Juro Kubicêk's Mein K(r)ampf: Derision, Dissent, and Denazification in Post-War Berlin

This essay focuses on a grangerised edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, by the little-known Austro-Hungarian Surrealist artist, Juro Kubicêk (1906-70). Between 1941 and 1946, Kubicêk inserted his own subversive montages mocking National Socialist leaders along with those of his peers, Arthur Szyk, John Heartfield and Hans Thiemann, into a 1940 edition of Hitler’s text. At a time when artists were forced to become economical and inventive, even using coffee grounds and toilet paper to make artworks, Mein Krampf might be understood as the ultimate act of recycling that powerfully undermined such a corrosive text. Examination of Kubicêk’s work and its complex conception opens up broader issues regarding how and why Berlin artists turned to humour – more specifically visual satire – in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Indeed, Kubicêk’s pointed addition of the letter ‘r’ turns ‘my struggle’ into ‘my cramp’, thereby punning on not only Hitler’s digestive problems, but also the crippling burden of history.

Taking Mein Krampf as a starting point, it explores the role played by satirical visual imagery in response to the Nazi regime. This is complicated by the conception of Kubicêk’s book over a period of five years, which marks it out as an initial source of private dissent under a dictatorship, to one of open derision completed after May 1945. It therefore raises uneasy questions regarding artists’ post hoc self-positioning to Nazi resistance, as well as the legitimate role played by humour in dealing with traumatic events. Kubicêk’s work is contextualised within the wider environment of the provocative modern art gallery, Gerd Rosen, and the understudied satirical journal, Ulenspiegel, in circulation between 1945 and 1950. Far from simply ‘epigonic’ attempts at Berlin Dada, the controversial artwork of Kubicêk and his contemporaries used satire as a critical way of engaging with everyday survival in a war-ravaged city. This meant tackling Allied occupation, but also the troubling subjects of culpability and guilt, head-on in their artworks. During the extraordinary period of Denazification that effectively sought to ‘cleanse’ Germany, the essay examines why, through works such as Mein Krampf, Kubicêk was perhaps attempting to do exactly the opposite.