Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture, 1914-1936 1350354627, 9781350354623

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Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture, 1914-1936

Visual Cultures and German Contexts Series Editors Deborah Ascher Barnstone (University of Technology Sydney, Australia) Thomas O. Haakenson (California College of the Arts, USA) Visual Cultures and German Contexts publishes innovative research into visual culture in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, as well as in diasporic linguistic and cultural communities outside of these geographic, historical, and political borders. The series invites scholarship by academics, curators, architects, artists, and designers across all media forms and time periods. It engages with traditional methods in visual culture analysis as well as inventive interdisciplinary approaches. It seeks to encourage a dialogue among scholars in traditional disciplines with those pursuing innovative interdisciplinary and intermedial research. Of particular interest are provocative perspectives on archival materials, original scholarship on emerging and established creative visual fields, investigations into time-based forms of aesthetic expression, and new readings of history through the lens of visual culture. The series offers a much-needed venue for expanding how we engage with the field of Visual Culture in general. Proposals for monographs, edited volumes, and outstanding research studies are welcome, by established as well as emerging writers from a wide range of comparative, theoretical and methodological perspectives. Advisory Board Donna West Brett, University of Sydney, Australia Charlotte Klonk, Humboldt Universität Berlin, Germany Nina Lübbren, Anglia Ruskin University, UK Maria Makela, California College of the Arts, USA Patrizia C. McBride, Cornell University, USA Rick McCormick, University of Minnesota, USA Elizabeth Otto, University at Buffalo SUNY, USA Kathryn Starkey, Stanford University, USA Annette F. Timm, University of Calgary, Canada James A. van Dyke, University of Missouri, USA

Titles in the Series Art and Resistance in Germany, edited by Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Elizabeth Otto Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School, edited by Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler Berlin Contemporary: Architecture and Politics after 1990, by Julia Walker Photofascism: Photography, Film, and Exhibition Culture in 1930s Germany and Italy, by Vanessa Rocco Single People and Mass Housing in Germany, 1850–1930: (No) Home Away from Home, by Erin Eckhold Sassin Material Modernity: Innovations in Art, Design, and Architecture in the Weimar Republic, edited by Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Maria Makela How to Make the Body: Difference, Identity, and Embodiment, edited by Jennifer L. Creech and Thomas O. Haakenson Jeanne Mammen: Art Between Resistance and Conformity in Modern Germany, 1916–1950, by Camilla Smith Herbert Bayer, Graphic Designer: From the Bauhaus to Berlin, 1921–1938, by Patrick Rössler German Colonialism in Africa and Its Legacies: Architecture, Art, Urbanism, and Visual Culture, edited by Itohan Osayimwese

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2024 Copyright © Ann Murray, 2024 Ann Murray has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Elena Durey Cover image: Otto Dix, Flanders, 1934-36. Oil and tempera on canvas. © Otto Dix/IVARO. Courtesy Nationalgalerie, SMB/Jörg P. Anders. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Murray, Ann (Art historian), author. Title: Otto Dix and the memorialization of World War I in German visual culture, 1914-1936 / Ann Murray. Description: London; New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023. | Series: Visual cultures and German contexts | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023013066 (print) | LCCN 2023013067 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350354623 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350354661 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350354630 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350354647 (epub) | ISBN 9781350354654 Subjects: LCSH: Dix, Otto, 1891-1969--Criticism and interpretation. | War in art. | World War, 1914-1918-Art and the war. | Collective memory--Germany--History--20th century. | Collective memory in art. Classification: LCC N6888.D5 M87 2023 (print) | LCC N6888.D5 (ebook) | DDC 704.9/4935502092--dc23/eng/20230602 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023013066 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023013067 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3503-5462-3 ePDF: 978-1-3503-5463-0 eBook: 978-1-3503-5464-7 Series: Visual Cultures and German Contexts This publication was part-funded by the Royal Irish Academy

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Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture, 1914-1936 Ann Murray

