The Memory Politics of Antifascism: Exhibiting John Heartfield During the Cold War

• In Event: Reframing Interwar Legacies: The Politics of Memory in Central and Eastern European Art

Abstract

In the fall of 1964, a major retrospective of John Heartfield’s photomontages, titled Still Yet…Exhibition John Heartfield, was held in Prague, before traveling to Bratislava, Brno, and Košice. Notably, the exhibition was framed as both a commemoration of the 1934 International Exhibition of Caricature and Humor in Prague and a celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). This paper examines the reframing of the interwar display of antifascist art in Prague—where Heartfield’s works had been censored following pressure from the German ambassador—to show how antifascist memory and art were mobilized in the service of cultural diplomacy between the GDR and the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic within the broader ideological framework of the Eastern Bloc.

Author

• Barbora Bartunkova, Independent Scholar / The Museum of Modern Art