guttmann_fotoperiodismo

German Life and Letters 62:4 October 20090016–8777 (print); 1468–0483 (online)

WILHELM SIMON GUTTMANN, 1891–1990:A DOCUMENTARY PORTRAIT

NICHOLAS JACOBS, WITH DIETHART KERBS1

ABSTRACT

In his collection of biographical essays, Lebenslinien – Deutsche Biographien aus dem 20.Jahrhundert (Essen 2007), Diethart Kerbs gave the first tentative portrait of SimonGuttmann as one of the founders of photo-journalism. As an emeritus professor ofthe History of Photography Kerbs based his study on his personal acquaintance withGuttmann and on his photographic associates in London, as well as on researchand contacts in Germany. The aim of the present study is to document as fullyas possible Guttmann’s development from literature, through the politics of theGerman revolutionary period of 1918/19, to his influential career in photographyin Berlin and, eventually, in London. To do this, Nicholas Jacobs has augmentedKerb’s essay with his own records of conversations with Guttmann (some undated),and with new critical material now available.

Simon Guttmann established himself in London in 1946 asfounder/manager or, as he insisted ‘secretary’, of Report, a radicalphotographic agency which he ran from then, virtually until his deathaged ninety-nine in 1990. He first appeared in public in Britain as theanonymous author of the text for a feature on Berlin in Picture Post in 1945,and he strove to maintain that anonymity until the end. For a short periodin 1944 he worked with the editor, Tom (later Sir Tom) Hopkinson, onPicture Post, where he made lifelong friends and useful contacts, includingthe journalists Robert Kee and James Cameron.

A detailed study of Report remains to be written. The following portraitof Guttmann focuses mainly on the first half of his life, which was radicallyaffected by exile, like so many other European lives, although Guttmannmanaged to survive in Continental Europe longer than most. It was theintense experience of his first fifty years that made him the unique, oftendifficult, but lovable and irreplaceable man who touched and influencedso many lives, and brought an important part of European intellectual lifeto Britain.

This attempted summary of Guttmann’s life is dedicated to the memoryof Karl Ludwig Schneider (1919–81), member of the Bundische Jugend, re-sistance fighter, Gestapo prisoner (in Fuhlsbuttel and Neuengamme), uni-versity professor, and editor of the work of Georg Heym, who knew frompersonal experience how difficult it was to pin Guttmann down:

1 Nicholas Jacobs is the editorial director of Libris; Diethart Kerbs is Emeritus Professor of the Historyof Photography at the Hochschule der Kunste in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Special thanks are due toHamish Ritchie for his essential help in the presentation of this article.

C© The authors 2009. Journal compilation C© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 20099600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

402 WILHELM SIMON GUTTMANN, 1891–1990

Angaben uber Wilhelm Simon Guttmann konnen hier leider nicht gebotenwerden, da dieser keine Auskunfte uber Lebensdaten gegeben hat. Auch denWiederabdruck seines Gedichtes ‘Erinnerungsspruch an Georg Heym’ undseiner Artikel uber den Dichter stimmte Guttmann nicht zu.2

This is the poem Guttmann would not allow to be reprinted:

‘Erinnerungsspruch an Georg Heym’

Da hoher Floten abendlicher Lauf entquollund Klagen troffen auf die schiefen Hofe,umbrannten wir Du riefst erfrorner Mauern Steigen,platzte die Stadt, von Blut und Wundern toll.

Ah, von Gebeten starrt der Wege Gerinselund Ozean, mit Schiffen hammernd hinterm Horizont.Grabt. Grabt. Da rings der Himmel nicht mehr dreht.Es klafft die Nacht. Und ihre Turme flammen.3

As far as possible, Simon Guttmann’s life will be recorded here chronolog-ically.

I

Wilhelm Simon Guttmann was born in Vienna on 15 November 1891. Heused to say he was ‘a blue baby’, revived by an over-conscientious doctorwho swung the apparently dead child round in a sling to start circulation,and that he consequently had a lifelong distrust of doctors. His parentsboth came from Jewish business families: his father, Maurice D. Guttmann,from Budapest then Vienna, his mother, Lucie Bruhl, from Berlin. Earliermembers of his father’s family had been jewellers in Budapest, even offi-cial suppliers to the Habsburg court. His mother came from a family ofBerlin timber merchants. The wealthy Maurice Guttmann took over theBruhl family business, but when Simon was eleven his unbeloved fatherdied, and Simon, an only child, remained close to his mother. Later hemade sure she left Hitler’s Germany early and moved to England.