To Simon

Contents List of figures Acknowledgements Note on translations

viii xiii xiv

Introduction 1 1 1914–18 15 2 The war amputee as anti-icon 37 3 Disenchanting Mars: The Trench and The War 67 4 Metropolis as war memorialization 115 5 War at the Prussian Academy of Arts 147 6 The fate of the war pictures in the early years of the Third Reich 179 Conclusion 197 Sources Bibliography Index

203 204 219

Figures 1

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Otto Dix, Selbstbildnis als Mars (Self-Portrait as Mars), 1915. Oil on canvas, 81 × 66 cm. Städtische Kunstsammlung im Haus der Heimat, Freital Otto Dix, Selbstporträtkopf im Spiegelscherben 1 (Self-Portrait in Mirror Shards 1), 1915. Black chalk, 44.1 × 34.4 cm. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart Otto Dix, Ein schönes Grab (A beautiful Grave). Field postcard to Helene Jakob with drawing of a French soldier’s grave, 17 January 1916. Graphite, 9.4 × 16.8 cm. Kunstsammlung Gera, D/Z 12 Memorial plate made by German soldiers for a French war grave, which reads: ‘Here lies one brave French warrior, fallen on 22 August 1914.’ Musée de la Grande Guerre du Pays de Meaux Willy Jaeckel, Serbisches Schicksal (Serbian Destiny), Kriegszeit, vol. 1, no. 56 (1 November 1915), p. 225 Willy Jaeckel, Memento 1914/15, ‘Vergewaltigung’ (Rape), Sheet 8 of 11, 1915. Lithograph, 49.6 × 64.2 cm. Berlinische Galerie, Berlin Theodor Rocholl, Deutsche Tote und Verwundete in einem Schützengraben (German Dead and Wounded in a Trench), 1915. Watercolour, 21.5 × 20.8 cm (painted area). Stadtmuseum, Hofgeismar Max Slevogt, Heldengrab im Osten 1917 (Hero’s Grave in the East, 1917), as illustrated in Hindurch! Deutsches Volk im Kriege, 1920, p. 27 Otto Dix, Grab eines Franzosen (Champagne) (Grave of a Frenchman (Champagne)), 1915. Gouache over pencil on paper, 29 × 28.3 cm. Museum Gunzenhauser, Chemnitz Otto Dix, Schlamm (Mud), 1916. Black chalk on yellowish paper, 41 × 39.5 cm. Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart Otto Dix, Stollen zum Unterstand (Dugout Tunnel), 1916. Chalk on paper, 28.9 × 28.4 cm. Zeppelin Museum, Friedrichschafen Otto Dix, Streichholzhändler (Match Seller), 1920. Oil and collage on canvas, 141.5 × 166 cm. Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart Otto Dix, Kriegskrüppel (45% erwerbsfähig) (War Cripples (45% Fit for Work)), 1920. Mixed media on canvas. Lost

