The art of political protest

The past doesn’t always remain in the past. Sometimes, it emerges in the present, reminding us about the universality and repetitiveness of the human experience. Berlin’s George Grosz Museum, a tiny gem, is a startling reminder that modern political and social ills are not modern. Grosz lived through World Wars I and II, shining a torch into the heart of darkness in high-ranking men and women—who were complicit in the collapse of the world as they knew it.

- ANITA PRATAP

Satirical and subversive, playful and profound, Grosz’s cartoons and drawings represent art as political protest, a resistance to “blood-stained nationalism”. He digs deeper, offering insightful, stinging analysis. Hyperinflation threw Germany into chaos. But with surgical precision, Grosz depicts a catastrophic cause for the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler: grotesque inequality. His cartoons are a testament that neither war nor inflation affect the power elite—the monarchy, military, church and bourgeoisie.