Sabine Kriebel: 'Left-wing Humour, or, Heartfield’s Holy Hate'
“Holy hate,” according to Georg Lukács, is the driving force behind penetrating social satire, its Marxist ‘holiness’ rooted in a political ethics of equity that prevents parodic forms from becoming trite or vulgar. This paper interrogates the politics of subversive laughter in John Heartfield’s AIZ photomontages, demonstrating that while his motivations might be holy in Lukács’ lexicon, his pictorial tactics are mischievously regressive, grotesque and often in bad taste. Embedded in contemporaneous theories of critical humour, this paper proposes to take Heartfield’s transgressive play seriously as a radical political tactic, shedding light on an often-overlooked aspect of interwar Marxism.