2 Gunter Martens, ‘Heyms Freunde aus dem “Neuen Club” – Biographische und bibliographischeHinweise’, in Georg Heym, Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Werk, ed. Karl Ludwig Schneider and Ger-hard Burckhardt, Hamburg 1968, p. 438. It is not clear to which article reference is made here, pos-sibly ‘Uber Hodler – Andeutungen’, quoted on p. 407 (see note 7 below). No article by Guttmannon Heym as such has been discovered.3 Simon Guttmann in Der Mistral , eine lyrische Anthologie, Die Bucherei Maiandros, Books 4–5, 1 May1913, p. 20 (Schneider Archive). When I put this poem in front of Guttmann, he looked at it asunsparingly as if scrutinising another set of photographic contacts. After some thought, and lookingat me reproachfully, he pronounced it ‘horribly conventional for its time and mostly incomprehen-sible’. He did, however, like one phrase – ‘mit Schiffen hammernd hinterm Horizont’. He declaredthese words acceptable. I wish to give special thanks here to the late Professor Schneider’s widow,Nina Schneider, who has enabled me and many other researchers to use his Archive, which she hascurated with scholarly and loving care.

C© The authors 2009. Journal compilation C© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2009

WILHELM SIMON GUTTMANN, 1891–1990 403

As the only child of a prosperous Jewish family, Guttmann was brought upin privileged circumstances. He went to the Konigstadtisches Realgymna-sium, changing to the Dorotheestadtisches Realgymnasium after failing in-ternal school exams. This school he also left before taking his Abitur, almostcertainly because of rebellious behaviour and intellectual arrogance. Mem-bers of the Freideutsche Studentenschaft, with whom Guttmann seems tohave been in touch when he was seventeen or eighteen years old, took ad-vantage of the well-known loophole whereby, even without having passedthe Abitur, one could study at university for four semesters. This opportu-nity was often eagerly taken and was one from which Simon Guttmann alsobenefited. He was registered at the University of Berlin from November1909 to Autumn 1911, and studied ‘Kulturgeschichte’ under Georg Sim-mel, and ‘Kunstgeschichte’ with Kurt Breysig and later also under HeinrichWolfflin in Munich.

On 8 November 1909 Guttmann attended an open meeting of the ‘NeuerClub’ (founded in the Spring), an ambitious group of philosophy and lit-erature students who had split away from a non-duelling student club atthe University of Berlin, called the ‘Freie Wissenschaftliche Vereinigung’.The leading figure of the ‘Neuer Club’ was the writer Kurt Hiller, an arch-individualist who was never a member of any club for long and who was tospend many years in exile in London.4 Other important members includedErich Unger (a writer on philosophy who emigrated to London in 1936)and Erwin Loewensohn (alias ‘Golo Gangi’), who emigrated to Palestine in1933.

Simon Guttmann, who from 1909 to 1911 sometimes used to spell hisname Ghuttmann to avoid confusion with another Guttmann, quickly be-came one of the new group’s most active members. He suggested the foun-dation of a ‘Neue Buhne’ and published an appeal for new plays in theBerliner Tageblatt in March 1910. It was then that the unknown Georg Heymgot in touch.5 They met in Guttmann’s house. Unimpressed by Heym’s clas-sical verse play, Atalanta, Guttmann asked him if he had written anythingelse.

Guttmann later said he ‘committed a crime’ in his lack of appreciation ofHeym’s play (explaining that he was then too much under the influence ofWedekind) and it was for this reason, as a kind of conciliatory gesture, thathe asked Heym if he had written anything else. When Heym then began torecite the first of his Berlin sonnets (‘Der hohe Straßenrand, auf dem wir

4 See J. M. Ritchie, German Exiles, British Perspectives, New York etc. 1997, especially Chapter 15. Seealso the same author’s ‘Kurt Hiller – a “Stankerer” in Exile, 1933–1955’, GLL (Exile Studies specialnumber), 11 (1998), 266–86.5 For Guttmann’s initial meeting with Heym, see Nina Schneider, Am Ufer des blauen Tags. Georg Heym,Sein Leben und Werk in Bildern and Selbstzeugnissen, Glinde 2000, pp. 67–8 (based on a letter to FrauSchneider by Simon Guttmann of 7 September 1988).



lagen,/ War weiß von Staub’) Guttmann was deeply moved and invited himto the ‘Neuer Club’ where he was warmly accepted.6

Before this, Guttmann had tried to make contact with the artists’ groupDie Brucke, founded in Dresden in 1905. When its members moved toBerlin in 1910, Guttmann became a close associate, and wrote about themin Franz Pfempfert’s journal Der Demokrat, of which he had been officiallyappointed art editor.7 He was the subject of portraits in various media byErich Heckel, Ernst L. Kirchner (whose major oil portrait of Guttmann is inthe Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.There are also two impressive portrait drawings by Ludwig Meidner, show-ing the extraordinary maturity of the then twenty-two-year-old Guttmann’sface.

