Henry Mayer's WWI Pasteboard Charlemagnes

Here are two views of a single illustration, created by Hy Mayer (aka Henry Mayer) and published in Puck (19 September 1914), vol 76 no 1959, pp. 12-13. It was accompanied by a text about the outbreak of World War I, titled “The Pasteboard Charlemagnes by Benjamin De Casseres. 

Mayer’s illustration, titled “Militarism: From the Craddle to the Grave,” is an upsidedown double image. As shown here, it appears to be the image of a child when viewed upright, but turned upsidedown, it looks like a German helmet with a human skull inside.

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.

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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.
 

the absurd continuing access to weapons of war

Without hesitation, I can say that one of my favorite artists is the German printmaker and sculptor Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945). I became acquainted with her work in 1964, when I was 18 and a freshman art student in undergraduate school. In the university’s art collection was one of Kollwitz’s finest lithographs, titled Death and the Woman (1934), reproduced below. 

Many of her most powerful works are self-portraits. One reason that they are so powerful is that her own appearance was so dignified, yet strikingly sad and remorseful, a quality that is equally true of photographs of her. Reproduced above is the commemorative relief profile that was issued as a German coin in 1967. And at the bottom of this blog post is surely one of her most unforgettable self-portraits, an etching titled Self-Portrait with Hand on Forehead (1910). In 1914, her sadness was intensified when her youngest son Peter was killed in World War I, only two days after arriving at the battlefield. 

The awful grief of losing her son remained with her until her own death, a sorrow that she tried to assuage by designing a gravesite memorial to him (and other soldiers), now at the Vladslo German war cemetery in Belgium. At that gravesite, she installed two mourning figures, she and her husband, side by side, known as The Grieving Parents. 

I was reminded of this lately when my friend, the distinguished German psychologist and neuroscientist Lothar Spillman, brought up her name, and recalled what she said at the time of her loss: “Where do those women find the courage to send their dear ones to the front to face the guns when they watched over them all their lives with loving care?” Today, not only do those mothers face the “weapons of war” on the battlefields of Ukraine, Sudan and elsewhere—but, in our own country, on the formerly innocuous neighborhood streets.

In 1996, PBS broadcast an eight-part video series on The Great War. In the final episode is a brief but memorable section about Käthe Kollwitz, the death of Peter, and the gravesite memorial. It can be accessed free online on YouTube. The portion that pertains to Käthe Kollwitz begins around 21 minutes into the film. I strongly recommend it. Do take a look, at a time when we too face—increasingly and every day—the needless killing of people with war-grade weapons.

 

Iowa Source / beware gertrude drives herself

Above By fortunate timing, this essay on Gertrude Stein’s Iowa friendships (Carl Van Vechten from Cedar Rapids, and William Edwards Cook from Independence) was published in The Iowa Source at the beginning of this month, coinciding with the release—online here—of our new 60-minute video on the same subject, COOK: The Man Who Taught Gertrude Stein to Drive. We are grateful for the unusually strong interest in both.

new documentary about Gertrude Stein 2022

I am pleased (albeit exhausted) to say that, as of yesterday, I completed what may be my most ambitious undertaking in recent years. It is a sixty-minute documentary voice-over film biography of the life of William Edwards Cook (1881-1959), an American expatriate artist, who grew up in Iowa, but spent his adult life in Europe, living in Paris, Rome, and Mallorca.

Titled COOK: The Man Who Taught Gertrude Stein to Drive, the film is freely available to everyone here online. More specifically, it is a detailed account of the life-long friendship of Cook with the American writer Gertrude Stein. It is based on her frequent adulation of him in her writings, as well as on the contents of 250 pages of their unpublished correspondence.

Cook was never a well-known artist, but he did acquire some renown for two other reasons: In 1907, he was the first American artist to be allowed to paint a portrait of Pope Pius X. Later, in 1926, he used his inheritance to commission the then-unknown Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier to design an early Modernist home (the "first true cubist house") in Boulogne-sur-Seine, which is still intact, and widely known as Maison Cook or Villa Cook.

The friendship of Gertrude Stein and William Edwards Cook (including the roles of their partners, Alice B. Toklas and Jeanne Moallic Cook) was first documented in (my earlier book)  COOK BOOK: Gertrude Stein, William Cook and Le Corbusier (Bobolink Books, 2005). This new documentary film corrects, updates, and adds to the information in that book.

This film project (as well as the earlier book) was made possible by the earlier work of such Stein scholars as Ulla Dydo, Bruce Kellner, and Rosalind Moad, as well as the Stein / Cook correspondence in the collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

In 2005, when COOK BOOK was released, Ulla Dydo (the pre-eminent expert on Stein, and author of The Language that Rises) praised it in the following way: "This book jumps out at my eyes, my ears. It comes from everywhere, never drags those even blocks of print that dull the mind. Look at it, read it, let it tease you: It's researched with all the care that keeps its sense of humor and its visual and voice delights. Travel with it, leave home, go and explore the many ways for a book to be a house for living."

