Sloth / Poster for Laster der Menschheit (The Vice of Humanity)
During the Weimar period, especially in Berlin, many Germans turned to drugs following the devastating loss of the war (Ohler 2017, 8-9). Georg Simmel points out that excessive stimuli makes one blasé to the world because eventually they are not physically able to feel what they used to (Simmel 1903, 14). Essentially, their nerves are shot. After excessive indulgence, it takes incredible willpower to defy what becomes “easy” and break the spell of drug addiction. Hardship leads to the need for an escape, which leads to drugs, which leads to addiction. The poster represents this addiction as a kind of resignation or sloth.
Bibliography:
Ohler, Norman. Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.
Simmel, Georg. “Chapter 1: The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Metropolis and Mental Life. From the Blackwell Publishing website. http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/bpl_images/content_store/sample_chapter/0631225137/bridge.pdf.