eyewitness account / the night of broken glass

Poster [detail] © Roy R. Behrens

Among the most despicable events in modern history is what is known as Kristallnacht (German for “Crystal Night”), or, as more commonly translated, “the Night of Broken Glass.” It refers to massive overnight rioting (a pogrom), instigated by the Nazi Party on November 9-10, 1938. It was carried out against Jewish synagogues, businesses, homes, schools, hospitals, as well as people on the street, and is said to have been triggered by the murder of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris by a 17-year-old assassin of Jewish ethnicity. It is estimated that 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses and 267 synagogues were destroyed, at least 90 citizens killed, and 30,000 Jewish males arrested. It was a foreboding of the insidious (and all but successful) attempts by Adolf Hitler and his many devotees to—in essence—recover from the humiliation of World War I, and to "make Deutschland great again." Visiting in Berlin that night was an American artist and writer named Ione Robinson (1910-1989). Eight years later, in an autobiography, she recalled what happened that horrible night, in the passages below.

•••

Ione Robinson, A Wall to Paint On. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1946—

There is still a feeling of suspense that something will happen in Berlin. We saw large groups of Storm Troopers about the city, but Freddie [a journalist friend] said they were probably ordered out to clap at some meeting.

Berlin, November 10, 1938 [the following day]
This morning the telephone rang at four o'clock. I could hear Freddie speaking quietly, and knowing something about the lives of newspapermen, I paid little attention to being awakened at such an early hour.

Later at breakfast I found Freddie sitting over his coffee, staring at the wall in from of him. Dorothy [his wife] was still in her dressing gown. There was a frightful silence when I entered thc room. I thought that someone must have died during the night.

Finally Freddie said, “Well, it has started and God only knows where it will end.” When I asked what had started, he told me calmly, “Another Jewish pogrom–because of vom Rath.”

Coming from a war, one’s nerves are atuned to violence, and I was surprised to find myself turning to Dorothy like a scared rabbit. She seemed to accept the thing that was about to happen like a trained nurse accustomed to caring for a lunatic.

Later in the morning I drove through the city with her. Everything was quiet, and the morning was so cold and damp after an hour of this cruising around that Dorothy decided the whole thing had been called off. I wanted to buy a Contax camera. I asked her to take me to a camera store. While I was examining the Contax I heard a splitting crash, followed by the noise of breaking glass. I started to run for the door of this shop but the salesman held my arm. He begged me not to look and said, “You are an American. I don’t want you to look at this Germany—these aren’t the people of my country doing this thing!”

In the furniture store across the street there was a group of young boys like our American college students. They had hatchets and crowbars in their hands and they were singing while they went about the most vicious piece of wrecking I have ever seen. They were not content just to smash an object—they methodically ground every conceivable thing to pieces; not even the walls of the store were left untouched. Long splinters of wood were left hanging like icicles. When this gang, which was comparatively small, and which any group of able-bodied men could have beaten to smithereens, had finished this store, they went singing down the street unmolested, searching out another victim.

By the time we had reached the Unter den Linden, every Jewish shop was being hacked to pieces. I was amazed at the coolness with which a wrecker would swing his ax into large plateglass window without the slightest fear of being cut by the falling glass. These people were like cold demons. They were wild with a sadistic kind of delirium. The pavements began to look as if an earthquake had struck Berlin. Objects of every description were strewn over the pavements. But the people just stood there; their faces looked dead. No one spoke a word and the police made no attempt to stop the wrecking or the looting…

I walked over to the Kurfurstendamm, which is one of the fashionable shopping streets…the same thing was happening there. I stood in front of one shop and watched the owner—an old Jewish man—being forced to pick up, piece by piece, the broken debris in front of his store. While he was doing this, the wreckers grabbed the only object that had not been torn to bits, a family photograph, and hung it on a wire in front of the doorway. And then they all took turns spitting on this picture! A baby started to cry in the arms of a young woman onlooker. She scolded the baby for crying and held it high in the air to have a better look at this “national glory!”