The distinguished critic Guy Davenport wrote: "This is as good as topnotch Behrens gets!"

This film is not without humor, and at times it shares surprises. It may prove of particular value to viewers (both scholars and the rest of us) who are particularly interested in American literature, Modernism, Gertrude Stein, art, architecture, horse racing, Harvard, William James, art collectors, expatriates, Paris, Mallorca, the American Midwest, Iowa, art history, the training of artists, Cézanne, Cubism, Picasso, Le Corbusier, LGBT, and gender identity issues. 

Maison Cook

WWI American actions and attitudes at home

Above 19th century Victorian wood type catalog page, 1874. Public domain.

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Edward Robb Ellis, Life in the United States 1914-1918. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1975, p. 428, describing the actions and attitudes of Americans during World War I, after the US declared war against Germany—

Anything mindful of German culture became suspect. Vigilantes inspected public libraries and invaded private homes and burned books by Goethe and Heine and Kant, broke Victrola records that preserved the music of Beethoven and Bach and Wagner. School after school forbade the teaching of the German language, while in clubs and churches and halls there was a ban against speaking German. [In the Iowa home of my father's parents, whose parents had immigrated from Germany in the 1850s, German was guardedly only spoken at home.]

With trembling fingers people plucked their gardens free of bachelor buttons, which was Germany’s national flower. Sauerkraut was renamed Liberty cabbage, hamburger became Salisbury steak. German measles were called Liberty measles, German dishes disappeared from restaurants, seed catalogs referred to German clover as Liberty clover, and bartenders removed pretzels from their free lunch counters.

no pain yet fearful that something had happened

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Above Roy R. Behrens, Egg Head. Digital montage © 2021.

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Fritz Heider, The life of a psychologist. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1983, pp. 5 and 30—

My brother and I had little cap pistols [at around the age of ten]. These caps seemed to have remarkable properties, and I decided to experiment to find out more about them. The upshot was that something exploded in my face. Several small pieces of lead became embedded in my cheeks and forehead, and a few entered my left eye, injuring the retina. My father took me to our doctor right away. He was rather pessimistic about the outlook for the eye. I remember that I had to stay in bed for two weeks, with my eyes covered. I had no pain as I lay there, but I had a dim feeling that something of importance had happened which would influence my whole life. I could not judge whether this would be beneficial or harmful—I only knew that there was something serious about it, though I do not remember that I was unduly worried.…

[Ten years later, during World War I] I tried several times to enter the military service. I began to wonder whether I was rejected because the draft board considered the possibility that my injured eye might become infected and affect the healthy eye. So, on one bleak, wintry day in 1916 I went to the hospital, accompanied by my father, and had the damaged eye removed, to be replaced by an artificial one. But even after that change in my physical condition, I was not taken on.

Roycroft / Elbert Hubbard and Alice Hubbard

online version

Having taught courses in the history of design for many years, I have of course long known about the Roycroft Workshops in East Aurora NY, as well as their proprietors, Elbert Hubbard, and his second wife, Alice Moore Hubbard. But until recently, I hadn't realized the extent of their connections to people and events in Iowa. This new essay from The Iowa Source discloses the various details.

rum, agony, complete carnage, noise and death

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Above Roy R. Behrens, Table Talk (© 2021). Digital montage.

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Anonymous (a retired, 79-year-old British man, who, at age eighteen, while serving in France during World War I, had survived crippling battlefield wounds), quoted in Ronald Blythe, The View in Winter: Reflections on Old Age. UK: Penguin Books, 1980, pp. 135-136—

[While serving in the trenches] we reached a line the Germans had just vacated and on the next morning, after being made to drink a lot of rum, I went over the top for the first time. Everybody has written about it and nobody can describe it. Not really. The legs and arms of the dead stretched out, the ripped bellies of the horses steaming and stinking. And the dead faces of mates looking up at you out of the filth. Filth. Men made into filth before your very eyes. “He’s finished,” you’d say to yourself, and in a way you were glad he was! Because there was this useless agony because you’d got to go. How I prayed then! “Over the top!” it was, and there you were, running and falling. After the first time I fell asleep in a trench filling with water and was nearly drowned. We were on the Somme. It was solid carnage, noise and death. There was so much death then that it doesn’t matter to me now. Or should I say, it doesn’t worry me now. Now that I’m getting on for eighty, and when there’s not a morning when I don’t thank God for it. Day come, day go.