From 1909 to 1914, Guttmann was the link between these graphic artistsof the Brucke and the literary Expressionists around Kurt Hiller and FranzPfempfert, editor of Die Aktion. It was, for example, Guttmann who, prob-ably in 1912/13, introduced Kirchner to the poetry of Georg Heym, anencounter which would eventually lead to the series of woodcuts Kirchnermade for the second edition of the first posthumous collection of Heym’spoetry, Umbra Vitae, published by Kurt Wolff in 1924. Whereas Guttmannand his friends had once briefly worshipped at the feet of George, Rilke andHofmannsthal, this generation was now under the sway of the tumultuousnew poetry of Heym, his friend and rival Jakob van Hoddis, and of JohannesR. Becher. Guttmann was close to van Hoddis, and stayed by him through-out his mental problems until he was permanently hospitalised. Guttmannthought that a more psychoanalytic approach might help. He also thoughtthe publication of a volume of van Hoddis’s poetry would make a crucialdifference.8

6 This conversation was held by me with Guttmann on 31 January 1988. We normally spoke in Englishas he had by then lost much of his German. As he quoted Heym’s lines to me off by heart, which heexplained actually referred to a particular stretch of road in Berlin-Grunewald, Guttmann was againvisibly moved by them and the memory of Georg Heym.7 See Guttmann’s article ‘Neue Kunst: Andeutungen’, in Der Demokrat, 2/46, unpaginated. This re-view of two exhibitions singles out Schmidt-Rotluff for special praise and comparison with Van Gogh(reprinted in Richard Sheppard’s extraordinarily rich collection Die Schriften des Neuen Clubs 1908–1914, 2 vols, Hildesheim 1980 and 1983, pp. 131–2).8 For a detailed account of Guttmann’s involvement in the tragedy of Jakob van Hoddis, which endedin Sobibor in 1942, see Helmut Hornbogen, Jakob van Hoddis – Die Odysee eines Verschollenen, Munich1986. There also exists in my possession a carbon copy of a typed translation by Simon Guttmannof Hoddis’s famous poem ‘Weltende’, made around 1966. This curio deserves to be preserved forposterity, even if only to remind putative translators that it is the tilers and not (as so often) the tilesthat ‘break in two’:

End of the World

The hat flies off the bourgeois’s pointed head,Through all the skies a clash like screaming.Tilers crash down and break into piecesAnd on the coast, one reads, the flood increases.



Simon Guttmann, chalk drawing by Ludwig Meidner, April 1912 ( c© Ludwig-Meidner Archiv, Judisches Museum der Stadt Frankfurt am Main)

From 1910 Guttmann was active with others in the ‘Neuer Club’ in de-veloping a literary cabaret of poetry and verse readings which took place in

The storm arrives. The wild seas hopOn to the land to squash thick dams.Most people suffer from a cold.The railway-trains plunge from the bridges.



different Berlin cafes and in Paul Cassirer’s art gallery. Among the visitorsto these occasions were Else Lasker-Schuler, Karl Kraus, Gottfried Benn andAlfred Wolfenstein. By the end of 1911, eight such evenings had been held,with Guttmann reading his own texts on the two last.9

Beside his contact with the Brucke, Guttmann took part in the dis-cussions of ‘Die Freie Schulgemeinde Wickersdorf’ (near Saalfeld inThuringen) on the ideas of the teacher and educational reformer GustavWyneken. It is in this context that Guttmann met Walter Benjamin, whohad returned from Freiburg to Berlin for the winter semester of 1912/13to work on the editorial board of the youth monthly Der Anfang , also pub-lished by Franz Pfempfert.10 In a kind of graphic family-tree of his friend-ships, drawn up later by Benjamin and found among his papers, Guttmanntakes up a fairly prominent position, in third place.11 Benjamin was twentyat the time, Guttmann a year older. Der Anfang survived only from May1913 to July 1914 as a dispute soon broke out in the editorial commit-tee: Guttmann wanted to unseat the two more politically radical editors,Georg Barbizon and Siegfried Bernfeld, in favour of the more otherworldlyWalter Benjamin and Fritz Heinle. The argument was settled by the out-break of the First World War and Heinle’s suicide. Guttmann subsequentlycriticised his own standpoint and defended the more political position.12

Later, Benjamin’s friend Gershom Scholem looked back more critically atGuttmann’s relationship with Benjamin in comments which convey in nouncertain terms the strength of Guttmann’s personality.13

