In his collection of biographical essays, Lebenslinien: deutsche Biographien aus dem 20. Jahrhundert (Essen 2007), Diethart Kerbs gave the first tentative portrait of Simon Guttmann as one of the founders of photo-journalism. As an emeritus professor of the History of Photography Kerbs based his study on his personal acquaintance with Guttmann and on his photographic associates in London, as well as on research and contacts in Germany. The aim of the present study is to document as fully as possible Guttmann’s development from literature, through the politics of the German revolutionary period of 1918–19, to his influential career in photography in Berlin and, eventually, in London. To do this, Nicholas Jacobs has augmented Kerb’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 as founder/manager or, as he insisted ‘secretary’, of Report, a radical photographic agency which he ran from then, virtually until his death aged 99 in 1990. He first appeared in public in Britain as the anonymous 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 period in 1944 he worked with the editor, Tom (later Sir Tom) Hopkinson, on Picture Post, where he made lifelong friends and useful contacts, including the journalists Robert Kee and James Cameron.

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

This attempted summary of Guttmann’s life is dedicated to the memory of Karl Ludwig Schneider (1919–81), member of the Bündische Jugend, resistance fighter, Gestapo prisoner (in Fuhlsbüttel and Neuengamme), university professor, and editor of the work of Georg Heym, who knew from personal experience how difficult it was to pin Guttmann down:

Angaben über Wilhelm Simon Guttmann können hier leider nicht geboten werden, da dieser keine Auskünfte über Lebensdaten gegeben hat. Auch den Wiederabdruck seines Gedichtes ‘Erinnerungsspruch an Georg Heym’ und seiner Artikel über den Dichter stimmte Guttmann nicht zu.[2]

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

‘Erinnerungsspruch an Georg Heym’

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

Ah, von Gebeten starrt der Wege Gerinsel
und Ozean, mit Schiffen hämmernd hinterm Horizont.
Grabt. Grabt. Da rings der Himmel nicht mehr dreht.
Es klafft die Nacht. Und ihre Türme flammen.[3]

As far as possible, Simon Guttmann’s life will be recorded here chronologically.

1

Wilhelm Simon Guttmann was born in Vienna on 15 November 1891. He used to say he was ‘a blue baby’, revived by an over-conscientious doctor who swung the apparently dead child round in a sling to start circulation, and that he consequently had a lifelong distrust of doctors. His parents both came from Jewish business families: his father, Maurice D. Guttmann, from Budapest then Vienna, his mother, Lucie Brühl, from Berlin. Earlier members of his father’s family had been jewellers in Budapest, even official suppliers to the Habsburg court. His mother came from a family of Berlin timber merchants. The wealthy Maurice Guttmann took over the Brühl family business, but when Simon was eleven his unbeloved father died, and Simon, an only child, remained close to his mother. Later he made sure she left Hitler’s Germany early and moved to England.

As the only child of a prosperous Jewish family, Guttmann was brought up in privileged circumstances. He went to the Königstädtisches Realgymnasium, changing to the Dorotheestädtisches Realgymnasium after failing internal school exams. This school he also left before taking his Abitur, almost certainly because of rebellious behaviour and intellectual arrogance. Members of the Freideutsche Studentenschaft, with whom Guttmann seems to have been in touch when he was seventeen or eighteen years old, took advantage of the well-known loophole whereby, even without having passed the Abitur, one could study at university for four semesters. This opportunity was often eagerly taken and was one from which Simon Guttmann also benefited. He was registered at the University of Berlin from November 1909 to Autumn 1911, and studied ‘Kulturgeschichte’ under Georg Simmel, and ‘Kunstgeschichte’ with Kurt Breysig and later also under Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich.

On 8 November 1909 Guttmann attended an open meeting of the ‘Neuer Club’ (founded in the spring), an ambitious group of philosophy and literature students who had split away from a non-duelling student club at the 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 to spend many years in exile in London.[4] Other important members included Erich Unger (a writer on philosophy who emigrated to London in 1936) and Erwin Loewensohn (alias ‘Golo Gangi’), who emigrated to Palestine in 1933.