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14 Unknown photographer, opening of the First International Dada Fair in the bookshop of Dr Burchard in Berlin, 1920, showing, on the left, Dix’s War Cripples (45% Fit for Service) with Grosz’s Victim of Society and Who is the most Beautiful mounted on its surface. In Richard Huelsenbeck, ed., Dada Almanach (Berlin: Erich Reiss Verlag, 1920), insert following p. 128 15 Front cover of Jedermann sein Eigner Fussball, February 1919 16 Wieland Herzfelde with Dix’s Bewegliches Figurenbild (Montage of Mobile Figures) at the First International Dada Fair, 1920 17 Left-right: Die Skatspieler (The Skat Players), Barrikade (Barricade) and Pragerstraβe (Prague Street) shown as exhibited, April–June (?) 1921 at the Berliner Sezession’s show, in Karl Georg Wendriner, Vorklang und Echo des Weltkrieges, 14 April 1921, p. 277. Deutsches Kunstarchiv, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremburg 18 Otto Dix, Pragerstraβe (Prague Street), 1920. Oil and collage on canvas, 101 cm × 81 cm, Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart 19 Otto Dix, Die Skatspieler (The Skat Players), 1920. Oil and collage on canvas, 110 × 88 cm. Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin 20 Otto Dix, Barrikade (Barricade), 1920. Oil on canvas with collaged elements, approx. 250 × 250 cm. Destroyed. Shown as reproduced in the catalogue, Ausstellung Otto Dix, Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf (Kunstarchiv, Berlin 1926), p. 21 21 Erich Drechsler, Auf der Barrikade (On the Barricade), 1920. Oil on canvas, lost. Shown as reproduced in the catalogue, März 1920. Ein Künstler ergreift Partei (Staatliche Museen Greiz, 1982), p. 26 22 Otto Dix, Der Schützengraben (The Trench), 1920–3. Oil on hessian, 250 × 227 cm. Lost or destroyed 23 Otto Dix, Kriegsverletzter (War Wounded), 1922. Watercolour over graphite, 48.8 × 36.9 cm. Private Collection 24 Otto Dix, Ohne Titel (Prostituierte und Kriegsverletzter) (Untitled (Prostitute and War Wounded)), Die Pleite, No. 7, July 1923, p. 24 25 Gert Wollheim, Der Verurteilte (The Condemned Man), 1921. Oil on canvas, 126 × 102 cm. Private Collection 26 Karl Wagner, Aus den Kämpfen in der Champagne 1914: Abwehr eines französischen Überfalls auf eine unserer Sappen nördlich Beauséjour (From the battles in Champagne 1914: repelling a French attack on one of our saps north of Beauséjour). After a sketch by

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33 34 35 36

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frontline soldier Wilhelm Buddenberg, in Hindenberg-Denkmal für das deutsche Volk, plate after p. 80 Left: Full-page advertisement announcing Verlag Karl Nierendorf ’s book of twenty-four offset prints from Der Krieg (The War), in Anzeiger für den Buch-, Kunst- und Musikalienhandel, Vienna, 19 September 1924, Nr. 38, p. 440, ANNO/Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. Right: Verlag Karl Nierendorf, Der Krieg, 1924, front cover Print 26, ‘Sterbender Soldat’ (‘Dying Soldier’), Der Krieg (The War), 1924. Aquatint and drypoint, plate size 19.3 × 14.3 cm. Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, A 1948/601 Karl Holz, Kurze Geschichte der deutschen Revolution (Short History of the German Revolution), Der Wahre Jacob, 29 October 1927, p. 3 Anton Hoffmann, Die Grosse Schlacht an der Somme Juli bis August 1916 (The Great Battle of the Somme, July to October 1916), in Ehrendenkmal der Deutschen Armee und Marine 1871-1918, Deutscher National Verlag, 1928, inserted after p. 400 Hans Werner Schmidt, Die 3 Champagneschlacht (The Third Battle of Champagne), in Ehrendenkmal der Deutschen Armee und Marine 1871-1918, Deutscher National Verlag, 1928, inserted after p. 436 Hans Thoma, War Postcard No. 4, for the benefit of the National Foundation and the Red Cross (Nationalstiftung und das Roten Kreuzes), 1914. Published by Galerie Moos, Karlsruhe Hans Thoma’s Sower reused on a postcard for the Red Cross, c. 1915, Frankfurt am Main Otto Dix, Straβenkampf (Streetbattle), 1927. Oil on canvas (?), dimensions unknown. Lost or destroyed Otto Dix, Groβstadt (Metropolis), 1928. Mixed media on wood, 181 × 402 cm. Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart View of the Exhibition, Sächsischer Kunst unserer Zeit, II. Jubiläumsausstellung des Sächsischen Kunstverein, Brühlsche Terrasse, Dresden, 1928. Photograph: SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek, unknown photographer Horst Naumann, Weimarer Fasching (Weimar Carnival), 1928–9. Oil on canvas, 91 × 71 cm. Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

