A FEARLESS communist and activist who lived through two world wars, John Heartfield was born in Berlin in 1891.

Along with his brother and two sisters he was abandoned by his parents at the age of eight and went with his siblings to live with relatives. After finishing school, the brothers moved first to Wiesbaden and from there to Munich where Heartfield studied art.

Initially, he worked as a commercial artist and later continued his studies in Berlin. In protest against chauvinist war propaganda and the greeting “May God Punish England,” he changed his German birth name Helmut Herzfeld into English, calling himself John Heartfield from then on.

He worked closely with his brother Wieland throughout his life and together they published the magazine Neue Jugend in Berlin in 1917-18, where Heartfield pioneered a new typography, and they founded the Malik-Verlag publishing house in 1917.

When the Communist Party of Germany was founded a year later, Heartfield joined immediately. He produced stage sets for proletarian theatres, posters for the Communist Party and contributed artwork for magazines and pamphlets.

Over the following years, he began experimenting with new ways of working with photographs. These photomontages were used for the book covers of Malik-Verlag and other progressive publishing houses. Heartfield also collaborated with other anti-fascist artists such as George Grosz, especially in creating collages in the early post-war years.

Photomontage became Heartfield’s specific artistic weapon. They commented on contemporary politics, starting with the famous image Fathers and Sons in 1924 and, after 1930, he contributed frequently to the weeklies Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ) and Volks-Illustrierte (VI), often collaborating with Wieland in creating montages. Those photomontages on the covers of the widely sold AIZ appeared on news-stands across Germany.

He used rotogravure, engraving pictures, words and designs onto the printing plate, to design montages for posters displayed on the streets of Berlin in 1932 and 1933.

The spirit of class struggle and in particular of the October revolution imbues the book covers he created for the works of revolutionary and radical German, US and Russian writers such as Tolstoy, Gorky, Ehrenburg and Sinclair and he responded directly to world events — the 1926 British general strike in 1926, the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927 and the frame-up of the eight Scottsboro boys in Alabama in 1931.

When fascism took over in Germany, Heartfield was immediately targeted by the nazis. He made a dramatic escape to Prague, where he resumed his work for AIZ and Malik-Verlag which had also decamped from nazi Germany. An entire series of photomontages was dedicated to the trial of Dimitrov in 1933 and, from 1936 to 1937, to the battles of the Spanish republic and the International Brigades.

In 1938, Hitler demanded the extradition of Heartfield and other anti-fascists, which was rejected by the Czechoslovak government. He fled to London shortly before the nazis marched into Prague at the end of that year and was initially interned as an enemy alien. Following his release, he received permission to stay in Britain, but his brother did not and had to flee to the US.

In London, Heartfield co-founded the active Free German League of Culture and earned his living as a typographer and designer for British publishing houses.

Returning from Britain in 1950, he settled in the German Democratic Republic, initially in Leipzig and then in Berlin. Despite serious heart trouble, he continued working, creating stage settings and theatre posters for the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and for the Berliner Ensemble, as well as political posters for the state.

In the catalogue of the last two exhibitions held during his lifetime, Heartfield wrote: “Since we are living in the nuclear age a third world war would mean a catastrophe for the whole of humanity, a catastrophe the full extent of which eludes our imagination ...

“Today the people of peace of all countries must work together even more closely and mobilise all resources to strengthen and save world peace, since warlike rulers are rallying for war. The civil war in Spain was the fascist manoeuvre field for the second world war in the same way today’s wars endanger world peace ...

“With his famous painting Guernica Picasso supported the heroic anti-fascist writers in Spain. He succeeded his compatriot Goya in the struggle against war.

“He also created the wonderful lithograph of the world-famous flying dove of peace. That the dove shall never again be impaled upon a bayonet, as shown in one of my photomontages, all advocates of peace, whatever their political opinions, must close the ranks in the fight to maintain peace.”

That, said Heartfield, had been the aim of his and his brother's artistic work since their earliest youth.

His images and words, inspiring generations of political artists all over the world in the years since his death in 1968, are as acute now as ever they were.