AIZ Jahrgang XI Nr. 18, 1932 / 1. Mai Mit Lenin zum Sieg! (First of May With Lenin to Victory)

Berlin: Neuer Deutscher Verlag - Willi Münzenberg, 1932. First edition. Softcover. Very good condition. Folio (15 x 11"). 22pp. (410-431). Photo-illustrated wraps with white and red lettering, protected by modern mylar. Centerfold with famous photomontage by John Heartfield: Krieg Und Leichen - Die Letzte Hoffnung Der Reichen. (War And Corpses - The Last Hope Of The Rich). "The hyena wears a "Blue Max," a flying medal from World War I. The original motto, "Pour le Mérite," has been changed to "Pour le Profit." This montage, Heartfield's first after returning from the Soviet Union, appeared in this special May Day issue... This issue carries an editorial by AIZ publisher Willi Münzenberg that remembered Lenin's call for the withdrawal of Russia from the "imperialist war" in 1917 and stressed the threat to the Soviet Union, fifteen years later, of attack by capitalist states in crisis. There were unsuccessful attempts to ban copies of this issue of AIZ in Baden, provoking protests from sympathetic artists and writers." (David Evans, John Heartfield, page 76). Imprint Neuer Deutscher Verlag, Berlin with offices in Vienna, Basel, Amsterdam Text in German. Some light fraying of two pages at foredge. John Heartfield (1891-1968), born Helmut Herzfeld, is best known for his "Use [of] Photography as a Weapon" - this line was written on a banner above the entrance of the room especially dedicated to his work at the 1929 exhibition "Film und Foto" in Stuttgart. Heartfield saw photomontage, a term coined by the Berlin Dadaists, as a tool of political protest and was best known and admired for his more than fifty photomontage dustjackets for book publications.

His vitae is "littered" with names instrumental in avant-garde movements of the 20th Century: George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters, Jan Tschichold, Herbert Bayer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, and famously Kurt Tuchosky in his work "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles," to which Heartfield contributed his photomontages. His publishing endeavors included the founding of the Malik Verlag, the Neue Jugend, a magazine published with George Grosz, and his 237 contributions to the AIZ (Illustrated Worker's Newspaper) between 1929 and 1938. During his stay in Russia, 1931-1932, Heartfield contributed to "Soviet Union in Construction," a collaboration between El Lissitzky and Rodchenko, experimenting with photography and photomontage.

With George Grosz Heartfiel edited and contributed to the first Communist satircal magazine, Der Knüppel (The Cudgel), from 1923 to 1927. His success in the 1929 Stuttgart Film und Foto exhibition prompted othe artist to show interest for the use of photomontage, e.g. Bayer and Moholy-Nagy in the German fashion magazine Neue Linie, and in Russia Rodchenko and Lissitzky as mentioned above.

Brecht congratulated th AIZ on its tenth anniversary in 1931 writing "the camera can lie just like the typesetting mahcine. The task of A-I-Z to serve truth and reproduce the real facts is of immense importance, and, it seems to me, has been achieved splendidly." (Brect in AIZ 10, No. 41, 1931). In 1933, after the takeover of the Nazis, Münzenberg moved to Paris and Heartfield to Prague, operating the Malik Verlag amd AIZ from there. The last AIZ issue published in Berlin was released on March 5, 1933, and Heartfield began publishing AIZ from Prague later that month. "Heartfield's first photomontage from Prague, Durch Licht zur Nacht (Through light to night; 5/33), a comment on Nazi book burning, appeared on 10 May, 1933." (David Evans, John Heartfield, page 12). The edition for each issue was reduced to 12,000 in Prague, compared to 500,000 in Berlin.

In 1936 Heartfield renamed AIZ to Volks-Illustrierte (VI) and in 1938 the operations were moved to France where seven additional issues without contributions by Heartfield were releasedbetween January 15th and February 26, 1939. Heartfield moved to London in 1940, after a narrow escape from the Gestapo. He was not welcomed by the British government but placed in various interment camps which had a severe effect on his health. Eventually he was able to continue his campaign against the Third Reich producing advertisements for the radio broadcast "Freedom Calling," a production utterly dispised by Adolf Hitler. In London Heartfield met Gertrud Fietz. They moved to East Germany in 1950 and got married there just before Heartfield's death in 1968.