Eyes of Compassion

The world's oldest profession, Fritz Eichenberg believed, is the making of images. For proof he offered the illustrated walls of the caves of Altimira and Lascaux, where unnamed artists affixed brilliant lines and vivid colors to rock 15,000 years ago.

Fritz was attracted to the profession of image maker as a child growing up early in this century "in the most Catholic city of Cologne, one great picture book, with its ancient wood carvings of saints and sinners and its heritage of painters and wood carvers." Fritz regarded his lifelong passion for cutting images into wood as Cologne's great gift to him.

He was born in 1901 into a Jewish family, though "we were not a religiously-motivated family," Fritz recalled. His father was ill through much of his childhood, dying when Fritz was 14.

"I grew up with the same mistake as all assimilated Jews in Germany, thinking we were German." He remembered his school as "very Prussian, very militaristic [where] they treated us like little soldiers." Here he learned "how brutalization kills understanding between countries, between people, within families." At the age of 5 or 6 he was one among the thousands of school children waving little flags as the emperor entered the city. "We were raised to think consciously of the emperor as a divine person." The poetry and songs students learned were for the glorification of empire.

"The Lord protected me from wanting to be a part of all that. I hated regimentation."

Fritz was 13 when World War I began. He experienced the social madness war occasions, and the bitter, poverty-stricken aftermath of defeat. Still a student, he got a taste of personal freedom by attending evening art classes. He spent countless hours sketching animals at the city zoo -- caged creatures and yet in some ways freer than their human admirers. They were not required to be patriotic.

With the war's end in 1918, Fritz became an apprentice in a print shop in Cologne, rubbing ink on lithographer's stone and drawing wine labels. "It was then that I really began to live," he told me many years later. "The war had finally ended. Like most people, I was hungry, half-starved really, happy to get a single piece of black bread and one thin herring. Yet I was unbelievably happy. I was finally doing what I wanted to do." A year later he was accepted as a master student at the Academy of Graphic Arts in Leipzig.

ALWAYS in love with books and longing to illustrate them, Fritz's first published wood engravings appeared in 1922, accompanying Charles de Coster's Till Eulenspiegel. Moving to Berlin, Fritz drew political cartoons. Hitler was a frequent target of his artist's pen.

"When it was clear that Hitler was going to run the country, I decided that I had better make my home somewhere else -- I smelled a rat and wanted to breathe sweeter air. I left Germany in 1933, practically the day when Hitler became chancellor, going first to Guatemala and Mexico -- my idols then were [Diego] Rivera and [Jose Clemente] Orozco, artists of social conscience.

"It didn't take me long to make my way north, entering the United States through Texas and going on to New York. New York seemed the place to live so I went back to Germany to get my wife and our baby. Luckily the police paid no attention to us -- they had bigger fish to fry at that moment." (Later he was able to get other family members safely out of Germany.)

"We sailed to New York. What a city it was, and such a wonderful country! I was able to make $22.75 a week working for [Franklin D.] Roosevelt's WPA [Works Progress Administration], doing any sort of art work I wanted to. I made my first woodcuts of St. Francis of Assisi at that time, though I hadn't yet become aware of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker community, the place St. Francis would have been in New York."

In 1936 he was doing wood engravings for books again, one of which was cited by the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Then a commission came from the Limited Editions Club to illustrate Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. His long association with masterpieces of Russian literature had begun.

In 1937 his wife died. "I had our daughter to take care of but I was in such despair I couldn't do anything. I had a breakdown. Thank God friends helped us. Home became the basement of a friend's house. Thanks to them, we survived. Another friend got me interested in Zen Buddhism, which was the beginning of my apprenticeship with silence. It was through Buddhists I discovered Quakers." In 1939 Fritz became a Quaker and the same year remarried.

In 1940 his edition of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels was published and the next year Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, followed by Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Book commissions were constant for the rest of his working life. (A survey of his book illustrations, The Wood and the Graver, was published in 1977. His massive study of print making and techniques, The Art of the Print, was published by Abrams in 1974.)

By his own reckoning, after remarriage and becoming a Quaker, the next great event in his life was meeting Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, in 1950.

"Dorothy loved Dostoevsky and knew me for my illustrations for Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. She asked if I would do anything for The Catholic Worker. She wanted something that would express without words the spirit of the Catholic Worker movement, especially to people who couldn't read. I was so pleased to be asked! The first project she gave me was to make pictures of her favorite saints.

"Through Dorothy, a period of my life began in which I was able to contribute to the work of a movement that gives an example of the spirit of poverty and unconditional love and nonviolence. These are things Quakers aspire to but the Catholic Worker practices. Also I was drawn to the Christ-centeredness of the Catholic Worker, the way that they saw Christ in everyone. If you see Christ in every living being, how can you kill? It's impossible. The Catholic Worker, for me, is not only a way of seeing but of listening, listening so carefully that the person you listen to may be changed for the better, even a very violent person."

Fritz's work touched countless lives, and surely will continue to do so. But his ability to guide a graver across the end grain of boxwood ended four years ago. The last wood engraving I received from him, at the end of 1987, was a print of the block on which he tested his graver -- the only abstract work Fritz ever did so far as I know. He died November 30, 1990. "His body gave in," his wife Antonie wrote in a letter. "Parkinson's disease is a vicious one. But Fritz's spirit did not give in!"

"I would like to think," Fritz once wrote, "that through my work as an artist and through my personal relations, I have been able to make friends all over the world. I am grateful for the fact that I was given the talents of an image maker, enabling me to interpret the great classics as well as expressing my own thoughts, and [as a teacher] that I was allowed to pass on my experiences to generations of young artists. It has been my hope that in a small way I have been able to contribute to peace through compassion and also to the recognition, as George Fox said three centuries ago, 'that there is that of God in everyone,' a conception of the sanctity of human life which precludes all wars and violence."

Jim Forest was a Sojourners contributing editor and the author of Religion in the New Russia (Crossroad, 1990) at the time this article appeared. He first met Fritz Eichenberg through The Catholic Worker. One of Eichenberg's last requests was that those who might wish to honor him do so by sending a gift to The Catholic Worker.