The Meaning of Geneva, Peace Cannot Live Where Greed Capital Exists!
This photomontage focuses on a white dove, a symbol of peace, impaled by a bayonet, symbol of modern warfare. The simplicity of this composition recalls the qualities of the 'object poster' and draws attention to how Heartfield deployed advertising techniques to create an affective critical, yet emotional reading of this historical event. Published on the cover of the November 27th issue of the AIZ, Heartfield reacts to the Geneva disarmament conference that took place on November 9, 1932, as well as comments on the police's violent reaction against protesters who demonstrated against fascism in front of the palace of the United Nations. The conference's outcome revealed itself three days later in Geneva, when England, France, and Italy granted Germany equal military rights. Heartfield's montage simultaneously grasps the implications of the present action and anticipates the future in the form of a Socialist Surrealism grounded in the imagery of the 1930s.
Heartfield was inspired by two contemporary images that were produced on the occasion of the Geneva conference: the Swiss stamp issued on the occasion of the disarmament conference, showing a dove freely hovering over a broken sword, and the caricature of a dove impaled by a sword, published in the Moscow newspaper Pravda. In this photomontage, Heartfield subtracts the sword and added the bayonet; he disassembles conventional representations of the Geneva conference and reassembles the pieces to make visible the underlying meaning of this conference that granted Germany permission to rearm.
Heartfield's original AIZ photomontage was reworked and used as the front cover of the December 1939 issue of the Direction, a legendary progressive journal that chronicled the troubles of the1930s through fiction, photography, music, art, drama, and humor. William Gropper edited the magazine out of Darien, Connecticut.