Simon Guttmann, who from 1909 to 1911 sometimes used to spell his name Ghuttmann to avoid confusion with another Guttmann, quickly became one of the new group’s most active members. He suggested the foundation of a ‘Neue Bühne’ and published an appeal for new plays in the Berliner Tageblatt in March 1910. It was then that the unknown Georg Heym got in touch.[5] They met in Guttmann’s house. Unimpressed by Heym’s classical verse play, Atalanta, Guttmann asked him if he had written anything else.

Guttmann later said he ‘committed a crime’ in his lack of appreciation of Heym’s play (explaining that he was then too much under the influence of Wedekind) and it was for this reason, as a kind of conciliatory gesture, that he asked Heym if he had written anything else. When Heym then began to recite the first of his Berlin sonnets (‘Der hohe Straßenrand, auf dem wir lagen,/ War weiß von Staub’) Guttmann was deeply moved and invited him to the ‘Neuer Club’ where he was warmly accepted.[6]

Before this, Guttmann had tried to make contact with the artists’ group Die Brücke, founded in Dresden in 1905. When its members moved to Berlin in 1910, Guttmann became a close associate, and wrote about them in Franz Pfempfert’s journal Der Demokrat, of which he had been officially appointed art editor.[7] He was the subject of portraits in various media by Erich Heckel, Ernst L. Kirchner (whose major oil portrait of Guttmann is in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. There are also two impressive portrait drawings by Ludwig Meidner, showing the extraordinary maturity of the then twenty-two-year-old Guttmann’s face.

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

From 1909 to 1914, Guttmann was the link between these graphic artists of the Brücke and the literary Expressionists around Kurt Hiller and Franz Pfempfert, editor of Die Aktion. It was, for example, Guttmann who, probably in 1912/13, introduced Kirchner to the poetry of Georg Heym, an encounter which would eventually lead to the series of woodcuts Kirchner made for the second edition of the first posthumous collection of Heym’s poetry, Umbra vitae, published by Kurt Wolff in 1924. Whereas Guttmann and his friends had once briefly worshipped at the feet of George, Rilke and Hofmannsthal, this generation was now under the sway of the tumultuous new poetry of Heym, his friend and rival Jakob van Hoddis, and of Johannes R. Becher. Guttmann was close to van Hoddis, and stayed by him throughout his mental problems until he was permanently hospitalized. Guttmann thought that a more psychoanalytic approach might help. He also thought the publication of a volume of van Hoddis’s poetry would make a crucial difference.[8] From 1910 Guttmann was active with others in the ‘Neuer Club’ in developing a literary cabaret of poetry and verse readings which took place in different Berlin cafés and in Paul Cassirer’s art gallery. Among the visitors to these occasions were Else Lasker-Schüler, Karl Kraus, Gottfried Benn and Alfred 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 Brücke, Guttmann took part in the discussionsof ‘Die Freie Schulgemeinde Wickersdorf’ (near Saalfeld in Thüringen) on the ideas of the teacher and educational reformer Gustav Wyneken. It is in this context that Guttmann met Walter Benjamin, who had returned from Freiburg to Berlin for the winter semester of 1912–13 to work on the editorial board of the youth monthly Der Anfang, also published by Franz Pfempfert.[10] In a kind of graphic family-tree of his friendships, drawn up later by Benjamin and found among his papers, Guttmann takes up a fairly prominent position, in third place.[11] Benjamin was 20 at the time, Guttmann a year older. Der Anfang survived only from May 1913 to July 1914 as a dispute soon broke out in the editorial committee: Guttmann wanted to unseat the two more politically radical editors, Georg Barbizon and Siegfried Bernfeld, in favour of the more other-worldly Walter Benjamin and Fritz Heinle. The argument was settled by the outbreak of the First World War and Heinle’s suicide. Guttmann subsequently criticized his own standpoint and defended the more political position.[12] Later, Benjamin’s friend Gershom Scholem looked back more critically at Guttmann’s relationship with Benjamin in comments which convey in no uncertain terms the strength of Guttmann’s personality.[13]

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

Der Parallelismus fehlt Georgens [sic]. Ich erinnere mich keines Dichters, der dieses Nebeneinander besitzt. Und nun ein Wunder: der Parallelismus findet sich – unabhängig von Hodler – bei einem jungen deutschen Dichter, dessen fast unbekannten Namen auszuposaunen zu den wesentlichen Verdiensten dieses Essays gehört: 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, with others in the ‘Neuer Club’, active in persuading Heym’s father that more of his son’s poetry should be published, and was one of the editors of the posthumous collection, Umbra vitae (Rowohlt 1912).