9 Complete documentation of the ‘Neuer Club’ is to be found in Gunter Martens, ‘Georg Heym undder “Neue Club”’, in Georg Heym. Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Werk, ed. Karl Ludwig Schneider andGerhard Burckhardt, Hamburg 1968, pp. 390–438. Visitors to the Club are discussed on p. 398.10 See Walter Benjamin, ‘Die Freie Schulgemeinde’ in his Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemannand Hermann Schweppenhauser, VII, Book 1, pp. 9–15, and in particular the notes to that text inibid., Book 2, pp. 531–60. See also Benjamin’s ‘Offener Brief an Herrn Dr. Gustav Wyneken’, inWalter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, I: 1910–1918, ed. Christoph Godde and Henry Lonitz, Frankfurta.M. 1995, pp. 202–10. For Der Anfang and the discussions around Wyneken’s ideas, see MommeBrodersen, Walter Benjamin – A Biography, trans. Malcolm R. Green and Ingrid Ligers, ed. MartinaDervis, London, 1996. This book was originally published in German in 1990, but was, in the author’swords, ‘revised and extended for the English edition’.11 See Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, VI, p. 804.12 In a conversation dated 9 August 1988, Guttmann said that he and Heinle had wanted a more‘unconventional’ paper and thought Barbizon too conventional and that Der Anfang edited by himwould be dull. Guttmann emphasised how well Pfempfert had always treated him and his difficultco-students.13 See Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin – Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft, Frankfurt a.M. 1975,p. 105: ‘So sagte er [Benjamin] mir eimal, als die Rede auf Simon Guttmann und seinenzerstorerischen Einfluß auf ihn und Dora [Benjamin’s wife] in der Zeit der Jugendbewegung kam:“Wenn Sie und ich eimal alte Leute sein werden, werde ich Ihnen von Simon Guttmann erzahlen”,wozu es aber nie kam.’ Here Scholem was summarising Benjamin’s letter to him from Bern of 30March 1918: ‘uber Simon Guttmann kann ich Ihnen einmal (vielleicht wenn wir beide alte Leutesind – falls wir es werden!) mehr erzahlen als irgend ein andrer Mensch auf der Welt, ausgenommenvielleicht meine Frau’ (Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe (Frankfurt a.M. 1995, I, p. 444). In his book about



Between 1910 and 1913 Guttmann occasionally published in Der Demokratand Die Aktion, both edited by Franz Pfempfert. In the former, for instance,he published an article entitled ‘Uber Hodler – Andeutungen’, in which hecompares Hodler to Van Gogh and draws parallels with the poetry of StefanGeorge. The article, however, ends:

Der Parallelismus fehlt Georgens [sic]. Ich erinnere mich keines Dichters, derdieses Nebeneinander besitzt. Und nun ein Wunder: der Parallelismus findetsich – unabhangig von Hodler– bei einem jungen deutschen Dichter, dessenfast unbekannten Namen auszuposaunen zu den wesentlichen Verdienstendieses Essays gehort: bei Georg Heym (——G e o r g H e y m——).14

After Heym’s sudden death less than two years later, Guttmann was, withothers in the ‘Neuer Club’, active in persuading Heym’s father that moreof his son’s poetry should be published, and was one of the editors of theposthumous collection, Umbra Vitae (Rowohlt 1912).

In Die Aktion Guttmann himself published poems and a now rather cryp-tic ‘Novelle’, ‘Selbstportrat’.15 It must have been at this time, before the war,that Guttmann got to know Franz Jung, Wieland Herzfelde and his brotherHelmut, soon to call himself John Heartfield in protest against fanaticalGerman anti-English propaganda. 1913 was the year of the campaign tofree the drug-addict, anarchist and psychoanalyst Otto Gross. In the courseof this campaign, which was also aimed at Gross’s father, Franz Jung andSimon Guttmann edited a special Otto Gross issue of the Munich journalRevolution and distributed over a thousand copies free. At the instigation ofhis father Hanns Gross, Otto had been arrested and sent to an asylum. Theintention of the campaign was to liberate him. Guttmann tried to enlist thehelp of prominent academics, among others Max Weber in Heidelberg.16

At the beginning of the war, Guttmann, Benjamin and other membersof the Berlin ‘Freie Studentenschaft’ took up a pronounced anti-war posi-tion. Eight days after war started, Benjamin’s friend Fritz Heinle committedsuicide with his girlfriend. In the February cold snap of 1915, and on theadvice of a doctor friend, Guttmann took numerous warm baths and thenspent time unclothed, exposed on a Berlin balcony. Army doctors subse-quently diagnosed severe bronchitis, as a result of which Guttmann wasallowed to convalesce in neutral Switzerland, where he lived for a time in asanatorium in Ascona, and then in style in Zurich Dada circles.17 Although

his own friendship with Benjamin, Scholem also says that Benjamin, after he split with Guttmann,only mentioned him ‘in dunklen Andeutungen als eine damonische Figur’ (Scholem, op.cit., p. 28).14 Der Demokrat, no. 48, 23 November 1910, 3 (Schneider Archive).15 Die Aktion, 1911, 14 August, 822–4.16 See Guttmann, ‘Der Arzt Otto Gross’, in Revolution, Munich, 20 December 1913. This short articleof under two hundred words ends with a typical Guttmann flourish: ‘Jede Behandlung des Grossstellt hin, daß der Mensch der Ort ist, wo die Welt an den Hornern zu packen ist.’17 Personal communication.



