In 2019, the Tate Modern in London held an exhibition entitled “Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919-33.” One painting on display burrowed deep into my brain, Jeanne Mammen’s At the Shooting Gallery, a work from 1929, which depicted the exact moment when misery and pleasure dove-tailed in the powder keg of Weimar Germany in the Golden Twenties.

Mammen was a Berlin artist. Her painting depicts a garish fair booth in which a female fairground worker hands a rifle to a male patron, both their faces etched in misery, to take aim at exotic targets. The excitement of the fair is reduced to a tense exchange of cash, reinforced by the visible price displayed on the stall, and to the weapon itself, acting as allusion to the coming second war and the doom brought to Germany through National Socialism. The woman appears as miserable, tired, but assured, perhaps ready to wield the rifle herself. This scene was Mammen’s call to arms. 

I had never encountered Mammen before, but this one piece seemed to mirror my experience of my own society. I had become disillusioned with the edifice of the modern world—its decadence, its cynicism, its unease and an uncertainty that had been masked by the affirmation that everything will be fine as long as you keep spending and don’t ask questions.

Yet art, and particularly modern art, allows you to release yourself from personal burdens and forge a deeper understanding of another’s condition. That is, after all, the only thing that genuinely matters. When I came across At the Shooting Gallery, Mammen found in me a willing witness to her observations of a world in ruin.

In Mammen’s Berlin, the Treaty of Versailles had wreaked havoc on the German economy, leading into a period of infamous hyperinflation—a “wheelbarrow of marks for a loaf of bread.” When the Dawes Plan finally stabilized the German economy in 1924, cultural expressions flourished. Berliners splurged at the underground Kabarett, revelling in live performances of jazz, dance, and circus acrobatics. While these shows once admitted only men in underground clubs, now Weimar’s women could gain entrance. 

This was a society frolicking in excess. Berlin inhaled the smoky atmosphere of the late-night clubs for only moments before everything, inevitably, caught fire. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 signaled its end, devastating the German economy. Jeanne Mammen was there to capture it in her art.

Mammen’s approach to her work, and her life, can be summed up in one quote: “I have always wanted to be just a pair of eyes, walking through the world unseen, only to see others.” Born in Berlin in 1890, but brought up in Paris, she was the daughter of a successful merchant. Mammen returned to Berlin alone when her family escaped to Amsterdam to avoid internment in the First World War. The French government confiscated her family’s property and she struggled to survive.  She lived as an outsider, concerned only with capturing her fellow Weimar women. 

Mammen understood that despite the apparent liberalism that had swept across Berlin, all could be undone in a moment. Social hierarchies based on gender, economics and religion still sorted Berlin, and post-war paranoia and despair persisted. Other Magic Realists of the Weimar period, particularly painter Otto Dix, depicted this paranoia through disturbing images portraying female subjects as dead, hung, or dismembered, illustrating a practice known as lustmord.  Both circus and cabaret acts that involved androgyny and sexual liberation were common, and these artists saw them as the epitome of a decayed civilization. As Dix put it, “Abnormal situations bring out all the depravity, the bestiality of human beings.”

Taking power in 1933, the Nazi Party branded Magic Realist art “degenerate” as it undertook Gleichschaltung, the “Nazification” of German society, in which the government outlawed rogue elements that undermined the party’s total control. Mammen and the modernist artists of Berlin became targets. In 1937, the Nazis held the Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) exhibition in Munich, aiming to turn the German people against it. The artist Max Beckmann, finding his work included in the exhibition, left Germany immediately for Amsterdam, understanding the persecution he would face if he stayed. The Nazis removed Otto Dix from his post as an art teacher. Other artists were forbidden to exhibit or even to produce art. Mammen herself stayed in Berlin, isolating herself within her locked flat and surviving only through the help of commissions from friends, continuing her work in defiance of the new regime’s attacks against her artwork.

Despite her tenuous situation, Mammen kept painting because she was committed to seeing and depicting the world as it really was, for good or ill. I can relate to the desperate, overstimulated culture of the late Weimar Republic, as I see its echoes in our contemporary Western capitalism. Looking at her paintings, I also relate to the depictions of emptiness and despair Mammen must have felt as she watched the Nazi Party’s destruction of her culture. 

We may always have the choice to deny or distract ourselves from the downfall that is coming, whether it be political, environmental, or virological, yet Mammen shows us that we are haunted by its possibility anyway. As in 1920s Berlin, many in our time have decided it is better to drown in excess and pleasure than to confront the reality of disasters laid at our feet. 

In fact, our freedom may only be an illusion, as it was for Mammen’s women. Her dedication to the truth in her art was the route to a level of freedom that transcended the physical and emotional constraints of her dark and brutal world. Perhaps it’s why she continued to paint; in her search for true freedom, I feel kinship with her. 

Mammen’s world is still so close to ours—direct from the burial grounds of Magic Realism in Berlin—because the human spirit has a habit of surviving. Mammen never closed her eyes to the world. We can therefore understand much about our future from seeing the world through her clear, uncompromising vision; I hope we choose to learn from her so that what befell her Berlin will never happen to us.