“Seid untertan der Obrigkeit”. The Akademie der Künste acquires 13 Švejk drawings by George Grosz for its Art Collection

Erwin Piscator and George Grosz’s 1928 production of Die Abenteuer des braven Soldaten Schwejk (The Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk) at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz was a landmark event in theatre and art history. Satirist and pacifist George Grosz’s figurines and the singular sketches he made in designing the set were a key part of this: his work on the production included larger-than-life “cardboard comrades”, which were presented using the modern technology of conveyor belts and as animated film sequences.

A number of these drawings – a selection published by Malik-Verlag in 1928 under the title Hintergrund that landed Grosz in court – are still well known today. Three of his sheets, the so-called Christus mit der Gasmaske (Christ with Gas Mask), Seid untertan der Obrigkeit (Bow to the Authorities) and Die Ausschüttung des heiligen Geistes (The Outpouring of the Holy Spirit), were seized for “publicly reviling institutions of the Christian churches” and resulted in one of the longest trials centred on art in the modernist period. In the end, despite two not-guilty verdicts, the supreme court of the German Reich ordered the destruction of the Christ drawing and any reproductions of it. However, Wieland Herzfelde, Grosz’s publisher, magicked it away before bequeathing it, in the 1980s, to the Akademie der Künste, where it has been kept ever since as a special treasure.

The Art Collection has now succeeded – with generous support from the Cultural Foundation of the German Federal States and the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung – in acquiring Seid untertan der Obrigkeit, the other large-format drawing that led to Grosz’s prosecution, as well as a preliminary study for the third, lost sheet Die Ausschüttung des heiligen Geistes, part of a bundle of 13 works from the estate of George Grosz and from a private source in Italy.

These Švejk drawings will be put on public display together with other sheets from the Stadtmuseum Berlin and from private collections in the exhibition “Was sind das für Zeiten? – Brecht, Grosz und Piscator” (4 Jul – 25 Nov). The show at Das kleine Grosz Museum is being mounted in cooperation with the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.