he attended the Club Voltaire in Zurich, Guttmann was, according to theDada artist Hans Richter, not a member of ‘the Dada group’. Richter de-scribes how Else Lasker-Schuler ‘read her poems to Erich Unger and SimonGuttmann’, and goes on to say that [Guttmann] ‘was one of the quickestand best conversationalists I have ever known, and was happiest when ex-changing bons mots and psychological and artistic theories with the equallysharp-witted Walter Serner.’18

Guttmann stayed in Zurich and in Ascona from 1915 to 1918, often in thecompany of Angela Hubermann (nee Mullner) (who had been married tothe Russian Leopold Hubermann, brother of the violinist Bronislav), andwhom Rilke knew in Locarno in 1920 as Angela Guttmann.19

Was Guttmann married to Angela Hubermann? Ferdinand Hardekopf(1876–1954), the poet and translator from French, who was also in Switzer-land during the war and mixed in the same Dada circles as Guttmann,wrote: ‘W.S. Guttmann ist in Berlin. Seine Gemahlin, Angela-Hubermannin Ascona.’20 In an undated conversation with me about the women in hislife, Guttmann said that this alleged (a word he often used – as in ‘this al-legedly modern world’) marriage was ‘ironical’. If you wanted to cohabitpublicly in Switzerland, it was only possible if you were married. The useof the inflated word ‘Gemahlin’ by Hardekopf here, instead of the simpleword ‘Frau’, could be a hint at this irony. There may have been some sort ofpossibly Jewish or civic ceremony (Hubermann had converted to Judaismfrom Roman Catholicism) in order to obtain papers, but no record exists.In the same conversation, Guttmann told me he ‘passed Angela on to some-one who loved her more’, namely the Berlin medical student Wilhelm orKarl Rohr. Guttmann’s own great love at the time was Emmy Ball-Hennings(1885–1948), the wife of Hugo Ball, and the muse of many German literaryExpressionists.

In Barbel Reetz’s, Emmy Ball-Hennings – Leben im Vielleicht (Frankfurta.M. 2001), there are numerous references to Guttmann. Later in London,Guttmann kept a book, opened at a page showing a photograph of EmmyHennings, permanently on his desk; this picture was invariably covered withpapers and other objects but was always there. Later he had a friendshipwith Olga Katunal, a Lithuanian Jewish intellectual who moved to Paris.Guttmann referred to her as ‘my official friend for years’, but stressed thatit was not a love relationship, although it was a sexual one. The woman helater referred to as his wife was the art historian Herta Wescher, author ofthe first comprehensive book on collage. She was with him later in France

18 See Hans Richter, Dada – art and anti–art, London 1965, p. 67. For Walter Seligmann (alias Serner)(1889–1942), see Christian Schad, ‘Zurich/Geneva: Dada’, in The Era of Expressionism, ed. Paul Raabe,trans. Hamish Ritchie, London 1974, pp. 161–6.19 See Ingeborg Schnack, ‘Wer war Angela Guttmann? Zu Rilkes Winter in Locarno 1919/20’, inRainer Maria Rilke und die Schweiz, Zurich 1992, pp. 109–22.20 See Richard Sheppard, ‘Ferdinand Hardekopf and Dada’, Jahrbuch der Schillergesellschaft, 20 (1976),145.



when, after her brief internment, she took the last train to leave Montpellierfor Zurich. After the war they visited each other in Paris and London. An-gela Hubermann went with her new husband to Soviet Russia. She workedas a doctor but also wrote articles for the Frankfurter Zeitung ; her husbandworked at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under David Riazanov. Bothwere arrested, and when Bertolt Brecht was briefly in Moscow, on his way toCalifornia, he wrote a letter to the famous Soviet writer Konstantin Fedinasking for his advice as to what could be done.21 Fedin did, or could do,nothing. Angela Hubermann spent sixteen years in the Gulag, but lived totell the tale, living in Moscow from 1978. She died in 1985.