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38 Anti-war demonstration in Dresden, 4 August 1928, with Eugen Hoffmann’s Sterbende Soldat im Drahtverhau (Dying Soldier in Barbed Wire). Stadtmuseum, Dresden, SMD Ph 2010 00621 39 Otto Dix, Krieg (War), 1929–32. Mixed media on canvas, central panel 204 × 204 cm; left and right wing panels 204 × 102 cm; predella 60 × 204 cm. Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gal. No. 3754 40 Richard Müller, Zeichenklasse in der Akademie (Drawing Class at the Academy), 1920. Oil on canvas, 120 × 90.5 cm. Albertinum | Galerie Neue Meister, Gal. No. 3141 41 August Schreitmüller, Die Wacht (The Watch), Memorial of the Garde-Grenadier-Regiment Nr. 5, 1922, Stabholzgarten, BerlinSpandau. Bronze (figure) on Silesian granite (slab) and Franconian shell limestone (base) 42 Kamerad im Westen. Ein Bericht in 221 Bilder (Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurter Societäts-Druckerei GmbH, 1930), pictures 79 and 200 (unpaginated), showing German dead in a French mass grave (top) and dead telephone operators 43 Willibald Krain, In einem Punkt hat Hitler unzweifelhaft Recht . . . (Hitler is undoubtedly right on one point . . . ), Der wahre Jacob, 14 March 1931, p. 13 44 Willi Steinert, Radikale Lösung (Radical Solution), Der wahre Jacob, 16 January 1932, p. 13 45 Georg Wilke, Kunst im Dritten Reich (Art in the Third Reich), Der wahre Jacob, 26 September 1931, p. 9 46 Illustrierter Beobachter, front cover, 26 March 1932 47 Brownshirts salute the Flensburg War Memorial. Illustrierter Beobachter, 22 October 1932 48 Photograph of the murdered SA member Otto Streibel, Illustrierter Beobachter, 17 September 1932 49 Peter Cohen, dir., Architecture of Doom. Still (00:12:32) showing The Trench in the exhibition Degenerate Art, Rathaus, Dresden, 23 September to 18 October 1933 50 Wilhelm (Willy) Waldapfel, Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden (I once had a Comrade), 1930. Lost. Oil on canvas, dimensions unknown. Photograph c. 1935 51 Willy (Wilhelm) Waldapfel, Der Front im Westen (War on the Western Front), 1933 or earlier. Lost. Shown as reproduced

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in the catalogue, Gemeinsame Ausstellung 3 Künstlergruppen: Dresden 1933 vom 17. August–15. Oktober Schloss u. Lennéstrasse / Künstlervereinigung, Deutscher Künstlerverband, Dresdner Sezession190 52 Front page of Kunst der Nation, 15 October 1934, with a photograph of Otto Dix’s bust of Nietzsche as an illustration for the article ‘Nietzsche-Bildnisse’ by F. Paul (Paul Ferdinand Schmidt) 195 53 View of the first and second rooms on the upper floor of the courtyard arcade, with Otto Dix’s War Cripples visible on the right side, Degenerate Art Exhibition, Institute of Archaeology, Hofgarten, Munich, 19 July–30 November 1937 198 It has been impossible to identify or contact the copyright holders for works by Erich Drechsler, Gert Wollheim and Karl Holz. I remain fully at the copyright holders’ disposal regarding the reproductions of work in this book.

Acknowledgements Throughout this project, I have depended on the assistance of numerous individuals and institutions, as well as the goodwill and support of friends. The staff of the following institutions have been especially supportive: Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Archiv der Hochschule für bildende Künste, Dresden; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Bibliothek, Kunsthaus Zürich; Deutsches Kunstarchiv, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremburg; Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart; Otto-Dix-Haus and Kunstsammlung Gera; Sächsisches Staatsarchiv – Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden; Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt; the Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats – und Universitätsbibliothek, Dresden; and the Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr, Dresden. I am particularly indebted to the Otto-Dix-Archiv, Vaduz for generously providing access to Otto Dix’s personal correspondence. The Royal Irish Academy, who awarded me a Charlemont Grant that enabled me to conduct vital research in Dresden and Berlin, was key to completing this book; their support of independent scholars at a time when tenured posts in the Humanities are scarce is an example that must be followed. I also wish to acknowledge the support of Prof Geoff Roberts (School of History, UCC) for his invaluable advice at the outset, and to Dr Laura Brandon CM for reading and responding to a section of this book and for her kind and supportive words. I am also grateful to SpeakUp Services en langues, Luxembourg, for their thoroughness in checking through the longer translations from German to English. I also wish to thank the staff at Bloomsbury Academic for their guidance and patience throughout the publication process, particularly my editors, Alexander Highfield and Ross Fraser-Smith, and the anonymous peer reviewers from whose insight and comments I have benefited. I am also indebted to Dr Błażej Kaucz for his kindness and a listening ear, especially during the isolation enforced by the Covid-19 pandemic. In countless ways, it was the unwavering support of my husband, Simon Urbanski, who helped me reach the finishing line. It is to him, with love and gratitude, that I dedicate this book.

