WATCHING Anita Halpin speak is striking. The slight, older woman speaks with precision; laconic, yet witty.

The trade unionist and former chair of the Communist Party of Britain opened this month’s Berlin conference The Hess Family Guestbooks: Art, Politics and Social Justice, then and Now with personal words about her family, about art, and about her father.

Hans Hess (1907–1975) was an art historian, co-founder of the Free German League of Culture, collector, curator and Marxist cultural theorist.

It was the first event held in Germany by the Hans Hess Foundation, just established in 2025; and yet, as Halpin emphasised, a long overdue act of return, of homecoming.

The guestbooks, started in 1907 by her grandparents Alfred and Thekla Hess, in their prosperous Erfurt household, were continued by her father in British exile well into the 1960s. After the end of the first world war, the Hess home became a meeting point and exhibition space for the artistic avantgarde of the 1920s.

Max Pechstein was a regular guest, as were Kandinsky, Nolde, Rohlfs and Molzahn, all of them leaving their mark in the guestbooks with small drawings, inscriptions and watercolours.

The former Berlin culture senator (an official of the city government responsible for cultural institutions and activities) Thomas Flierl chaired the conference.

Though Halpin and he had never met in person, their paths had already crossed. In 2006, Flierl announced the restitution of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s painting Berliner Strassenszene, which had hung in the Bruecke Museum in Berlin since 1980.

It was Halpin who had demanded its return. The restitution, which became known in Germany as the “causa Kirchner,“ provoked a debate at the time, rich in anti-semitic undertones.

Criminal complaints for breach of fiduciary duty were filed against Flierl and others from conservative circles.

Annemarie Jaeggi, director of the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin until 2025, which holds the originals, introduced the objects themselves. The changed collecting patterns of the Hess family from 1919 onwards are reflected in new guests and acquaintances, and in their entries. Today these constitute a unique testament, rich in miniatures that frequently allude to the artists’ larger works.

Art historian Henry Keazor of the University of Heidelberg broadened the frame, introducing guestbooks as a diverse genre of visual culture.

Drawing on the multi-volume guestbooks of the collectors and brothers Nicola (1886–1967) and Franz Moufang (1893–1984), spanning several decades of the 20th century and bearing entries from senior figures in politics, art and culture, he presented guestbooks as representations of social networks, and raised, in view of Nicola Moufang’s Nazi entanglements, the question of Geschichtspolitik (sometimes termed “the politics of memory” in English, how societies shape collective narratives about their histories) and the dealing with guilt.

The journalist Conrad Landin closed the morning session with reflections on political art: Kathe Kollwitz’s woodcut on the death of Karl Liebknecht (1921), and Max Beckmann’s lithograph Das Martyrium, made shortly after Rosa Luxemburg’s murder.

Both works circle the same historical events and could hardly be more different. Kollwitz, Landin argued, transforms commemoration into praxis; Beckmann, by contrast, who claimed he had never concerned himself with barricades, delivers an anatomy of violence, rich in iconographic allusion and the props of modernity.

And in doing so, as Landin showed, he furnishes an example of precisely what Hans Hess had held against Expressionism: the constant choice of the wrong struggles.

Generational conflict, the battle of the sexes, the consciousness of loneliness instead of class struggle.

Landin drew the line to the present with a glance at Scotland: as in the Weimar Republic, public and private arts funding today are deeply interconnected, yet without the political energy that once, despite everything, sustained the avant-garde.

Institutions such as the Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts, recently closed, had become entangled in culture wars and personnel disputes rather than deploying art as a political instrument.

The question Landin left open remains: do we today possess an aesthetic culture ready for the harsher coming confrontation with the authoritarian right?

The most striking address of the afternoon was given by Nick Wright, a former student of Hess.

He spoke not only about Hess’s work, but recalled a man who understood pictures as arguments and thinking as practice, and who in doing so resisted the dual pulls of dogmatism and revisionism.

Hess’s Marxist conviction, the understanding that social existence determines not only consciousness but as well its formalisations in art, poetry, religion and law — had freed him from the temptation to reduce works to their ideological function.

Hess insisted on the singularity of each work, on its rootedness in the time and place of its making.

This showed, Wright argued, in Hess’s two major monographs. His verdict on George Grosz, who in his New York years had capitulated before the power of money, who watched goods become gods and abandoned his faith in demystification, stands in sharp contrast to that on Lyonel Feininger, whose late works Wright described as “statements of finality”: reality assembling itself at the meeting of lines, the harmony of dissimilarity, rest through tension.

Hess’s relationship to the art of socialist realism was, Wright suggested, characteristic of his intellectual honesty: he wrote about it scarcely at all. Hess insisted on the right of abstraction, and recognised in John Heartfield, for instance, “an artist of a new type” — one who makes invisible social relations visible. Hess: “The dialectics of Marx are the key to understanding Heartfield.”

The Hess family guestbooks are currently being edited and will be published jointly by the Bauhaus-Archiv and Manifesto Press. Hans Hess’s Selected Writings are already available in three volumes in English and can be ordered from the junge Welt shop.

Christophe Immer is part of the agitprop department of the German Marxist daily Junge Welt.