Towards evening, clouds of smoke curled over Berlin. The synagogues had been set on fire. I drove with Dorothy across the city to find the wife of a Jewish newspaperman working for the UPI [United Press International]. While I waited in the street I saw a man being chased by fifteen Storm Troopers. He didn't have a chance. They closed in on him like hounds after a fox. When they grabbed him he was thrown to the pavement and his skull bashed until he lay there completely unconscious. The Troopers walked calmly away, brushing off their uniforms. I stood by the car, numb with fear, and hating myself for having watched such a ghastly scene; then I realized what could happen to the hearts of men if they permitted themselves not only to indulge in such sadism, but to become passive spectators of such hideous crimes.
 

window for first fifty exhibition at hearst center

A few weeks ago, I designed the exhibition mailing card (shown below at end of post) for an upcoming exhibition at the Hearst Center for the Arts (Cedar Falls IA). It is a non-juried public event that provides an opportunity for anyone—amateur and non-practicing artists included—to have their work exhibited at an art center. The theme of the annual event this year is FIRST FIFTY 2023: PATTERNS. The exhibition is on view from June 15 to August 6.

Having designed the card, I was subsequently asked to produce a six-panel window design, to promote the same exhibition. Shown above is a diagram of the window installation scheme, and below is a view of how the front of the building looked earlier this week.

Vladimir Tatlin's Tower of the Third International

Above Photograph of Russian Constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin (second from left) and three of his associates in the process of constructing a model of his now famous Tower of the Third International (aka Tatlin's Tower).

•••

George Grosz, An Autobiography. Translated by Nora Hodges. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, pp. 178-180—

Constructivism had many followers in Russia. [Among the most prominent] was a certain [Vladimir] Tatlin, a peculiar Russian child of nature. Tatlin came from a wealthy family and had traveled in Germany before the First World War. At that time he had been a member of a famous balalaika band [in which he played the bandura] and choir [which sang in Ukrainian], which had played before Kaiser Wilhelm at court. He then became a painter and also studied at a school of technology. He got known when he exhibited his big project for a monument in Moscow [intended for construction near the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul] …he himself would never have called it a monument, that word was too old-fashioned and romantic, he called it the “Tower of the Third International” [at full scale, it would have been one third taller than the Eiffel Tower]. The [initial] model of this whole powerful construction was about ten feet high, consisting of all sorts of rods and bars put together at odd angles.…

…[Sometime later] I went to see Tatlin once more. He lived in a small, old, dilapidated apartment. Some of the chickens that he kept slept in his bed. They laid eggs in one corner. We drank tea, and Tatlin chatted about Berlin, Wertheim's department store, and his performance at court. There was a completely rusted wire mattress leaning on the wall behind him with a few sleeping chickens sitting on it, their heads tucked under their wings. They furnished the perfect frame to dear Tatlin as he started to play his homemade balalaika. Darkness appeared through the curtainless window; most panes had been replaced with little squares of wood. We suddenly seemed surrounded by the melancholy humor of a book by [Russian writer Nikolai] Gogol. Tatlin was no longer the ultramodern constructivist; he was a piece of genuine, old Russia. I never saw him again, nor did I ever hear of him or the formerly much discussed “Tatlinism.” He is said to have died alone, and forgotten [in 1953].•

 • According to a Wikipedia biographical text, “In 1948 he was heavily criticized for his allegedly anti-communist stance and lost his job, but was not repressed.”

•••

George Grosz, An Autobiography. Translated by Nora Hodges. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998—

I remember [American literary critic] Edmund Wilson best coming down the steps in his beach coat; like all fat people, he looked most impressive viewed from below…Wilson is more a lobster person than a fish person: you have to use a nut cracker to get to the meat. (p. 305)

Below Vladimir Tatlin, Counter-relief (1916). Photo: Shakko, Wikimedia Commons.

impromptu gymnastics strengthens muscularity

flag waving / anon

A.A. Milne, Autobiography. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1939, pp. 52-53—

The only occasion on which I spoke in the Debating Society was at what was called an “Impromptu Debate.” The names of the members were put into one hat, the subjects for speech into another. In an agony of nervousness I waited for my name to be called. It came at last, “Milne Three.” Milne III tottered up and drew his fate; not that it mattered, for one subject was as fatal to him as another. He tottered back to his desk and opened the paper. The subject on which he had to speak was “Gymnastics.”