Translations The text contains numerous long quotations, gathered mainly from newspapers, magazines and books during the years 1914–39. Because I am not a native speaker of German, long (indented) quotations as well as short quotations, where rarely used or obscure language is contained, have been checked by a professional translation service to ensure correct translation.

Introduction

Around a decade ago, during my first steps into German studies, I was introduced to the trailblazing Prof Eda Sagarra, who recounted to me the time she had spent in the 1950s as a young woman near Lake Constance, where it forms part of the German border with Switzerland. There, she had known ‘Mammi’ and ‘Pappi’ Dix, who lived at Hemmenhofen with their orphaned granddaughter Bettina, the only child of Dix’s daughter Nelly. When she first met the ‘irascible’ Otto Dix in 1955, he was carving the Sunday goose at an artist friend’s house. I was enthralled by her story of trudging ten miles in the snowcrowned landscape that he had so memorably painted, where in the absence of public transport, she and the M​ühlenweg family (of Dix’s artist friend Fritz) took turns pulling the endlessly complaining Bettina on a sledge to Radolfzell hospital where Mammi and Pappi lay after a car accident. This magical retelling of the private Dix served to deepen the enigma of the public figure, who only rarely discussed his art and hardly ever did so during the peak of his career in the 1920s. A master of visualizing German society’s worst nightmares, sometimes all too real for its audience to face, he was the most elliptical of interlocutors. Sparse knowledge of his intentions regarding his socially and politically incisive, sometimes deeply controversial war-related work has only deepened its magnetism. This book explores Dix’s confrontational war pictures and examines their role in shaping the memory of World War I in Germany from 1914 to 1936. Because Dix’s memory-making – for the most part unrelenting and explicit in describing the experience of World War I – and that of his similarly disposed fellow artists were at odds with established historiographies and artistic traditions regarding how past events should be framed in the present, critics were divided – sometimes in irresolvable debate – regarding his memorialization of the war. Given the close connections between art and politics during the period, it is unsurprising that the reception of the artist’s war pictures was shaped in good part by political sympathies, as much if not more than aesthetic considerations. Therefore, this book examines the pictures’ engagement with their immediate artistic, cultural and political environment, at the time of their first public

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Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

exhibition, with particular attention given to the reception of the works in the local press and art-historical and cultural publications. Reception aesthetics for art history, which began most definitively with Alois Riegl’s Das holländische Gruppenporträt (The Dutch Group Portrait) and has been developed further by German art historian Wolfgang Kemp, challenges the notion that a work of art can only be interpreted by its materiality, its production or its maker and affords a more complex contextual analysis of the manner in which a work of art functions to engage its beholders and the specificities of that engagement under certain cultural conditions.1 Reception aesthetics is problematic because it is impossible to fully access the complex reception of any artist’s work; in this study as in many others, the manifold responses of the public, for example, cannot be accessed in any comprehensive way and the infinitely varied body– mind response to art – an essential constituent of its reception – is arguably ill-represented by words. Additionally, the limitations of the primarily academic reception pool that remains for a body of work with deep cultural relevance, barring the few insights provided by reviewers who also served in the war, excludes the first-hand reception of the primary actors in Dix’s pictures: the veterans, which included those physically and psychological maimed by warfare as well as those who murdered or pillaged, the army command who controlled the conduct and promulgation of the war, and those bereaved or left destitute in the aftermath. Yet, the critical reviews that remain provide rich, valuable insights to the impact of Dix’s work within art-historical discourse and when examined in the broader cultural context of war memorialization significantly extend the terms by which they can be interpreted. Dix’s works, as part of a body of modernist post-war images that prioritized individual experience of warfare, mark a paroxysmal turning point in artistic war commemoration, where a tradition of comparatively benign war imagery that portrayed a nation at war to best advantage was shaken by the unavoidably visible evidence of the war’s effects brought home by artists who participated. By taking into account contemporary reviews in art journals, books, catalogues and the local press, the book uncovers, as far as possible, how the works impacted upon their reviewers, whose political leanings and views on how the war should be remembered informed their appraisals. Arguably, the

