Under Pressure – Political Posters 1918–1933

Few visual media have been discussed, collected, and exhibited as extensively as the political poster. Since the early twentieth century, it has been understood as a key instrument of mass communication—situated between art, propaganda, journalism, and street culture. Numerous publications and exhibitions have examined its aesthetic strategies, its role in political mobilization, and its capacity to condense complex ideologies into immediately legible images. Museum Wiesbaden’s latest exhibition “Under Pressure” builds on this established discourse, while focusing on a particularly fragile historical moment in which the political poster became both a mirror and a motor of social conflict.

The period between 1918 and 1933 marks a decisive phase in the history of political visual culture in Europe. During the First World War, posters were deployed on an unprecedented scale, transforming public space into a battlefield of images. Governments and political actors experimented with different modes of persuasion—from rational argument and statistical claims to emotional manipulation, stereotyping, and deliberate distortion. These strategies did not disappear with the armistice; rather, they migrated into the political struggles of the postwar years.

In the early years of the Weimar Republic, the political poster absorbed the psychological shock of defeat, revolution, and economic instability. Expressionist visual languages, fractured compositions, and exaggerated figures conveyed collective trauma and uncertainty. At the same time, posters functioned as tools of orientation in a rapidly changing media landscape, competing with newspapers, leaflets, and emerging forms of mass communication.

As political polarization intensified during the 1920s and early 1930s, the poster increasingly became a site of confrontation. Its imagery grew harsher, more reductive, and more aggressive—especially in material produced by extremist movements on both the left and the right. The street poster, designed for instant impact, proved particularly susceptible to simplification and radicalization. Violence, dehumanization, and apocalyptic narratives entered the visual vocabulary long before they were fully realized in political practice.

Under Pressure also addresses the limits of plurality. The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 marked a fundamental rupture: political posters ceased to articulate competing positions and were subsumed into a centralized system of ideological control. What had once been a contested visual arena became a univocal instrument of domination. The exhibition thus understands political posters not only as historical documents but as indicators of democratic fragility and authoritarian consolidation.

The exhibition presents political posters from the collection of Wiesbaden-based collector Maximilian Karagöz. Presented in cooperation with the Hessian State Parliament, whose parallel exhibition Political Posters 1945–1991 (18 March – 12 April 2026) extends the discussion into the postwar period, Under Pressure situates the interwar poster within a longer tradition of political image-making and its enduring relevance for contemporary visual culture.

Under Pressure – Political Posters 1918–1933
Museum Wiesbaden | 6 February – 9 August 2026