In Die Aktion Guttmann himself published poems and a now rather cryptic ‘Novelle’, ‘Selbstporträt’.[15] It must have been at this time, before the war, that Guttmann got to know Franz Jung, Wieland Herzfelde and his brother Helmut, soon to call himself John Heartfield in protest against fanatical German anti-English propaganda. 1913 was the year of the campaign to free the drug-addict, anarchist and psychoanalyst Otto Gross. In the course of this campaign, which was also aimed at Gross’s father, Franz Jung and Simon Guttmann edited a special Otto Gross issue of the Munich journal Revolution and distributed over a thousand copies free. At the instigation of his father Hanns Gross, Otto had been arrested and sent to an asylum. The intention of the campaign was to liberate him. Guttmann tried to enlist the help of prominent academics, among others Max Weber in Heidelberg.[16]

At the beginning of the war, Guttmann, Benjamin and other members of the Berlin ‘Freie Studentenschaft’ took up a pronounced anti-war position. Eight days after war started, Benjamin’s friend Fritz Heinle committed suicide with his girlfriend. In the February cold snap of 1915, and on the advice of a doctor friend, Guttmann took numerous warm baths and then spent time unclothed, exposed on a Berlin balcony. Army doctors subsequently diagnosed severe bronchitis, as a result of which Guttmann was allowed to convalesce in neutral Switzerland, where he lived for a time in a sanatorium in Ascona, and then in style in Zürich Dada circles.[17] Although he attended the Club Voltaire in Zürich, Guttmann was, according to the Dada artist Hans Richter, not a member of ‘the Dada group’. Richter describes how Else Lasker-Schüler ‘read her poems to Erich Unger and Simon Guttmann’, and goes on to say that [Guttmann] ‘was one of the quickest and best conversationalists I have ever known, and was happiest when exchanging bons mots and psychological and artistic theories with the equally sharp-witted Walter Serner.’ [18]

Guttmann stayed in Zürich and in Ascona from 1915 to 1918, often in the company of Angela Hubermann (née Müllner) (who had been married to the Russian Leopold Hubermann, brother of the violinist Bronislav), and whom 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 Switzerland during the war and mixed in the same Dada circles as Guttmann, wrote: ‘W.S. Guttmann ist in Berlin. Seine Gemahlin, Angela-Hubermann in Ascona.’[20] In an undated conversation with me about the women in his life, Guttmann said that this alleged (a word he often used – as in ‘this allegedly modern world’) marriage was ‘ironical’. If you wanted to cohabit publicly in Switzerland, it was only possible if you were married. The use of the inflated word ‘Gemahlin’ by Hardekopf here, instead of the simple word ‘Frau’, could be a hint at this irony. There may have been some sort of possibly Jewish or civic ceremony (Hubermann had converted to Judaism from Roman Catholicism) in order to obtain papers, but no record exists. In the same conversation, Guttmann told me he ‘passed Angela on to someone who loved her more’, namely the Berlin medical student Wilhelm or Karl 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 literary Expressionists.

In Bärbel Reetz’s, Emmy Ball-Hennings: Leben im Vielleicht (Frankfurt a.M. 2001), there are numerous references to Guttmann. Later in London, Guttmann kept a book, opened at a page showing a photograph of Emmy Hennings, permanently on his desk; this picture was invariably covered with papers and other objects but was always there. Later he had a friendship with Olga Katunal, a Lithuanian Jewish intellectual who moved to Paris. Guttmann referred to her as ‘my official friend for years’, but stressed that it was not a love relationship, although it was a sexual one. The woman he later referred to as his wife was the art historian Herta Wescher, author of the first comprehensive book on collage. She was with him later in France when, after her brief internment, she took the last train to leave Montpellier for Zürich. After the war they visited each other in Paris and London. Angela Hubermann went with her new husband to Soviet Russia. She worked as a doctor but also wrote articles for the Frankfurter Zeitung; her husband worked at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under David Riazanov. Both were arrested, and when Bertolt Brecht was briefly in Moscow, on his way to California, he wrote a letter to the famous Soviet writer Konstantin Fedin asking 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 to tell the tale, living in Moscow from 1978. She died in 1985.

