Tina was still convinced that she would soon be leaving Mexico and was fairly sure about where she would be going. Germany seemed an attractive choice and the February 1930 issue of Deutsches Magazin von Mexiko published several of her photographs along with an interview given some time previously, which mentioned that ‘Tina Modotti desperately wants to go to Germany. Within three months she will travel there to settle in Berlin or Munich.’ It was noted that she admired the work of Käthe Kollwitz and George Grosz.
She arrived in Berlin by train from Holland in the first days of April, hoping to be able to earn her living as a photographer, even though her main objective was to be somewhere she could ‘be most useful to the movement’. It seems Tina was totally unprepared for the situation she encountered: ‘The strain shows on the people; they never laugh, they walk the streets very gravely, always in a hurry and seem to be constantly conscious of the heavy burden which weighs on their shoulders.’ She was also ill-prepared for the climate, with freezing temperatures and no sunshine during her first ten days. Homesick for Mexico and bitter about having to start over, she complained to Weston that ‘for one coming from Mexico the change is rather cruel. But I know that the wisest thing is just to forget sun, blue skies and other delights of Mexico and adapt myself to this new reality, and start, once more, life all over …’
In early October, when Tina’s six-month, non-renewable visa was about to expire, [Vittorio] Vidali returned to Berlin, again under the guise of Jacobo Hurwitz. He found Tina looking thin and pale. The money she had brought with her from Mexico was about to run out. When she asked him to help her return to Italy, he told her that he himself had already asked the Party for permission to do likewise and could help her. However, he stipulated that if her situation in Germany did not improve within a month, she accompany him to Moscow. He was very enthusiastic about life in the Soviet Union, which after an earlier visit he had envisioned in glowing terms, describing ‘the Red soldiers marching with their rebellious songs, with proud, intelligent faces; and the armed youth and the children who discuss politics … A new society, great, magnificent, raises its superb towers above the old and decrepit.’ He must have been persuasive in his arguments, for within two weeks Tina had left Germany and was en route to Moscow in his company.
– Selections from Margaret Hooks Tina Modotti: Photographer & Revolutionary. Madrid: La Fabrica, 2017.