Artist Hans Gross: Recruited to fight in a 'cultural war'
Hungry and desperate for paying work, he'd do anything to stay in the game.
Artist Hans Gross (1892-1981) plays a significant role in my still-unpublished nonfiction, “The Will to Style: Radical Utopians of the Weimar Bauhaus, 1919-1925.” -ts
Since before World War I, Hans Gross had wanted to become a maker of religious iconography. Attending art school in Weimar, he dreamed of carving commissioned wood-reliefs or designing stained-glass windows of ancient saints and heroic warriors of the faith.
Near the start of the German kaisers’ war, Hans Gross (1892-1981) volunteered as a soldier. He was discharged from the Reichswehr after one year, citing his ill health and “weak constitution” that made him “unfit for service.” Thus, the young artist was spared from fighting on any European battlefield for the duration of the German monarchy’s awful lost cause. When he returned to Weimar, he learned that his school had a new director: Berlin architect Walter Gropius. Also a new name: The Bauhaus State School of art and design.
Gross took pride in making images of religious saints and Wagnerian heros, warriors from a fantastical Nordic fatherland. In reality, however, the artist himself was filled with wide-ranging anxieties, a soul-sapping dread of misery and death. At 29 years old, Hans Gross wanted to be more — to accomplish more with his life and work. Like so many others around him, however, Gross was desperately poor, always mindful of his tattered army-issue clothing and fragile physique, caused by having suffered “malnutrition since my childhood.”
“Never during that year,” one of his friends remembered, “did I see Hans Gross in anything other than his old, field-green soldiers’ uniform, its patches torn away.”
How unfairly fate had treated Hans Gross. His childhood home had been abandoned by a sea-faring father who left his wife with four hungry mouths to feed. They lived in a small house on the fens of Dithmarschen, in Schleswig-Holstein — the wet marshlands between the Elbe and Eider rivers. In Weimar, Hans missed those wide-open swards of seeping soils and shallow waterways. He wrote letters to friends there, describing his dreary winter days in Thuringia, his life reckoned in pennies for the meanest quantities of heating fuel or food — always sensing, with growing fear, the approach of some impending “catastrophe.”
“This terrible time is completely wearing down my nerve” he wrote. “Thoughts race through my brain that I cannot possibly write down….”
After World War II, Gross recounted how he joined the Nazi Party of Adolf Hitler in April 1930, believing then that this was his “way out of hardship and unemployment.” (He’d joined the party both to boost his sense of “German identity” and to get a better job in Dithmarschen.)
“As an artist and idealist,” Gross told his American military interviewers, “I believed I was doing the right thing….”
