Der Dichter (The Poet), Wilhelm Geissler

Exhibition Label:
"Cryptograph: An Exhibition for Alan Turing," Mar-2012, Stephen Goddard
Alan Turing would have been eight years old when the word “robot” first appeared shortly after World War I, in Karel Čapek’s play of 1920, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots).
Only a few years later Geißler produced a remarkable series of woodcuts showing mechanical people busy at their professions: soldier, mathematician, musician, dancer, bureaucrat, king, poet, schoolmaster, gymnast, and worker. The War brought horrendous damage by new machines of war, and left many people dependent upon mechanical prosthetic devices. In its aftermath, Geißler—who had served as a soldier from 1916-1918—created this series satirizing a world populated with electro-mechanical robots. The musician, for example, sits at the piano playing “The Soul of Music,” and the author of the short preface to the portfolio, Dr. Oswald Schmitt, wrote that the mechanical man is the Grabkreuz [“trench-cross” or burial ground] of Europe. Turing, however, was instrumental in moving us rapidly from a mechanical to an electronic age; from his theoretical “Turing machine” to the real world of computing and all its progeny. SG