2

In December 1918 Simon Guttmann returned from Zürich to Berlin, remaining there until 1932. He had spent most of the war in Switzerland, often in Dada circles in Zürich, written ballet criticism for a local paper and worked for the art dealer and collector, Paul Cassirer, and the arts patron Harry Graf Kessler, helping to promote cultural contacts with France, something that was known, if not encouraged, by the German authorities. During the revolutionary period in Berlin in January 1919, Guttmann functioned as a link, some thought possibly as a spy, between Kessler and the Spartacists and is often mentioned in Kessler’s diaries. One entry tells of someone identified as Karl Liebknecht’s son about to be lynched by a mob: ‘Guttmann klammert sich an mich. “Helfen Sie, Helfen Sie! Sagen Sie den Leuten, dass sie ihn nicht totschlagen.”’[22]

Sometimes called the ‘verratene Revolution’, the German Revolution of 1918 to 1920 might more correctly be called ‘the impossible revolution’, because Germany was then a defeated country, partly occupied by allies vigilant to stamp out any decisively revolutionary activity, particularly with the raw experience of the Russian Revolution in mind.[23] This bleak reality transformed the literary Guttmann into someone who thought in more political terms. Perhaps his last purely artistic activity was his participation in Berlin 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 able to live for some time from the investments he left her, and to finance her son. The inflation of 1923 was to terminate such arrangements.

During the revolutionary events of November 1918 in Germany, a considerable number of artists and writers sympathized with the anti-war ‘Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands’ (USPD). The USPD was 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 position with many divisions, and after the Social Democrats, led by Ebert, Scheidemann and Noske, had been seen to betray and strangle the Revolution, the intellectual left disintegrated further.[24] Some returned to the Social Democrats, some went to the Communists (including, in 1921, most of the USPD); others left politics altogether.

Such were the political circumstances of the foundation in Berlin on 4 April 1920 of yet another radical party, the ‘Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands’ (KAPD), a left-wing splinter group of the KPD. The KPD was in favour of taking part in elections to the Reichstag, whereas the KAPD considered this a betrayal of the Revolution. Franz Jung and Alexander Schwab were among the leaders of the KAPD, and Simon Guttmann and the journalist John Graudenz were among their closest collaborators. A little earlier Simon Guttmann had actually applied to join the KPD but had been rejected by Otto Braun, head of party security, on the grounds of Guttmann’s extreme individualism. After just two years, the KAPD collapsed in 1922 and some of its members returned to the KPD. It is not clear if Guttmann ever joined the KAPD, but this was the closest he ever came to party politics. Alexander Schwab and other KAPD leaders would eventually find themselves together again, from 1932 in the ‘Rote Kämpfer’ resistance group, and from 1936 in the prisons and concentration camps of the Third Reich.

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

Guttmann was in fact expelled from the Soviet Union for importing forbidden magazines, but he recalled his visit as having a fundamental effect upon him, and nostalgically reminisced about the red star above the Kremlin, which seemed then to be a symbol of hope. After Lenin died in 1924, Guttmann spliced together in a few nights a short compilation of all the film clips and photographs he could lay his hands on. The result was successfully 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 Ernst Toller’s play Hoppla, wir leben!, directed by Piscator.[25]

Since the middle of the 1920s, Guttmann had taken part in the meetings of the so-called Philosophy Group, built up around the philosopher Erich Unger and the Jewish mystic Oskar Goldberg, both of whom he knew from the period of the ‘Neuer Club’ and from exile in Zürich. As the last survivor of the inner circle of the Philosophy Group, he became the custodian of its manuscripts, which eventually found their way to the German Literary Archive in Marbach. It was at this time that Guttmann made the acquaintance of Bertolt Brecht, several years his junior. He took an instant dislike to him because Brecht greeted him with the 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 Franz and Cläre [sic] Jung; Eduard Marx and Dr Kurt Rüdiger von Roques were the financial sponsors. The photographers were Otto Umbehr (Umbo) and, from mid-1929, the former newspaper artist Hans Felix Baumann who, as a photo reporter, now called himself Felix H. Man. Others followed, including the portrait photographer Kurt Hübschmann (later to become a famous photographer in exile in England under the name Kurt Hutton). Harald Lechenperg and Walter Bosshard travelled for Dephot to Afghanistan and India, where Guttmann pestered them with instructions by letter and telegram. Fifty years later he would do the same to the well-established Caribbean writer George Lamming, who responded in kind. In those four years – from autumn 1928 to autumn 1932 – Simon Guttmann occupied the role which, wartime interruptions apart, he would fulfil for the rest of his life: that of stimulator, commissioner of work, teacher and manager of a group or collective of press photographers. In this role, Guttmann was able to use his experience in literature and art, in picture-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 heyday of press photography. In his book on Otto Umbehr, of all the photographers the one personally closest to Guttmann, Herbert Molderings writes:
‘Nie zuvor und nie wieder danach hat es eine derartige Konzentration der Presse in Deutschland gegeben. Und nie wieder hat die journalistische Fotografieeinen solchen Aufschwung erlebt wie im Berlin der späten zwanziger Jahre.’[27]

