Adam Kirsch

"The Woman of Progressive Intellect (Intellectural), 1914," by August Sander If it were not for her enlightened eyes, She’d be the witch that intellect denies Has ever walked the earth: the sunken jaw, The blunt chin like a claw-toothed hammer’s claw, The stubbed and crooking finger, and the skin As stained and crinkly as her crinoline, Would make a loving grandchild run away. It takes another kind of love to see How spirit, in its tactical withdrawal From aging outworks that are doomed to fall, Consents to the bewitching of its shell As long as it can hold the citadel Where the progressive intellect has spent A lifetime plotting the enlightenment The backward and the beautiful dismiss As mind’s revenge for its unloveliness.

Revolutionaries [Alois Lindner, Erich Mühsam, Guido Kopp], 1929 by August Sander Twelve years on, the beard that Lenin wore Still sharpens revolutionary chins To dagger-points held ready for the war In which the outgunned proletarians Will triumph thanks to these, their generals, Whose rounded shoulders and round glasses say That sedentary intellectuals Raised in the bosom of the bourgeoisie Can also learn to work — if not with hands, Then with the liberated consciousness That shrinks from nothing since it understands What’s coming has to come. The monuments To which the future genuflects will bear These faces, so intelligently stern, Under whose revolutionary stare Everything that is burnable must burn.

Professional Middle-class Couple, 1927 by August Sander What justifies the inequality That issues her a tastefully square-cut Ruby for her finger, him a suit Whose rumpled, unemphatic dignity Declares a life of working sitting down, While someone in a sweatshop has to squint And palsy sewing, and a continent Sheds blood to pry the gemstone from the ground, Could not be justice. Nothing but the use To which they put prosperity can speak In their defense: the faces money makes, They demonstrate, don’t have to be obtuse, Entitled, vapid, arrogantly strong; Only among the burghers do you find A glance so frank, engaging, and refined, So tentative, so conscious of  its wrong.

"Kinetics Researcher from Vienna [Max Thun-Hohenstetin], 1930," by August Sander Nakedness ought to be undatable, Proof that the latest phenotype is made On the same plan as his original Who sauntered through the Garden, unafraid. Even without the cotton pouch he wears As a concession to the prudery Of viewers not evolved enough to share His unembarrassed objectivity, The willed detachment on his face would show, Better than any clothes, the difference Between the antique innocence that knows No shame, and cultivated shamelessness.

"Farming Family, 1912," by August Sander The cruelty of the men when they’re alone, The women’s tiredness and resignation, Do not get multiplied, as you’d expect, When the extended families collect, One day a year, to get their pictures taken. It’s not that any of their faces soften, Nor that there’s any obvious affection Between the farmer’s mother and his son; And only an idealist could see In this brief cutting from the family tree A symbol of the strength of rootedness— Three generations dwelling in one place— Knowing how soon the root will lose its branch, Cut down and hacked to pieces in a trench. The only explanation that makes sense For the illusion of resilience That lights their eyes and makes them look at home Is that with every added generation Buried potentialities appear: The son who poses strumming his guitar Refutes his father’s brandished Iron Cross No more convincingly than his bare face Proves that his father’s beard is obsolete; Denying one another, they complete Their likeness to the contradictory God who commanded us to multiply So He could manifest, in every birth, Another of His attributes on earth.

The Butcher’s Apprentice, 1911–1914 by August Sander The high white collar and the bowler hat, The black coat of respectability, The starched cuff and the brandished cigarette Are what he has decided we will see, Though in the closet hangs an apron flecked With bits of  brain beside the rubber boots Stained brown from wading through the bloody slick That by the end of every workday coats The killing floor he stands on. He declines To illustrate as in a children’s book The work he does, although it will define Him every time the photograph he took Is shown and captioned for posterity — Even as his proud eyes and carriage say That what he is is not what he would be, In a just world where no one had to slay.