In his memoirs printed after World War II, Stern wrote that Europe was an eclectic work, combining dadaist and suprematist motifs, and also expressionist-constructivist style with the basics of functional graphics. This book, published in a square format, was a one-of-a-kind combination of drawing and photomontage with film elements. Its political message was directed at the nationalism on the rise, presenting a catastrophic image of the conditions of Europe’s working masses left alone without food and money, with empty pockets and lust for revolution.
Stern’s poem was first published in its original version, illustration-less, in the Reflektor magazine (1925) issued in Lublin, and afterwards in the extended version of the 1927 book of poetry Bieg do Bieguna (editor’s translation: Run to the Pole). In the same year, Szczuka offered Stern to illustrate the poem. The artists have collaborated before – they published the first and only issue of the Awangarda leftist literature biweekly (1927) together with Brunon Jasieński, the leader of the Polish futurists. Szczuka also created the artwork for Stern’s and Jasieński’s works in Jan Hempl’s Nowa Kultura magazine, and also did the cover for 1924’s Ziemia na Lewo (editor’s translation: Earth to the Left) – Jasieński’s and Stern’s joint book of poetry.
1929’s Europe fit into the concept of combining poetry with plastic arts, photography, photomontage and the experiments of visual typography. The new poetry was supposed to be not merely read, but also watched, and the book itself was supposed to function as an autonomous piece of art and the result of the poet’s and artist’s collaboration. In the 1920s, in this spirit, Alexander Rodchenko illustrated Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetry with photomontages in the book Pro eto; Czech artists from the Devetsil group, Vitezslav Nezval and Karel Teige, created the concept of poetism – poetry in images and the famous pictorial alphabet ABECEDA; and the Romanian artists Victor Brauner and Ilarie Voronca – the concept of pictopoetry in the book 75 HP. Avant-garde tandems, consisting of a poet and a visual artist, were very popular in Poland as well: Aleksander Wat and Henryk Berlewi collaborated on the publication titled Jazz (1924) and worked on advert projects, combining advertising slogans with mechanofacture; Władysław Strzemiński and Julian Przyboś created one of the Polish avant-garde’s most visually stunning poetry books – Z Ponad (editor’s translation: With Above), published in 1930.
Thus, Szczuka’s and Stern’s collaboration on Europe was not an isolated case. Among the forementioned poetical and artistic avant-garde projects, Europe was a piece which exhibited much more radical political engagement on the side of the creators. Stern himself considered his contemporariness as an epoch, in which the poet can no longer merely write about the world’s beauty and aesthetisize, but has to show the reality as it is, without lies and false images. He believed that the new poetry has to be engaged and Europe was supposed to be a voice of protest against the war which changed ‘human masses into cannon fodder and soulless automatons’. The poem was largely directed at the current European politics which was going through a big crisis at the time. It was collapsing while jazz and the so-called upper-crust’s entertaining banquets were still carelessly going on – Stern would often harshly criticise this state of affairs.
Not without a reason the poem opened with a scene portraying the starved and exploited populace, which does not receive a decent pay for its strenuous labour, stuffing the rich men’s pockets. The people are left on their own, without hope for help from the ruling authorities:
My – żrący mięso
raz na miesiąc,
(...)
my – wlokący ulicami
rząd zapadłych brzuchów,
z bezsilnymi pięściami
wypychającymi kieszenie,
m y
przegramy,
przegramy,
przegramy,
jak zwykle!
(editor’s translation:
Us – devouring meat
once in a month,
(…)
us – dragging swollen bellies,
through the streets,
with powerless fists
stuffing our pockets,
u s
we will lose,
we will lose,
we will lose,
as we always do!)
This poetic vision was completed in an interesting way by an illustration depicting Charlie Chaplin, cracking up at the sight of these masses, powerless in the catastrophic situation in which they ended up. The world’s most famous tramp was always in dire straits as a homeless, starving vagrant and immigrant. Nonetheless, in his films he managed to get out of even the biggest trouble. On the other hand, one could see an anarchist’s attitude in him and his films were read as a critique of the authority’s oppressive character. Chaplin’s silent cinema has shown how the proletarian reality looked like – directly and without redundancies. In this aspect, his presence in Europe’s visual layer is also justified. Stern showed an image of the starving proletariat, satiated not from having enough food, but from the excess of empty words, empty slogans and empty promises for the enhancement and reassurance of worthy living conditions:
karmią nas
wpychają nam do gardła
pokarm dla ducha!
500 metrowe trychiny
kazań
wyblakłe tasiemce
gazet
słodkie
zjadliwe
bakcyle słów
wpycha nam do gęby
obżarte bractwo
literaciąt
prezydentów
ministrów oświaty
chiny zachodu !!
przestańcie truć nas
my nie jesteśmy szczurami!