1 Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland. Texts and Documents, English-language edited edn (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2000 (1902)); Wolfgang Kemp, ‘The Work of Art and Its Beholder. The Methodology of the Aesthetic of Reception’, in The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Mark A. Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Introduction

3

works in themselves with regard to politics, are relatively unfiltered containers of war memory, in that that they do not obviously signal, through their content or the artist’s standpoint, a specific political agenda, as, for example, in the work of George Grosz. But it was among the most controversial as well as celebrated of the era, and belonged to a remarkably dynamic and varied visual culture that was central to the hard-fought shaping of war memory in Germany during the Weimar years, and which arguably possessed the greatest diversity and richness of any of the former belligerent nations. Its diversity was in part a result of the troubled nature of German war memory symbolised by the fact that, unlike the victorious nations such as Britain and France, failed to establish a central, universal war memorial to its dead. Responses to Dix’s visual memorialization, which was essentially a bringing forth of one person’s experience of the war and its aftermath, reflected this troubled visual culture of war, in turn, fed by the sociopolitical conditions of interwar Germany. The latter can be traced in many contemporary responses, especially from the first exhibition of The Trench in late 1923, where reviewers often focus more on the pictures’ incisive, warts-and-all realistic representation of the war as much as – if not more – than their place among current artistic trends. As such, the book attempts to situate the works’ role within Germany’s broader cultural and political landscape, which featured emerging visual styles arising in response to post-war conditions, numerous diametrically opposed, politically motivated cultural groups and a turbulent societal backdrop. The visual culture of war, in Germany as elsewhere, ranged from the purely jingoistic to the outright rejection of militarism, sometimes along clearly defined political standpoints. If Dix’s war art was often, though not always, interpreted as explicit anti-war rhetoric, inadvertently or otherwise spurring politically motivated reactions, Dix did not, according to surviving evidence, express much interest in politics. Artist and left-wing activist Otto Griebel once recalled Dix’s disapproval of how much of Griebel’s time was eaten up by political activities, remarking: ‘You and your damned politics. [. . .] Why don’t you sit down on your arse and paint instead.’2 A terse autobiographic statement of 1950 exemplifies his elliptical stance, in which he laconically describes his war tenure: ‘In August 1914 I was summoned to the military and decruited as vice staff sergeant in 1918. I was awarded three times and wounded once (shrapnel in the neck).’3 Only 2 Otto Griebel, Ich war ein Mann der Straβe. Lebenserinnerungen eines Dresdner Malers, ed. Matthias Griebel and Hans-Peter Lühr (Leipzig: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1986), 102. 3 Otto Dix, ‘Lebenslauf des Herrn Prof. Otto Dix, Hemmenhofen’, dated 6 March 1950. Unpaginated transcript. Nachlaß Otto Dix, Deutsche Kunstarchiv, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremburg (hereafter abbreviated as DKA, GNM).