The Iowa Exploits of Buffalo Bill Cody

Iowa-born Wild West showman William Frederick Cody, famously known as Buffalo Bill, was fortunate not to have witnessed the final years of the Great War. He died on January 10, 1917, in Denver, Colorado, at age 70. His funeral was a major news event, as admirers worldwide mourned his passing. Ironically, despite the on-going conflict, condolences for his death were sent by both England’s King George V and Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Cody’s death was undoubtedly fresh in American minds on March 6, 1917, less than two months after the funeral. On that day, according to an article in the Marshalltown (Iowa) Times-Republican, a group of Iowa youngsters, who were walking down the street in Cedar Falls…more>>>

Iowa's Buffalo Bill

Flu pandemic and quackery in Iowa in 1918

Roy R. Behrens (©1980), Cream City Review

Richard Critchfield, Those Days: An American Album. New York: Dell, 1986, p. 189—

[Jessie in Postville, Iowa, writing to Anne in Minneapolis, October 28, 1918, in reference to the Spanish flu pandemic] . . . Hope you and the children got there safely. Helen got ill just after you left. It seems to be a recurrence. She had it awfully hard last year. I’m keeping her out of school. So far the rest of us have been spared. We keep hearing wild rumors. One is that some doctors and nurses at Camp Dodge outside Des Moines were caught injecting flu germs into patients and were court-martialed and shot. Another is that fifty black soldiers who died of flu were buried in a mass grave behind the hospital. Who can be believed? Dad says none of it's true but that so many of the young boys who got drafted and are down at Camp Dodge are sick and going overseas. One of the fellows we knew died of flu on his way to France and had to be buried at sea. Liquor is outlawed here, but the police will issue medicinal whiskey permits if Doc Schmidt signs them. No more than a quart and the man is watched. Doc Schmidt got hold of what he calls “pneumonia serum.” He told Papa, “I don't know if it's any good, but c'mon over and I'll give you a shot.” So he went. I tried a new medicine, “Vick's Vaporub,” with Helen. Folks have been trying just about anything—onions, kerosene, Hicks tablets, mustard poultices, lemon juice, turpentine, linament. Papa had me make up some little cheesecloth breath strainers. But there's plenty of quackery…

Mary Snyder Behrens | Home

Home (2005) © Mary Snyder Behrens

Above Selected work from a series of intricate handmade bundles (called Trammels) with undisclosed contents, about palm size, made in 2004-2005 by Iowa artist Mary Snyder Behrens. Copyright © the artist.

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Robert Graves in Goodbye to All That, Garden City NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1957, p. 202—

[The continuance of war] seemed merely a sacrifice of the idealistic younger generation to the stupidity and self-protective alarm of the elder.…

War should be a sport for men above forty-five only, the Jesses, not the Davids. "Well, dear father, how proud I am of you serving your country as a very gallant gentleman prepared to make even the supreme sacrifice! I only wish I were your age: how willingly would I buckle on my armor and fight those unspeakable Philistines! As it is, of course, I can't be spared; I have to stay behind at the War Office and administrate for you lucky old men. What sacrifices I have made!" David would sigh, when the old boys had gone off with a draft to the front, singing Tipperary: "There's father and my Uncle Salmon, and both my grandfathers all on active service. I must put a card in the window about it."

Lincoln Infographic | Jordon Deutmeyer

Lincoln Infographic © Jordon Deutmeyer 2015

A large-format interpretative chronology of the assassination of US President Abraham Lincoln, designed by Jordon Deutmeyer, graphic design student, Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa, 2015.

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Richard Critchfield, Those Days: An American Album (New York: Dell, 1986), p. 342—

Just after we moved to Fargo [ND], the summer of 1932, Mother took Grandma Critchfield down to Knoxville, Iowa, to visit McLain in the veterans hospital. He'd been there ever since his brain was injured in that plane crash during World War I. Mom took the three boys along with her. We'd moved into a house on the north side of town and the Hopes were visiting… Mr. Hope had fallen asleep at the wheel and woke up when his car hit a passing train at a crossing. He walked for help with a shattered kneecap. Anyway, the whole family of Hopes came to our house in Fargo to recuperate. When Mom got back from Iowa, she hunted all over for the toilet brush and found it in the kitchen. Helen had been using it to scrub vegetables.

In that first house in Fargo, a family named Hilliard lived next door… Mr. Hilliard wore shorts and a goatee. The shorts came below his stomach and one day his little girl stuck a nasturtium in his navel and he left it there all day. Mr. Hilliard was very congenial. He'd call over, "Yoo hoo! Let's all come out! I've got a good dirty story!" Daddy was always joking too. One time, a man had been chasing girls in the park and Daddy said, "I just wish he'd jump out of the bushes at Betty. She'd scare 'im." Another time, when Aunt Helen was visiting from Iowa with her two-year-old and a newborn baby, Daddy said, "You people in Iowa breed just like rabbits." That didn't go down so well.