(editor’s translation:
they feed us
nourishment for the soul
forced into our throats!
500-metre long trichina worms
of sermons
faded cestoids
tabloids
sweet
scathing
bacilluses of words
stuffed into our mugs
by the gobbled brotherhood
of toddler authors
presidents
ministers of education
China of the West !!
stop poisoning us
we are not pests!)
However Stern showed the European proletariat’s catastrophic position, it is worth mentioning that this poem was equally directed at the Second Polish Republic’s actual politics. In the face of the regained independence, the Polish government, occupied mostly with regaining Polish lands and acquiring new ones, did not tend to the problems of the working masses and respective individuals. Stern posed a rhetorical question in Europe:
lecz któż
lecz któż
walczy
o droższe od wszystkich
śląsków świata
od niepodległości wszystkich droższe –
wyzwolone
serce człowieka?!
(editor’s translation:
but who
but who
fights
for the dearer than every
Silesia of the world
dearer than all the independences –
liberated
heart of man?!)
A black map of Europe with ‘SOS’ written on it, in which the letter ‘O’ replaced Poland, is in the centre of Szczuka’s illustration. It is a call for help, a hope for a final chance. Europe is framed in an unfinished hourglass and a red frame resembling a sea of blood. Petrarca, turning his face away from the perishing blood-soaked Old Continent, is visible in the upper left corner. His lofty poems do not fit into the modern times, in which, according to Stern, the poet has to create politically engaged art. The terrified Holy Mother’s and her child’s effigies, modelled after Raphael’s Renaissance painting and placed on a gigantic skyscraper, also do not fit into the modern times – the times of sportsmen, boxers, locomotives, chorus girls and film. The latter appears in Europe’s visuals not only as Charlie Chaplin, but also as a moving film frame, introducing duelling boxers. Stern’s poem convinces us that the modern times are also the times of the epileptic Dionysus and mechanical Orpheus.
Squares, rectangles and diagonal, vertical and horizontal lines arranged adequately by Szczuka, bring Russian Suprematism to mind. Although Szczuka considered Suprematism to be non-applicable and not understandable to the proletariat, in Europe’s visuals one can notice elements borrowed from El Lissitzky’s black-red-white posters. They are especially visible in illustration, in which dynamic, suprematist lines combine with the image of a speeding biker, footballers and horse riders. The view of the Zamarła Turnia summit, surrounded by a triangular hourglass, garlands the visuals. This was often interpreted as a premonition of the artist’s incoming death. Szczuka was a seasoned mountain climber, but he risked his life by venturing on difficult routes in the Tatry mountains. He considered the ambition to explore new, unbeaten tracks to be the essence of climbing. In reality, the illustration on the last page showed his last venture. Stern emphasized when commenting on it:
If I were a mystic, I would have to feel the nether world’s breath on my face at the sight of the mentioned ‘hourglass’, which the artist placed in my poem – at the sight of the summit circled with a ‘black stroke’, where a spot on the wall was marked, from which Szczuka later supposedly fell off.
Europe’s cover was created in 1929 by Teresa Żarnower, using the photographs from G.W. Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul (1927) and other materials from the German UFA film studio. A macaque’s head appears in the photomontage – although in reality it was an animal of small height, here it is a character dominating the composition. It bares its teeth at the sight of the dancings, chorus dancers and war images, as if it embodied the proletariat’s rage, treated by the authorities, bourgeoisie and aristocracy as lesser beings. It appears next to another monkey, one that is sleepy and dopey, which could represent the populace’s malaise and inaction. The active populace, arguably represented by the brattish macaque, is aggressive and feral. This animalisation could have suggested the only way out for the proletariat: in a radical protest against the existing world, in an uncompromising revolt against the reality of the jaded Europe.
It is worth noting that Europe inspired Stefan and Franciszka Themerson to create an avant-garde film going by the same title in 1932. It was basically the literary original’s illustration and was the most widely discussed Polish Interwar Period’s avant-garde film. It was preserved only in the form of film stills. In the 1970s, the art group Akademia Ruchu (editor’s translation: Academy of Movement) invoked Stern’s Europe by carrying out a couple of performances under this title in Poland’s largest cities. Its members threw banners, onto which Stern’s politically engaged poem was written, under the feet of the passer-bys. They formed a muddle of words, introducing new connections and new senses in the communist reality, and also alluded to the worker strikes in Warsaw’s Ursus district and in Radom. The images of ‘liberated words’ thrown on the city streets here became an open fight with the authorities, to which the poem called out in the 1920s even though the political atmosphere was different.
Originally written in Polish by Przemysław Strożek, Oct 2017, translated by Patryk Grabowski, Nov 2017
