfare, like its Nazi and Weimar predecessors, should be rejected and genuine measures to generate jobs and give workers a living wage, need to be introduced instead.