II

In December 1918 Simon Guttmann returned from Zurich to Berlin, re-maining there till 1932. He had spent most of the war in Switzerland, of-ten in Dada circles in Zurich, written ballet criticism for a local paper andworked for the art dealer and collector, Paul Cassirer, and the arts patronHarry Graf Kessler, helping to promote cultural contacts with France, some-thing that was known, if not encouraged, by the German authorities. Dur-ing the revolutionary period in Berlin in January 1919, Guttmann func-tioned as a link, some thought possibly as a spy, between Kessler and theSpartacists and is often mentioned in Kessler’s diaries. One entry tells ofsomeone identified as Karl Liebknecht’s son about to be lynched by a mob:‘Guttmann klammert sich an mich. “Helfen Sie, Helfen Sie! Sagen Sie denLeuten, dass sie ihn nicht totschlagen.”’ 22

Sometimes called the ‘verratene Revolution’, the German Revolution of1918 to 1920 might more correctly be called ‘the impossible revolution’,because Germany was then a defeated country, partly occupied by alliesvigilant to stamp out any decisively revolutionary activity, particularly withthe raw experience of the Russian Revolution in mind.23 This bleak realitytransformed the literary Guttmann into someone who thought in more po-litical terms. Perhaps his last purely artistic activity was his participation inBerlin Dada, but that was itself as much a political as an artistic movement.

After the death of Guttmann’s father in 1911, his mother had been ableto live for some time from the investments he left her, and to finance herson. The inflation of 1923 was to terminate such arrangements.

21 ‘Bitte, helfen Sie ihr doch so gut Sie konnen’ (‘Schreiben in der Diktatur’, FAZ , 11 August 2006)(report by Gesine Bey).22 See Harry Graf Kessler, Das Tagebuch, vol. 7 (1919–1923), ed. Angela Reinthal, Stuttgart 2007, p. 79(entry for 6 January 1919), and for the lynching incident, ibid., p. 128 (entry for 9 February 1919).Simon Guttmann was Kessler’s secretary for a short period in 1919. They had met through PaulCassirer.23 See the detailed study of the British occupation by Douglas Newton, Britain and the Weimar Republic,1918–1919, Oxford 1999.



During the revolutionary events of November 1918 in Germany, a con-siderable number of artists and writers sympathised with the anti-war ‘Un-abhangige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands’ (USPD). The USPDwas in some respects as radical, as it was, for instance, more pacifist, than the‘Spartacists’ (now the ‘Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands’ – the KPD).These writers and artists had therefore committed themselves to a left po-sition with many divisions,24 and after the Social Democrats, led by Ebert,Scheidemann and Noske, had been seen to betray and strangle the Revolu-tion, the intellectual left disintegrated further. Some returned to the SocialDemocrats, some went to the Communists (including, in 1921, most of theUSPD); others left politics altogether.

Such were the political circumstances of the foundation in Berlin on4 April 1920 of yet another radical party, the ‘Kommunistische Arbeiter-partei Deutschlands’ (KAPD), a left-wing splinter group of the KPD. TheKPD was in favour of taking part in elections to the Reichstag, whereas theKAPD considered this a betrayal of the Revolution. Franz Jung and Alexan-der Schwab were among the leaders of the KAPD, and Simon Guttmannand the journalist John Graudenz were among their closest collaborators.A little earlier Simon Guttmann had actually applied to join the KPD buthad been rejected by Otto Braun, head of party security, on the groundsof Guttmann’s extreme individualism. After just two years, the KAPD col-lapsed in 1922 and some of its members returned to the KPD. It is not clearif Guttmann ever joined the KAPD, but this was the closest he ever came toparty politics. Alexander Schwab and other KAPD leaders would eventuallyfind themselves together again, from 1932 in the ‘Rote Kampfer’ resistancegroup, and from 1936 in the prisons and concentration camps of the ThirdReich.

Guttmann had been working since 1921 as manager in a picture agencybegun by John Graudenz, providing photographs to the US press. In 1923he went to Moscow at the invitation of Lily Brik. He stayed for two weeksin Osip and Lily Brik’s house where he met Mayakovsky. On his return hebrought in his luggage some as yet unidentified early Soviet films (one ofthem based on a short story by Tolstoy) which were subsequently shownwith great success in Berlin. At the very height of the inflation, Guttmannbecame the initiator of German-Russian film relations.

Guttmann was in fact expelled from the Soviet Union for importing for-bidden magazines, but he recalled his visit as having a fundamental effectupon him, and nostalgically reminisced about the red star above the Krem-lin, which seemed then to be a symbol of hope. After Lenin died in 1924,

24 For a detailed historical survey relevant to this development, see the two articles by Richard Shep-pard: ‘Artists, Intellectuals and the USPD 1917–1922’, in Literaturwissenschftliches Jahrbuch, 23 (1991),175–216, and ‘The SPD, its Cultural Policy and the German Avant-garde 1917–1922’, InternationalesArchiv fur Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur , 20 (1995), 16–66. In 1919 Guttmann himself pub-lished a Malik Verlag pamphlet, Dieser Friede wird kein Brest-Litovsk.



