Fritz Eichenberg’s traumatic experiences as a child growing up in Germany during World War I did not embitter him. Rather, they convinced him to use art – which wipes away language barriers – to help people understand each other.  His illustrations portrayed the redemptive qualities he found in Russian literature:  “through human suffering, one becomes purified…and that is the hope for which you are praying; for which you're working.”  He created life from blank woodblocks and the darkened surface of lithographic stones, chosing these mediums as ways of working from dark into light, with all the gradations.  This sensitivity drew him beyond his paid work to a parallel career as volunteer illustrator for The Catholic Worker newspaper of Dorothy Day, whom he admired for standing by “the underdog – the oppressed, the poor, the weak – the ones who were easily discarded by society as ‘hopeless cases.’”  He wanted not just to make a living, but especially to make a difference. For this as well as his artistic genius we continue to be grateful.
-- Patricia Carlson

“It is 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 has said…’That there is a God in everyone,’ a conception of the sanctity of human life which precludes all war and violence.”

At the time of his death at the age of eighty-nine Fritz Eichenberg was widely acknowledged as one of the modern masters of the wood engraving. He was famous for his illustrations of literary classics by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and the Bronte sisters, and his work was featured in galleries and museums around the world. But through his association with Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, he achieved recognition among a different audience. His wood engravings could be found printed on faded newsprint, taped to the walls of a coal miner’s home in West Virginia or a farmworker’s shack in California. In over a hundred works, some reprinted so often as to assume the status of Catholic Worker icons, he was able to summarize in simple images the moral and spiritual perspective which the editors otherwise strove to communicate in words and deeds.

Eichenberg was born in Cologne on October 24, 1901.  He underwent formal training as an artist, choosing wood engraving as his special medium.  But his heroes were artists like Kollwitz, Daumier, and Goya, who had put their talents at the service of the moral and social convictions. With the rise of Hitler, Eichenberg, who came from an assimilated Jewish background, decided he had no future in Germany. In 1933 he managed to get his family out of the country and to emigrate to the United States. In 1938 the tragic death of his wife prompted an emotional breakdown. Afterward he found solace in his conversion to Quakerism. In the Society of Friends he was attracted by the spirit of simplicity and stillness, the quest for the Peaceable Kingdom, and the conviction, in the words of George Fox, “that there is that of God in everyone.”

A major event in his life occurred in 1949 when Eichenberg was introduced to Dorothy Day, editor of the pacifist Catholic Worker newspaper. By this time Eichenberg had achieved some renown for his illustrations of the Russian classics, a passion for which he shared with Day. There was an instantaneous communion of spirits between the two, and Eichenberg gladly responded to Day’s invitation to contribute his art to her paper. Day felt strongly that images could touch people emotionally and communicate the Catholic Worker spirit to people who, perhaps, could not read the articles. For his part, Eichenberg felt that in this Catholic newspaper, with its emphasis on the works of mercy and the witness for peace, he had found the expression of his own spiritual and moral convictions.

Eichenberg’s first contributions were depictions of the saints. Whether it was a Benedict, a John of the Cross, or his personal favorite, St. Francis of Assisi, Eichenberg’s saints were men and women of flesh and blood, fully engaged in the struggle to follow Christ in their own circumstances. Soon canonical saints were joined by an ecumenical parade of other holy witnesses: Tolstoy, Erasmus, and Mahatma Gandhi, as well as modern-day heroes like Thomas Merton, Cesar Chavez, and Lanza del Vasto.

His most poignant and powerful images, however, were drawn from the life of Christ. In Nativity scenes set in a war zone or an urban slum, in his Black Crucifixion – drawn during the height of the civil rights struggle – and in a haunting Pietà, he evoked not only Jesus’ humanity but his familiarity with the common world of the working poor, the refugee, the outcast, the prisoner. Two of his most successful images directly connected the life of Christ to the world of the Catholic Worker. “Christ of the Breadlines” (1953) shows a ragged line of men and women waiting their turn for a handout of bread – an image literally inspired by the breadline that daily formed outside the Catholic Worker house of hospitality. In the midst of the line, however, is the unmistakable silhouette of Christ, awaiting his turn among the hungry. Similarly, in “Christ of the Homeless” (1982), two homeless figures huddle in the cold of night with a third, Jesus, crouched in between. Thus, Eichenberg illustrated one of the central inspirations of the Catholic Worker and its commitment to works of mercy: that Christ comes to us disguised in the need of our neighbor, so that what we do for the poor we do directly for him.

Eichenberg’s art was a faithful reflection of his own spirit and the ideals by which he hoped to live. Often he expressed his regret that he did not have the temperament to live in a Catholic Worker house of hospitality or, like the young peacemakers he admired, to go to jail in obedience to conscience. Yet he struggled through his work to communicate a compassionate vision of the world and an affirmation of the sanctity of life that he dared to hope might affect his viewers for the better. In this he identified with the words of Dostoevsky, which Dorothy Day often repeated, “The world will be saved by beauty.”

Additional Resources

See: Fritz Eichenberg: Works of Mercy, ed. Robert Ellsberg (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993).