In a short time Dephot became one of the leading picture agencies in Germany. No longer did it supply only single pictures, but picture stories, so called ‘Bildserien’ in which a subject would be comprehensively covered by pictures and text. From 1933 Guttmann, who benefited from holding a Hungarian passport because of his father, returned on numerous short visits to Berlin. One of his first actions was to destroy, in spring 1933, with the help of a young assistant, the whole of Dephot’s portrait archive, in order to prevent portraits of left-wing writers and politicians being used in police searches. In August 1932 he had sent another young man, a left-wing Hungarian student called Endre Ernö Friedmann to Copenhagen to photograph Leon Trotsky during his first public appearance in exile. It was the young photographer’s first publication. Four years later he would be world-famous under the name Robert Capa, one of the creators of the photo agency Magnum, founded on the model of Dephot.

3

Little is known about Guttmann’s life between 1933 and 1937. He himself used to say that he travelled back and forth between Vienna, Berlin, Budapest and Paris, partly as a photographic agent, at times carrying out secret political missions. From 1937 he settled in Paris with the German art historian Herta Wescher, moving more in French artistic circles than with German émigrés. 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 Resistance, for whom Guttmann did translation work. While Herta Wescher was able to move to Switzerland, Guttmann, by contrast, was arrested on the orders of the Vichy Government and interned for a period in the Grand Hotel at Balaroc-les-Bains. From there he made his adventurous way across the Pyrenees, via Spain and Portugal to England, arriving in London in 1943, where he was briefly interned. He subsequently stayed with Sebastian Haffner, whom he had helped leave Germany clandestinely in 1938 and who later worked for the Observer. It was this latter contact which seems to have enabled Guttmann to reach London. On reporting to the British consul in Barcelona, he was told of a postcard from Richard Crossman, then working for the Political Warfare Executive in London, asking the consulate to arrange for his speedy dispatch to London, on account of his valuable journalistic resources. Typically, however, when informed that he would be put on a fast train, or plane, to Lisbon, Guttmann announced that he would only proceed by way of Toledo; he wanted to see the landscape that had inspired 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 British Political Warfare Executive, first in Ingersoll House, Kingsway and then in Russell Square, co-editing a French-language journal, Cadran (‘Dial’), for distribution in liberated France.

From 1944 Guttmann worked for Tom (later Sir Tom) Hopkinson and Stefan Lorant (1901–97), another famous and long-lived Hungarian German exile on the London illustrated weekly, Picture Post, which Lorant had founded. Guttmann knew Lorant from the days of the Münchener Illustrierte Presse in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In autumn 1945 Guttmann returned to Berlin for the first time to do a story for Picture Post. Then in 1946 he founded the picture agency Report, eventually moving into an attic office at 411 Oxford Street, opposite the eastern end of Selfridges.

Guttmann advised and taught generations of photographers for a period of 40 years. Report specialized in pictures of political activity of any kind, such as demonstrations and marches, especially if they were left-wing and radical, but including the not necessarily radical Trades Union conferences. It also covered avant-garde cultural events, including theatre, dance and spectacle. Among Guttmann’s pupils and collaborators were Romano Cagnoni, 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 Andrew Wiard. Guttmann worked in his attic office into his ripe old age, until he was over 95 and could not leave it without assistance. For the last years of his life he was confined to a wheelchair, and moved to ground-floor accommodation. He lived frugally, and consistently refused his state pension, just as he had refused a British passport, or to move into sheltered accommodation.