Guttmann spliced together in a few nights a short compilation of all thefilm clips and photographs he could lay his hands on. The result was suc-cessfully shown at various memorial meetings. In 1927 he was involved inthe ‘political theatre’ with Erwin Piscator, Otto Katz and Felix Gasbarra.For instance, he worked with Curt Oertel on the back-projections for ErnstToller’s play Hoppla, wir leben!, directed by Piscator.25

Since the middle of the nineteen-twenties, Guttmann had taken partin the meetings of the so-called Philosophy Group, built up around thephilosopher Erich Unger and the Jewish mystic Oskar Goldberg, both ofwhom he knew from the period of the ‘Neuer Club’ and from exile inZurich. As the last survivor of the inner circle of the Philosophy Group,he became the custodian of its manuscripts, which eventually found theirway to the German Literary Archive in Marbach. It was at this time thatGuttmann made the acquaintance of Bertolt Brecht, several years his ju-nior. He took an instant dislike to him because Brecht greeted him withthe words ‘Ich bin der Brecht.’26

At the end of 1928 Guttmann founded his first picture agency, the‘Deutscher Photodienst’ (Dephot). Co-founders and owners were Franzand Clare [sic] Jung; Eduard Marx and Dr Kurt Rudiger von Roques werethe financial sponsors. The photographers were Otto Umbehr (Umbo)and, from mid 1929, the former newspaper artist Hans Felix Baumannwho, as a photo reporter, now called himself Felix H. Man. Others fol-lowed, including the portrait photographer Kurt Hubschmann (later to be-come a famous photographer in exile in England under the name KurtHutton). Harald Lechenperg and Walter Bosshard travelled for Dephotto Afghanistan and India, where Guttmann pestered them with instruc-tions by letter and telegram. Fifty years later he would do the same tothe well-established Caribbean writer George Lamming, who respondedin kind. In those four years – from Autumn 1928 to Autumn 1932 – Si-mon Guttmann occupied the role which, wartime interruptions apart, hewould fulfil for the rest of his life: that of stimulator, commissioner of work,teacher and manager of a group or collective of press photographers. Inthis role, Guttmann was able to use his experience in literature and art, inpicture-journalism and as film-maker, to develop the new genre of photo-reportage and the photo-essay. The years 1928–1932 in Berlin were the hey-day of press photography. In his book on Otto Umbehr, of all the photogra-phers the one personally closest to Guttmann, Herbert Molderings writes:

25 See Erwin Piscator, Das Politische Theater , Berlin 1968, p. 155, where the chaos Guttmann toldme prevailed is exemplified: ‘Am 3. September 1927 ließ die Piscator-Buhne zum erstenmal denVorhang gehen . . . Noch am Abend der Premiere, die auf 7 Uhr angesetzt war, begegnet ich um 7 3/4Uhr [Felix] Gasbarra und Guttmann, die in einem Kellerraum Teile des Zwischenfilmes zusammen-schnitten, der um 8 Uhr oben laufen sollte.’26 Personal communication.



Nie zuvor und nie wieder danach hat es eine derartige Konzentration derPresse in Deutschland gegeben. Und nie wieder hat die journalistische Fo-tografie einen solchen Aufschwung erlebt wie im Berlin der spaten zwanzigerJahre.27

In a short time Dephot became one of the leading picture agencies inGermany. No longer did it supply only single pictures, but picture sto-ries, so called ‘Bildserien’ in which a subject would be comprehensivelycovered by pictures and text. From 1933 Guttmann, who benefited fromholding a Hungarian passport because of his father, returned on nu-merous short visits to Berlin. One of his first actions was to destroy, inSpring 1933, with the help of a young assistant, the whole of Dephot’s por-trait archive, in order to prevent portraits of left-wing writers and politi-cians being used in police searches. In August 1932 he had sent anotheryoung man, a left-wing Hungarian student called Endre Erno Friedmannto Copenhagen to photograph Leon Trotzky during his first public ap-pearance in exile. It was the young photographer’s first publication. Fouryears later he would be world-famous under the name Robert Capa, oneof the creators of the photo agency Magnum, founded on the model ofDephot.

III

Little is known about Guttmann’s life between 1933 and 1937. He him-self used to say that he travelled back and forth between Vienna, Berlin,Budapest and Paris, partly as a photographic agent, at times carrying outsecret political missions. From 1937 he settled in Paris with the Germanart historian Herta Wescher, moving more in French artistic circles thanwith German emigres. In June 1940, after the German invasion of France,Guttmann and Herta Wescher moved to the fishing village of Palavas-les-Flots, south of Montpellier, where they made contact with the French Resis-tance, for whom Guttmann did translation work. While Herta Wescher wasable to move to Switzerland, Guttmann, by contrast, was arrested on theorders of the Vichy Government and interned for a period in the GrandHotel at Balaroc-les-Bains. From there he made his adventurous way acrossthe Pyrenees, via Spain and Portugal to England, arriving in London in1943, where he was briefly interned. He subsequently stayed with SebastianHaffner, whom he had helped leave Germany clandestinely in 1938 andwho later worked for the Observer . It was this latter contact which seems tohave enabled Guttmann to reach London. On reporting to the British con-sul in Barcelona, he was told of a postcard from Richard Crossman, thenworking for the Political Warfare Executive in London, asking the consulate

