Revealing Evil: The Visual Zygosis of John Heartfield

With his scathing photomontages, John Heartfield subverted the propaganda of the Nazi Reich…

Remy Dean
Signifier
Published in
8 min readApr 10, 2022

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The political potential of photomontage was pioneered by three prominent members of the Berlin Dada group. During the First World War, Helmut Herzfeld, George Grosz, and Hannah Höch were experimenting with arranging photographic elements sourced from advertising, newspapers, journals, and pamphlets, thus synthesising selected images to create new meanings. This was also the first melding of art and activism using the method and, when Helmut Herzfeld anglicised his name to John Heartfield, he became synonymous with the technique he termed zygosis.

KPD campaign posters by John Heartfield for the 1928 German government elections [view license]

In 1899, when Helmut was 8 years of age, he and his three siblings were abandoned by their parents and raised by an uncle. He’d just turned 23 at the outbreak of the First World War but was deemed mentally unfit for military training, which suited his pacifist sensibilities. Instead, he was assigned to the army’s film unit, and it was around this time that he changed his name to John Heartfield in protest against the hatred that was being stoked against the British.

He lost his job in the film unit due to his outspoken support for a workers’ strike that protested against the politically motivated torture and…

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Remy Dean
Signifier

Author, Artist, Lecturer in Creative Arts & Media. ‘This, That, and The Other’ fantasy novels published by The Red Sparrow Press. https://linktr.ee/remydean