Jesekiel David Kirszenbaum (1900–1954). Student of the Bauhaus

Instead, Kirszenbaum went to Berlin in 1925 where he worked as a freelance artist for the next eight years. He stayed in contact with his fellow students from the Bauhaus. They included the painter, illustrator and photographer Paul Citroen (1896-1983), with whom he had studied in Itten’s preliminary course and who hailed from Berlin, where he had also worked as a freelance artist from 1925 before leaving for Amsterdam via Paris and Basel in 1927. Also amongst them was Citroen’s sister-in-law, Ruth Citroën (1906-2002),[8] née Margarete Vallentin, who until 1923 had worked in the carpet weaving workshop at the Bauhaus and who had married the aspiring Berlin fur trader Hans Citroen (1905-1985), Paul’s brother. In December 1925, an etching by Kirszenbaum appeared in the Berlin magazine International Advertising Art. Monthly Magazine for Promoting Art in Advertising/Gebrauchsgraphik. Illustratoren. Monatsschrift zur Förderung künstlerischer Reklame, the official organ of the Association of German Advertising Artists/Bundes Deutscher Gebrauchsgraphiker. However, the etching entitled “In the Beth Hamedrasch” (Fig. 7) appeared with the title “Illustrations for Jewish novella” and under the new pseudonym “J. Duwdiwani”, the Hebrew word for “Kirschbaum (cherry tree)”, and with the German spelling of the surname “Kirschenbaum” added in brackets.[9] At that time, the artist was living in Kantstraße 114 in Charlottenburg.[10] In the same year he created umpteen further drawings and etchings showing scenes from Jewish life (Fig. 6, 8-10).

At the beginning of 1926, the artist was commissioned to provided illustrations and cartoons for the satirical magazine Ulk, an independent weekly publication from the liberal Berliner Tageblatt. Both media organs were part of the Berlin publishing group Rudolf Mosse and had close ties to the left-wing liberal German Democratic Party/Deutschen Demokratischen Partei (DDP). Ulk had been around since 1872 and from 1918 to 1920 was under the leadership of Kurt Tucholsky. Until 1922 it appeared as a free supplement in the Berliner Tageblatt and the Berliner Volks-Zeitung. From 1926 the Tageblatt ran at a loss so Ulk was only enclosed occasionally as a free supplement. The first four illustrations by Kirszenbaum bearing the signatures “D” and “Duwdiwani” appeared on 19 February 1926. They were harmless social satires, including an “expressionist politician”,[11] for which the editorial team usually invented the texts and captions. During the three years or more that he worked for them, twenty nine pages on which one or more of Kirszenbaum’s satirical illustrations or cartoons were printed appeared in Ulk up to 17 May 1929 (Fig. 15-31).[12] He presumably stopped working there for financial reasons because Ulk was already insolvent at this time.

From July 1926, more of Kirszenbaum’s illustrations appeared in the culture and zeitgeist magazine Der Querschnitt, which was founded by Alfred Flechtheim in 1921 and published by Hermann von Wedderkop for Hermann Ullstein under the Propyläen Publishing House/Propyläen Verlag.[13] These illustrations mainly involved stylised figures in traditional Russian or Jewish costume which were consistent with the respective literary articles, such as in the essay by Darius Milhaud entitled “Musical life in Soviet Russia”,[14] a mother and child and a drinking scene in an article by Adam Olearius entitled “The first Russian Revolution (1656)”,[15] a water carrier in the same text (Fig. 12), a harmonica player as an illustration for an essay by S. Dimitrijewski entitled “Stalin – The rise of a man” (Fig. 13), and a Jewish fiddler, just as Kirszenbaum remembered from his time in Staszów, in a Russian novella by Ramon Gomez de la Serna entitled “Maria Wassiljewna” (Fig. 14). In all, ten illustrations appeared in Querschnitt in 1926, 1927, 1929 and 1931, the most recent being two full cartoons, “The table of regulars” (Fig. 35) and a drawing depicting old men in official clothing in front of the old imperial flag (Fig. 36) to accompany the multi-page commentary entitled “Matadors of the Reichstag” by an author with the pseudonym “O.B. Server”. The editorial department at Querschnitt may have acquired a whole bundle of Kirszenbaum’s drawings at an earlier point in time because the fiddler from Staszów (Fig. 14) and a farmer with pig and geese in the basket[16] are obviously dated “26” with the initials “JDK” barely legible, but they didn’t appear until 1929 and 1931 in the relevant contexts.