Guttmann died on 13 January 1990 in London shortly after discharging himself from hospital. By then Guttmann had outlived all his friends and most of his enemies. Franz Pfempfert had died in 1974 in Mexico City, Oskar Goldberg in France in 1952, Erich Unger in London in 1950 – all in exile. Carl Einstein and Walter Benjamin had taken their lives on the Franco-Spanish border in 1940, John Graudenz was executed in Berlin-Plötzensee in 1942, Alexander Schwab had died in prison in Zwickau in 1943, and Emmy Ball-Hennings died in Lugano in 1948. Of the photographers who were part of Guttmann’s life, Robert Capa was killed in Indo-China in 1954; Kurt Hutton died in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, in 1960; Felix Man died in London in 1985; Otto Umbehr (Umbo) died in Hanover in 1980. The Swiss Walter Bosshard (died 1975) and the Austrian Harald Lechenperg (died 1994) both worked as travel photographers during the Third Reich and after.

When the photographer Gisèle Freund visited Guttmann after the Second World War in London to interview him for her book, Photography and society, he made her promise not to mention his name. He insisted that, if he ever had to be mentioned in print, he be referred to as ‘the secretary of Report’.[28]

Simon Guttmann was cremated at Golder’s Green cemetery in North London. His funeral service was devised by his friends. He himself had once said: ‘Death is an examination which, so far, everybody passes.’ His favourite poem, Goethe’s ‘Selige Sehnsucht’, was read in German and English by the co-authors of this article, and the words Guttmann used to describe Otto Gross (see note 16) were spoken in English: ‘All Dr Gross’s actions derive from the idea that inside the human being is the place where the world may be taken by the horns.’ At his request, Guttmann’s ashes were scattered at sea. This was done in 1990 by friends of his on a sailing holiday in the Caribbean.[28]

Notes

1. Diethart Kerbs (1937–2013) was Emeritus Professor of the History of Photography at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Special thanks are due to Hamish Ritchie for his essential help in the presentation of this article.

2. Gunter Martens, ‘Heyms Freunde aus dem “Neuen Club”: Biographische und bibliographische Hinweise’, in Georg Heym: Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Werk, ed. Karl Ludwig Schneider and Gerhard Burckhardt, Hamburg 1968, p. 438. It is not clear to which article reference is made here, possibly ‘Über Hodler: Andeutungen’, quoted on p. 407 (see note 7 below). No article by Guttmann on Heym as such has been discovered.

3. Simon Guttmann in Der Mistral, eine lyrische Anthologie, Die Bücherei Maiandros, books 4–5, 1 May 1913, p. 20 (Schneider Archive). When I put this poem in front of Guttmann, he looked at it as unsparingly as if scrutinizing another set of photographic contacts. After some thought, and looking at me reproachfully, he pronounced it ‘horribly conventional for its time and mostly incomprehensible’. He did, however, like one phrase – ‘mit Schiffen hämmernd hinterm Horizont’. He declared these 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 has curated with scholarly and loving care

4. See J. M. Ritchie, German exiles, British perspectives, New York etc. 1997, especially chapter 15. See also the same author’s ‘Kurt Hiller: a “Stänkerer” in Exile, 1933–1955’, German Life and Letters (Exile Studies special number), vol. 11, 1998, pp. 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 Frau Schneider by Simon Guttmann of 7 September 1988).

6. This conversation was held by me with Guttmann on 31 January 1988. We normally spoke in English as he had by then lost much of his German. As he quoted Heym’s lines to me off by heart, which he explained actually referred to a particular stretch of road in Berlin-Grunewald, Guttmann was again visibly moved by them and the memory of Georg Heym.

7. See Guttmann’s article ‘Neue Kunst: Andeutungen’, in Der Demokrat, 2/46, unpaginated. This review 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 ended in Sobibor in 1942, see Helmut Hornbogen, Jakob van Hoddis: Die Odysee eines Verschollenen, Munich 1986. There also exists in my possession a carbon copy of a typed translation by Simon Guttmann of Hoddis’s famous poem ‘Weltende’, made around 1966. This curio deserves to be preserved for posterity, even if only to remind putative translators that it is the tilers and not (as so often) the tiles that ‘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 pieces
And on the coast, one reads, the flood increases.
The storm arrives. The wild seas hop
On to the land to squash thick dams.
Most people suffer from a cold.
The railway-trains plunge from the bridges.

