Looking through Erwin Blumenfeld's Darkly Comic Lenses, or How a German-Jewish Photographer Coped with Life as a Refugee (1933-1941)

• In Event: Jewish Refugees’ Responses to Entrapment in Places of Temporary Sojourn during Flight from Holocaust Persecution

Abstract

During the Holocaust, German-Jewish refugee photographers responded to their personal experiences of persecution and forced migration with black humor and bitter irony. This response brought comic relief and it also served as a form of resistance. One such photographer was the refugee Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969) who followed in the mold of Hannah Arendt’s “Jewish pariah” figure. Throughout the Nazi era, Blumenfeld coped with his outcast and persecuted status by creating photographs and composing texts that emphasize the grotesque, Dadaist absurdity, and dark Jewish humor. Based in Amsterdam in 1933, Blumenfeld produced subversive and black humorous anti-Nazi photo-collages like the celebrated HITLER, GRAUENFRESSE, Grauenfresse (HITLER, FACE OF HORROR) or the brilliant and self-ironic, SELF-PORTRAIT WITH SWASTIKA. (This second image was created as a dark humorous and horrified response to the opening of the Dachau concentration camp.) Forced to move to Paris in 1936, he created other black humorous images like THE DICTATOR or SWASTIKA LEGS. Meanwhile, his correspondence and later autobiographical reflections (EINBUILDUNGSROMAN) demonstrate how these same strategies of dark Jewish humor entered into his writing about his horrendous experiences. As he states in a poignant postcard to his wife Lena Citroën in June 1940: “Life is grotesque and I would like to be Cervantes to write the novel of these days.” Blumenfeld recounts his whirlwind tour of four French internment camps (Marmagne, Loriol, Le Vernet d’ Ariège, and Catus-Cavalier) in 1940-41 and later a fifth camp in Morocco (Sidi-el-Ayachi) set up by the Vichy government for foreign Jews. After many ordeals, Blumenfeld finally found extended refuge in New York in August 1941 where he would become one of the highest paid fashion photographers in the world. Assimilated into the history of avant-garde art and photography, Blumenfeld’s trials as a persecuted German-Jewish refugee and his narrow escape from the Holocaust have been overlooked until the recent exhibition LES TRIBULATIONS D'ERWIN BLUMENFELD (1930-1950) at the MAHJ in Paris (2022-23). This presentation situates itself as part of this reassessment and it views Blumenfeld’s response as part of this larger tendency of German-Jewish refugee photographers deploying corrosive and morbid Jewish Witz in dark times.

Author

• Louis Kaplan, University of Toronto