Ernst Barlach

Ernst Barlach is presented in a 1933 scene with Paul Klee as an artist contending with pain and the persecution of modern artists. Their conversation joins a bodily detail—Barlach’s aching hands—to the threats directed at their work, while his laughter gives their exchange a note of sardonic defiance.

The 1933 Conversation

Barlach sits with a cup of tea cooling on the table and cracks his knuckles. He says, “My hands hurt so much these days,” a remark that makes physical pain part of the scene without explaining its cause or its effect on his work. The quiet domestic detail stands beside the political danger discussed moments later.

Klee tells Barlach that he has just been expelled from the Düsseldorf Academy of Art and that he is being called “a Siberian Jew.” Barlach asks who is responsible; Klee answers, “Das Schwarze Korps?” and says that books containing pictures of their work are being burned. Klee also reports that he is called “a Slavic lunatic.” The exchange links Klee’s personal expulsion and the destruction of books to an attack on the artists’ work more broadly.

Humor and Persecution

Barlach responds to Klee’s account with the dry line, “They’re correct about both of us.” The remark adopts the language of the insults rather than rebutting it, making their absurdity and hostility audible at once. The scene does not suggest that Barlach is untouched by the danger: the books are described as containing images of “our work,” placing his art within the same threatened artistic world.

After Barlach’s response, he laughs. That brief action gives the conversation its closing turn: persecution and pain remain present, but the exchange does not end in solemnity. Barlach’s humor registers as a shared, sharply ironic response to the labels and censorship Klee describes, not as evidence that the threat has passed.

Narrative Significance

The scene sets the cooling tea and Barlach’s painful hands against expulsion and book burning, bringing intimate physical experience into the same frame as cultural repression. Its compact movement—from pain, to Klee’s report, to Barlach’s joke and laughter—shows how the characters meet an attack on their work with wit while leaving the seriousness of that attack intact.