9. Complete documentation of the ‘Neuer Club’ is to be found in Gunter Martens, ‘Georg Heym und der “Neue Club”’, in Georg Heym: Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Werk, ed. Karl Ludwig Schneider and Gerhard 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 Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, VII, Book 1, pp. 9–15, and in particular the notes to that text in ibid., Book 2, pp. 531–60. See also Benjamin’s ‘Offener Brief an Herrn Dr. Gustav Wyneken’, in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, I: 1910–1918, ed. Christoph G¨odde and Henry Lonitz, Frankfurt a.M. 1995, pp. 202–10. For Der Anfang and the discussions around Wyneken’s ideas, see Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: a biography, trans. Malcolm R. Green and Ingrid Ligers, ed. Martina Dervis, London, 1996. This book was originally published in German in 1990, but was, in the author’s words, ‘revised and extended for the English edition’.

11. See Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, VI, p. 804.

12. In a conversation on 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 him would be dull. Guttmann emphasized how well Pfempfert had always treated him and his difficult co-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 seinen zer störerischen 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 erzählen”, wozu es aber nie kam.’ Here Scholem was summarizing Benjamin’s letter to him from Bern of 30 March 1918: ‘über Simon Guttmann kann ich Ihnen einmal (vielleicht wenn wir beide alte Leute sind – falls wir es werden!) mehr erzählen als irgend ein andrer Mensch auf der Welt, ausgenommen vielleicht meine Frau’ (Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe (Frankfurt a.M. 1995, I, p. 444). In his book about his own friendship with Benjamin, Scholem also says that Benjamin, after he split with Guttmann, only mentioned him ‘in dunklen Andeutungen als eine dämonische Figur’ (Scholem, op. cit., p. 28).

14. Der Demokrat, no. 48, 23 November 1910, 3 (Schneider Archive).

15. Die Aktion, 1911, 14 August, pp. 822–4.

16. See Guttmann, ‘Der Arzt Otto Gross’, in Revolution, Munich, 20 December 1913. This short article of under two hundred words ends with a typical Guttmann flourish: ‘Jede Behandlung des Gross stellt hin, daß der Mensch der Ort ist, wo die Welt an den Hörnern zu packen ist.’

17. Personal communication.

18. See Hans Richter, Dada: art and anti-art, London 1965, p. 67. For Walter Seligmann (alias Serner) (1889–1942), see Christian Schad, ‘Zürich/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’, in Rainer Maria Rilke und die Schweiz, Zürich 1992, pp. 109–22.

20. See Richard Sheppard, ‘Ferdinand Hardekopf and Dada’, Jahrbuch der Schillergesellschaft, vol. 20, 1976, p. 145.

21. ‘Bitte, helfen Sie ihr doch so gut Sie können’ (‘Schreiben in der Diktatur’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 August 2006) (report by Gesine Bey).

22. See Harry Graf Kessler, Das Tagebuch, vol. 7 (1919–23), 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 Paul Cassirer.

23. See the detailed study of the British occupation by Douglas Newton, Britain and the Weimar Republic, 1918–1919, Oxford 1999.

24. For a detailed historical survey relevant to this development, see the two articles by Richard Sheppard: ‘Artists, intellectuals and the USPD 1917–1922’, in Literaturwissenschftliches Jahrbuch, vol. 23, 1991, pp. 175–216, and ‘The SPD, its Cultural Policy and the German Avant-garde 1917–1922’, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, vol. 20, 1995, pp. 16–66. In 1919 Guttmann himself published a Malik Verlag pamphlet, Dieser Friede wird kein Brest-Litovsk.

25. See Erwin Piscator, Das politische Theater, Berlin 1968, p. 155, where the chaos Guttmann told me prevailed is exemplified: ‘Am 3. September 1927 ließ die Piscator-Bühne zum erstenmal den Vorhang gehen … Noch am Abend der Premiere, die auf 7 Uhr angesetzt war, begegnet ich um 7 3/4 Uhr [Felix] Gasbarra und Guttmann, die in einem Kellerraum Teile des Zwischenfilmes zusammenschnitten, der um 8 Uhr oben laufen sollte.’

26. Personal communication.

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

28. See Gisèle Freund, Photography and society, London 1980, pp. 224–5, note 115. Gisèle Freund was as good as her word – Guttmann is only mentioned in the book as ‘the secretary’ and is not in the index.

[ German Life and Letters, vol. 62, no. 4, 2009, pp. 401–14 ]