Kurt Tucholsky’s and John Heartfield’s photobook Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles (DD) was published at the end of the 1920s – a time when other photobooks also addressed the topic of “Germany,” trying to come to terms with the fundamental changes and instability of the Weimar Republic. Yet, even among these publications, DD remains a unique take on the state of Germany, due to its intriguing text-image combinations, its high volume of photographs and its collaborative nature on the part of its authors, Tucholsky, Heartfield and an array of anonymous photographers whose photos have been published by various media outlets and are reused in DD. Scholarship so far has often discussed the reception of this photobook, its satirical techniques in both texts and photos, and its montage method, particularly focusing on Heartfield’s photomontages. This analysis of DD takes an in-depth look at the montage technique applied in this photobook. I argue that a combination of cinematic and industrial montage creates, what I call “functional montages” that imitate the everyday life of the working class, while also urging DD’s worker-readers to reflect on their lives and status within Weimar Germany’s public sphere. This argument also considers the intermedial processes at work here. Building on Werner Wolf’s and Jens Schröter’s typologies of intermediality, this article demonstrates that DD is an example of “covert, intracompositional intermediality,” to borrow Wolf’s term. This kind of intermediality asks its recipients to decode its intermedial references, a task which Tucholsky’s and Heartfield’s readers have to do when they engage with their montages of texts and photographs. It will become clear that DD’s use of cinematic and industrial montage techniques is a demonstration of understanding intermediality less as a transfer of media elements, but as “media narrating literally and cinematically” as Joachim Peach has stated in his analysis of intermediality.

First, this essay evaluates Tucholsky’s views on the use of photography. He demanded not only that print media should employ more photos, but also argued for photos to be juxtaposed in order to aim for political agitation. He based his demands on images of grievances within the working class, which were also often at the center of his writings. His poem Zehn Jahre Deutsche Republik was paired with photos when it appeared in the AIZ in 1928, including photos that would be reused in DD. While scholarship has discussed the various interactions of photos and texts in DD, attention has often been directed at combinations of individual photos alongside a text or discussions have focused on Heartfield’s photomontages. Secondly, this essay shows that while Heartfield’s photomontages were certainly persuasive re-assemblies of photographic material, they could, however, also fall short by leaving their viewers potentially overwhelmed and confused. Yet, one section of DD, entitled “The Parliament,” shows how photomontages can be extended by a textual component that, instead of using the photomontage as a prompt or illustration, mirrors and builds on the photomontage’s visual narrative in content and form. This way, the photomontage is extended to a “functional montage.” This montage combines several photos with a text that can stretch over several pages in a photobook, as this essay demonstrates, using the section “Good Times” as an example. Combining the industrial montage of the assembly line with the film montage associated with Soviet cinema of the 1920s, the “functional montage” aims to draw attention to each of its components and their narratives so as to both address and educate DD’s workerreaders to reflect on their status in Weimar Germany’s public sphere. Scholarship has so far argued that photobooks aimed to educate their readers to become visually literate while interacting with photos. Tucholsky’s and Heartfield’s photobook shows how these educational measures can be taken one step further. DD’s way of repurposing media, based on the intermedial narrative qualities of images and texts, shows that DD is an example of Werner Wolf’s concept of “intracompositional intermediality.”

Kurt Tucholsky’s and John Heartfield’s photobook Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles (DD)1 appeared in 1929, when the media landscape was saturated with illustrated magazines and books that had discovered photography’s presumed authentic qualities. Nonetheless, DD prompted a substantial echo in both the leftwing and the conservative press. Already its title and itsironic play on the first verse of the national anthem The Song of the Germans indicates that the condition of the Weimar Republic is at stake in this photobook combining 188 photographs and photomontages with 96 texts. Tucholsky and Heartfield particularly criticize the media’s portrayal of the Weimar Republic’s current state. They aim to unveil its actual condition by including, educating and addressing the working class and questioning its visibility and representation within the German public sphere. The worker-readers of DD are supposed to see themselves differently with the help of DD.

As this essay argues, Tucholsky and Heartfield employed, what I call “functional montages” – an extension of the photomontage that combines industrial and cinematic montage – which allow the worker-readers to recognize themselves in DD, while also gaining the ability to take a critical stance on their position within the German public sphere. In using “functional montages,” Tucholsky and Heartfield are not only educating working class readers by transferring the industrial montage onto the book’s page; they also demonstrate how photobooks at the time adapted another montage principle, associated with Soviet cinema of the 1920s, in order to further develop the photobook’s educational purpose. Scholarship today defines this process of transferring cinematic and industrial montage onto the book’s page as intermedial.

Drawing on Werner Wolf’s typologies of intermediality,2 DD exemplifies a “covert intermediality”(Wolf, 2013, p. 345).3 Due to a switch between media, according to Wolf (2013), one medium disappears within another medium, which conceals the former and thus is not recognizable anymore on the surface of the target medium. To that end, as I argue, DD and its combinations of essays, poems or songs alongside photographs and photomontages enact the cinematic montage, aiming to imitate film “by using its signs iconically, not referentially, similar to when certain structures are used to approximate a literary text to music” (Wolf, 2013, p. 345). Yet, while the film medium might not be recognizable anymore in DD, especially as there are many textual components, both film and photobook continue to have the photograph as their basis in common, which both media use to build their narratives. Joachim Paech (1997) supports this view of narrative being a tertium comparationis when he states that “there is no intermediality between literature and film; there is one only between media narrating literarily and cinematically” (p. 335). Jens Schröter (2011) builds on this notion of transmedial narration in the second of his four types of discourse on intermediality. His second paradigm of “formal (or transmedial) intermediality” (p. 3) manages to highlight the balancing act of the procedure of translating (for instance, film into a photobook) which “has to assume [on the one hand] that the procedure is media-unspecific enough in order to be able to appear in another media context as the same, i.e., as a re-identifiable principle […]. On the other hand, the procedure has to be media-specific enough in order to still be able to point in its new media context to the medium from which it was ‘borrowed’ […]” (p. 4). In the case of DD, there are several indicators that contribute to such a balancing act. In combining not only images with each other, but also including texts, Tucholsky and Heartfield demonstrate the media-unspecific procedure of translating film into a photobook. At the same time, Heartfield’s photomontages, and, what I call “functional montages” point back to the medium of film. These kinds of montages rely on a visual and textual narrative spanning several pages, building on each other, hence also functioning like an industrial montage process. Moreover, as Patrick Rössler (2012) writes, a “reportage-like view” (p. 285) of authors and audiences at the time, which was influenced by photo reportages in illustrated magazines and montage techniques of film programs, make a “filmic composition of books” (p. 285) possible. Just as Paech emphasized how narrative is the tertium comparationis in intermedial transfers, Rössler also points out that photobooks imitate the “dynamic narrative style of film stories” (p. 285; my emphasis), claiming that DD and its combination of “film montage and photomontage” (p. 285) does so most convincingly. This essay builds on this notion of narrative functioning as an intermedial point of comparison. It allows me to include the translation of the industrial montage, which shapes the narrative of the workers’ daily views and routines, and combining it with film montage in order to identify “functional montages” targeted at working-class readers in DD.