ment,had appropriated the hand–raised or extended, offered or withheld–as
apowerful symbolofpolitical unity and strength. AsBarbara McCloskey has
shown, Grosz’scontributionto this emerging communist iconographybecame
an important inspiration for Heartfield.¹³It can also be assumed that he was fa-
miliar with the 1917cartoon“The Hand thatWill Rule theWorld,”published in
Solidarity,the journal of the InternationalWorkers of theWorld (IWW), known as
Wobblies. After the October Revolution, thisgesture acquiredamore violent
charge on communist election posters,such as the 19 20 “Vote forSpartakus”
(i.e., the precursor of the KPD), which depictsabright red(bloody) fist smashing
an ineffectual Reichstag.Acomparisonto LucianBernhard’sfamous1915 poster
for awar bond drive indicatesthatthis symbolism of the fist was part and parcel
of abroader militarization of civil society duringand after the war.The same can
be said about later Nazi propaganda posters depicting muscular German workers
crushing therepresentativesofparliamentary democracyand globalfinance
capital. The graphic quality and simple visualmessageofthese political posters
clearlyinfluenced Heartfield’sdesign of the circular logofor the RFB(Alliance of
RedFront Fighters), the paramilitary group affiliated with the KPD,that features
amassi ve raised fist,knuckles directed outward, set against the backdrop of a
mass demonstration.It is not known whether theKPDadopted theraised fist
as its official saluteafter Heartfield created the Rotfront logo, as Aragon claims
in the above-cited paeanto“revolutionary beauty”(see figure17.6). However,it
stands to reason that the anticapitalist and antidemocratic sentimentsshared by
KPD and NSDAP made it increasinglydifficultto promotethe fist asavalidges-
tural alternative to the Nazi salute, givenits proliferation on Nazi election posters
from 1929 onward that,with exhortations like“Put an Endto Corruption!Vote
National Socialists!,”show large red fists crushing so-calledJewish-Bolshevik
conspiracies.
Hands and fists werepart ofawidespread preoccupation, if not obsession,
in Weimar visual culture–inseparable from the modern bodydiscourses that re-
jected the bourgeois cultivation of psychological interiority in favorofthe phys-
icality of manual labor,sports, and sexuality. From the sinewyhandsinthe ex-
pressionist portraits of OskarKokoschkaand the surrealist hand photograms by
László Moholy-Nagytothe famous posters forFritz Lang’sM(1931), with its omi-
nous red letter inscribed in the murderer’spalm, hands offeredaconvenient way
of affirmingthe values of individualism while exploring the new languages of
collective bodies.Avant-garde artists and photographers usedmen’shands to re-
SeeBarbara McCloskey,George Grosz and the CommunistParty:Art and RadicalisminCrisis,
1918 to 1936(Princeton: Princeton University Press,1997), 101.
John Heartfield’sProductiveRage 309