Uwe Fleckner approaches the “political” Picasso from different directions: From the confiscation of his early painting The Sleepy Drinker by the National Socialists to the iconization of Guernica by contemporary art and the current protest culture. Fleckner interprets this legendary work as the artist’s response to Francoist propaganda lies, analyzes Picasso’s play Desire Caught by the Tail as a reaction to the German occupation of Paris and sheds light on the important retrospective at the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 1955. With this exhibition, international art was to move into the former National Socialist exhibition house: Works such as Guernica or Massacre in Korea provoked a new viewer behavior and thus contributed to the democratization process of the German population.