I stood there dumbly. I could think of nothing. The boy next to me, misapprehending the meaning of the word “impromptu,” whispered to me: “Gymnastics strengthens the muscles.” I swallowed and said, “Gymnasthicth thtrengthenth the muthelth.” Then I sat down. This is the shortest speech I have ever made, and possibly, for that reason, the best.

• See also this great story about the “shotgun seminars” at Princeton, as well as this video essay about the nature of humor.

the democratization of the art of brain surgery

A.A. Milne [author of Winnie the Pooh], Autobiography. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1939, pp. 310-311—

…the modern eagerness to lower standards and abolish “form” [is distressing]. It is as if democracy had said, not “[Art] shall be open to aII,” as it has every right to say, but [rather] “Achievement in [art] shall be the [assured for everyone]; which is nice for all of us, but not so good for [art]. Sometimes I think it is a pity that, having gone so far, we do not go further, and say: “Achievement in sports shall be [assured for everyone].” As a golfer I should like to be able to look contemptuously down upon the old-fashioned practice of raising the golf ball in the air, and to abolish the old-fashioned rule which says, how foolishly, that the player who does the hole in the lean number of shots shall be the winner. It is more in keeping with modern ideals (and it is also easier) to go from one point to another in a straight line rather than in a parabola, and the playing of eight shots expresses your personality, which is really all that matters, much more completely than the playing of one. But alas! in sport you can only feel superior to the champions of the past by beating them at their own game and under their own rules. In the arts you can denounce the target, change the rules, aim in a different direction, hit nothing, and receive the assurances of your friends that you are the better man.

Also see Art, Design, and Brain Research: Non-Scientific Thoughts about Neuroesthetics

social media acronyms as practiced by victorians

Above A three-panel caricature, The Pair of Skaters (1873), by one of history's finest comic illustrators (often featured in Simplicissimus), the Norwegian artist Olaf Gulbransson. His command of movement and gestural line has never been equaled.

•••

A.A. Milne, Autobiography. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1939, pp. 131-132—

One way and another we [the author and his brother Kenneth John Milne] got a good deal of happiness out of it [preparatory school], if not always in the way expected of us. We sat together now, never to be separated, in the Mathematical Sixth, which meant that we occupied one corner of a room in which some lowly mathmatical set was being taught. Since we could not talk wthout disturbing the master-in-charge we wrote letters to each other: long letters detailing our plans for the next holidays. Interest was added to these letters by our custom of omitting every other word, leaving blanks which the addressee had to fill in. Our minds were sufficiently in tune for this to be possible without being easy; one could get the general sense without being certain of the exact word. As in my old French set, we then changed papers and marked each other's mistakes. Sometimes our communications were in initial letters only. During “second school,” for instance, it was certain that one of us would ask the other “SWGUSIB?” This clearly meant “Shall we go up-Sutts in break?” a question which expected the answer “Yes” and got it. Ken would feel in his pockets and decide that, since we already owed Father 15/6, we might as well owe him sixteen shillings. We did.

the lash of the tongue of teacher Henry Tonks

Above Roy R. Behrens, exhibition card design, 2023.

•••

Bernard Leach, Beyond East and West: memoirs, portraits, and essays. New York: Watson-Guptill, 1978—

[As an art student at the Slade School of Art, he endured] the lash of the tongue of [his drawing teacher] Henry Tonks—Tonks with his gritty eye and tomahawk nose, tall in shiny blue serge, who had given up his job as house surgeon at Bart's Hospital to use his scalpel on us at the Slade; Tonks who became a second-class artist in the Impressionist manner, but a good draughtsman and perhaps the best teacher in all England. Often we saw some girl cowering in tears behind a plaster cast. He spared none; his bitter tongue was fearless and true. Here is tribute and thanks to him. His surgery changed our skins—saved our lives maybe. Tonks, who enunciated “action, construction, proportion” as the flaming guardians of the paradise of art; who, sitting on one of the student’s “donkeys” [drawing benches], after a glance at his drawing, buried his face in his hands, paused long, and then asked, “Why do you do it?”; and who once said to me grudgingly, “You may be able to draw one day.” I remember on one occasion he flung open the studio door, stood there in deadly silence, then burst out: “I want to know whether a day will come when I shall see a sign of art in this room,” and slammed the door behind him.