27 Herbert Molderings, Umbo – Otto Umbehr 1902–1980, Dusseldorf 1995, p. 125.



to arrange for his speedy dispatch to London, on account of his valuablejournalistic resources. Typically, however, when informed that he would beput on a fast train, or plane, to Lisbon, Guttmann announced that he wouldonly proceed by way of Toledo; he wanted to see the landscape that had in-spired El Greco, the inspiration of many German Expressionist painters.His journey was so arranged.

Guttmann himself worked for a time in an intelligence unit of the BritishPolitical Warfare Executive, first in Ingersoll House, Kingsway and then inRussell Square, co-editing a French-language journal, Cadran (‘Dial’), fordistribution in liberated France.

From 1944 Guttmann worked for Tom (later Sir Tom) Hopkinson andStefan Lorant (1901–97), another famous and long-lived Hungarian Ger-man exile on the London illustrated weekly, Picture Post, which Lorant hadfounded. Guttmann knew Lorant from the days of the Munchener IllustriertePresse in the late twenties and early thirties. In Autumn 1945 Guttmann re-turned to Berlin for the first time to do a story for Picture Post. Then in 1946he founded the picture agency Report, eventually moving into an attic officeat 411 Oxford Street, opposite the eastern end of Selfridges.

Guttmann advised and taught generations of photographers for a pe-riod of forty years. Report specialised in pictures of political activity of anykind, such as demonstrations and marches, especially if they were left-wingand radical, but including the not necessarily radical Trades Union confer-ences. It also covered avant-garde cultural events, including theatre, danceand spectacle. Amongst Guttmann’s pupils and collaborators were RomanoCagnoni, James Cameron, Chris Davies, Leonard McCombe, Patrick Eager,Inge Morath, Mary Elgin (Marion Elliger), Carlos Guarita, Peter Harrap,Mark Rusher, Lawrie Sparham, Derek Speirs, John Sturrock and AndrewWiard. Guttmann worked in his attic office into his ripe old age, until hewas over ninety-five and could not leave it without assistance. For the lastyears of his life he was confined to a wheelchair, and moved to ground-floor accommodation. He lived frugally, and consistently refused his statepension, just as he had refused a British passport, or to move into shelteredaccommodation.

Guttmann died on 13 January 1990 in London shortly after discharginghimself from hospital. By then Guttmann had outlived all his friends andmost of his enemies. Franz Pfempfert had died in 1974 in Mexico City,Oskar Goldberg in France in 1952, Erich Unger in London in 1950 – allin exile. Carl Einstein and Walter Benjamin had taken their lives on theFranco-Spanish border in 1940, John Graudenz was executed in Berlin-Plotzensee in 1942, Alexander Schwab had died in prison in Zwickau in1943, and Emmy Ball-Hennings died in Lugano in 1948. Of the photogra-phers who were part of Guttmann’s life, Robert Capa was killed in Indo-China in 1954; Kurt Hutton died in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, in 1960; FelixMan died in London in 1985; Otto Umbehr (Umbo) died in Hanoverin 1980. The Swiss Walter Bosshard (died 1975) and the Austrian Harald



Lechenperg (died 1994) both worked as travel photographers during theThird Reich and after.

When the photographer Gisele Freund visited Guttmann after the Sec-ond World War in London to interview him for her book, Photography andSociety, he made her promise not to mention his name. He insisted that, ifhe ever had to be mentioned in print, he be referred to as ‘the secretary ofReport’.28

Simon Guttmann was cremated at Golder’s Green cemetery in NorthLondon. His funeral service was devised by his friends. He himself had oncesaid: ‘Death is an examination which, so far, everybody passes.’ His favouritepoem, Goethe’s ‘Selige Sehnsucht’, was read in German and English by theco-authors of this article, and the words Guttmann used to describe OttoGross (see note 16 above) were spoken in English: ‘All Dr Gross’s actionsderive from the idea that inside the human being is the place where theworld may be taken by the horns.’ At his request, Guttmann’s ashes werescattered at sea. This was done in 1990 by friends of his on a sailing holidayin the Caribbean.

28 See Gisele Freund, Photography and Society, London 1980, pp. 224–5, note 115. Gisele Freund wasas good as her word – Guttmann is only mentioned in the book as ’the secretary’ and is not in theindex.


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