Simon Wachsmuth

In 1920, artists John Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter faced charges of defamation of the German army for their contribution to Berlin’s First International Dada Fair: a dummy of a pig-faced military officer, which they christened Prussian Archangel. Strung up on the ceiling, the figure bore a sash with the title line from the popular Christmas carol, Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her. Translating loosely to “I come from heaven on high,” the song was attributed to the Reformer Martin Luther. Intended as a rebuke to the church, in the hands of the Dadaists—many of whom had been forced against their will to fight in the first World War—the carol was reinterpreted as an anti-war anthem. A second sign dangled from the figure’s waist, stipulating that in order to truly understand the work, one must first engage in twelve hours of field exercises with a full backpack on the Tempelhofer Feld.

Simon Wachsmuth takes this absurd directive literally in his new work, From Heaven High. The first of its three acts opens with a soldier complying with Heartfield and Schlichter’s marching orders—however begrudgingly—on Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld, a site that has served as martial training grounds, an airfield, and a concentration camp, as well as a public park. Wachsmuth digs further into the controversial his- tory of this stretch of land in the work’s second act, which uses animation to build into a discussion on freedom. The third and final act addresses the constraints placed on a specific freedom—the freedom of speech—alluding to the weaponization of the justice system against artists like Heartfield and Schlichter (and later other colleagues, including Otto Dix and Georg Grosz), as a means of suppressing creative expression.

Text: Kate Sutton