Career
He is particularly known for his links with German avant-garde art and Marxist thought, and was the brother of the photo montage artist John Heartfield, with whom he often worked. Towards the end of World War I, he briefly worked on propaganda films for the German government. After the war, he continued his publishing activities and also founded an art gallery, Grosz-Galerie, and a bookshop, as well as helping to organize the First International Dada Fair in 1920, which included works by Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Georg Scholz, Johannes Theodor Baargeld, and Otto Dix.
Following Hitler"s rise to power, he fled to Prague in 1933, later moving to London, and in 1939 to the United States of America where he published works by exiled German writers.
In 1949 he returned to what was by then East Germany, becoming a professor of literature at the University of Leipzig. He also wrote poetry and fiction, and worked as a translator.
He died in 1988 and was buried in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery in Berlin.