The peri­od, in Ger­many, between the end of World War I in 1918 and Hitler’s rise to pow­er in 1933 is a fas­ci­nat­ing one: there was a rapid emer­gence of inno­va­tion in the arts and sci­ences, embod­ied in the term “Weimar cul­ture” (after the Weimar Repub­lic, which was the unof­fi­cial des­ig­na­tion for the Ger­man state at that time).

Lumi­nar­ies in the sci­ences dur­ing the peri­od includ­ed Albert Ein­stein, Wern­er Heisen­berg and Max Born; Wal­ter Gropius was busy invent­ing mod­ern archi­tec­ture and design with the Bauhaus move­ment; Lud­wig Prandtl was pio­neer­ing aero­nau­ti­cal engi­neer­ing. In the arts, Ger­man Expres­sion­ism was reach­ing its peak: Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis expressed the pub­lic’s fas­ci­na­tion with futur­ism and tech­nol­o­gy; con­cert halls were begin­ning to hear the aton­al, mod­ern exper­i­men­tal music of Kurt Weill and Arnold Schoen­berg, whilst Bertolt Brecht was shak­ing up the the­atre.

How­ev­er, 1920s Berlin also had a dark under­bel­ly and a rep­u­ta­tion for deca­dence. There was a sig­nif­i­cant rise in pros­ti­tu­tion, drug use, and crime. The cabaret scene, as doc­u­ment­ed by Britain’s Christo­pher Ish­er­wood in his nov­el Good­bye to Berlin (which was even­tu­al­ly adapt­ed into the musi­cal movie, Cabaret), was emblem­at­ic of Berlin’s deca­dence. Many of the painters, sculp­tors, com­posers, archi­tects, play­wrights, and film­mak­ers asso­ci­at­ed with the time would be the same ones whose art would lat­er be denounced as “degen­er­ate art” (Entartete Kun­st) by Adolf Hitler.

A new cul­tur­al move­ment start­ed around this time, how­ev­er – named New Objec­tiv­i­ty (Neue Sach­lichkeit). Its mem­bers turned away from the roman­tic ideals of Ger­man Expres­sion­ism and adopt­ed instead an unsen­ti­men­tal per­spec­tive on the harsh real­i­ties of Ger­man soci­ety. A lead­ing mem­ber of this move­ment was Otto Dix, and it is his paint­ings – satir­i­cal and at times sav­age — that I’m show­cas­ing here. He wished to por­tray the decay of the post-war life; thus, fre­quent themes include the pros­ti­tutes and down­trod­den of Berlin, their defects exag­ger­at­ed to the point of car­i­ca­ture. He also paint­ed many of the promi­nent char­ac­ters from his milieu, in a style influ­enced by the dadaism and cubism art move­ments.

Here is a small selec­tion of his art from the Weimar years, begin­ning with his 1928 tryp­tych, Metrop­o­lis (Großs­tadt), which incor­po­rat­ed crip­pled war vet­er­ans, pros­ti­tutes, musi­cians, dancers, and night club rev­ellers into its three-pan­el indict­ment of con­tem­po­rary Berlin life. Inci­den­tal­ly, when the Nazis came to pow­er, Dix had to promise to paint only inof­fen­sive land­scapes: that must have been excru­ci­at­ing for him!