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Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

later, in several interviews in the 1950s and 1960s, did Dix indicate an anti-war position, though maintained that he himself was ‘no pacifist’. One is prompted to question why he did not explicitly and publicly declare his intentions during the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in 1924 during the controversy and prolonged debate arising from the exhibition of The Trench, though as things turned out, his silence on the matter and disassociation with politics was undoubtedly a factor in his ability to remain in Germany, albeit in a fragile peace, after the NSDAP took power in January 1933. In addition to bringing to light a range of archival and primary sources, this book acknowledges the most significant work by leading researchers, much of which unfortunately has only been published in German. This includes the work of Dix’s two key biographers, Otto Conzelmann (1909–92) and Fritz Löffler (1899–1988), whose first major works on Dix were published in 1959 and 1960 respectively and helped re-establish Dix’s career after World War II. They remain key reference points on Dix’s war art, though Conzelmann’s work clearly reveals how scholarship on Dix has been impacted by the division of Germany. Conzelmann’s 1959 book was the first detailed study of Dix’s art in West Germany and remains useful as indicative of the reception of Dix’s art in the Adenauer era (1949–63).4 However, Conzelmann’s subsequent work on Dix has been shown to be limited in scope and to contain errors of fact. Dix scholar Dietrich Schubert, who as a young researcher had met the artist, was asked to review Conzelmann’s Der andere Dix in 1983 and was – with utter justification – both unimpressed by Conzelmann’s ‘unscientific rants, his unconsidered anti-socialism and blind antiMarxist stance’ and incensed by Conzelmann’s thoroughly baseless criticism of Schubert’s research. Schubert detected Conzelmann’s suppression of discussion on the sociopolitical impact of the pictures in what was now East Germany but at the time of the works’ creation the site of much first-hand reception of some of the artist’s most important works. Conzelmann omitted important and varied left-wing debates of the 1920s and 1930s that reveal manifold issues presented by differing Marxist positions. Unjustified criticism of Schubert’s research accused the latter of falsifying captions of works to shroud them in pacifist or proletarian meaning and even misidentifying works that on examination, Conzelmann had only seen in reproduction.5 Dresden born and based Löffler (1899–1988) is remembered as the key figure in the drive to restore the city’s pre-1945 architecture and an important documenter of the city’s culture. He served in World War I 4 Otto Conzelmann, Otto Dix (Hanover: Fackelträger-Verlag, 1959). 5 Dietrich Schubert, ‘Betrifft: O. Conzelmann, Der “Andere” Dix (Verlag Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1983). Brief an die Redaktion einer Kunst-Zeitschrift’, Kritische Berichte 12, no. 1 (1984): 85–6.

Introduction

5

from 1917 and after the war became embedded in Dresden’s artistic scene. A member of the SA from 1934 and the Nazi Party from 1937, he was dismissed for promoting left-wing, so-called ‘degenerate art’. If Löffler was accused of leftwing leanings by the Nazis, Löffler, Dix’s wife Martha and others involved with Dix feared that the work would be categorized and understood solely in terms of the Communist brand of socialist ideology.6 Löffler’s 1960 monograph on Dix, a later edition of which was translated and published in English in 1982, even today remains central to Dix scholarship.7 More recently, crucial foundational work has been carried out by Ulrike Lorenz, who finally brought Dix’s letters to publication in 2013, while Dietrich Schubert’s insightful studies of some of Dix’s major war pictures have been very useful. Beyond art-historical scholarship, cultural studies have proven insightful, especially those that have examined the challenges faced by German cultural life during the rise of extreme nationalism, especially from 1927. The reception of Dix’s work by the far Right during the Weimar years, that is, well before the infamous 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich, or even the catalysing Degenerate Art exhibition in Dresden in 1933 that was the first to publicly defame Dix’s major war pieces, is a much less studied aspect of Dix’s (and other artists’) work, possibly because extreme right-wing texts were based on the narrow artistic vision of the Nazis. Yet, the extreme Right’s reception reveals not only the pictures’ highly intricate dialogue with the culture of war and warriorhood in post-war Germany but also the works’ complex relationship to the history of war art in that country. Hildegard Brenner’s ground-breaking study, though published in 1963, remains key, revealing how the extreme Right’s activities in the regions of Saxony, of which Dresden was the artistic capital, and neighbouring Thuringia, where Otto Dix was born and maintained family connections, affected the course of modern art before 1933. Brenner traces the activities of extreme right-wing groups including the German Art Society Dresden (Deutsche Kunstgesellschaft Dresden, DKD), founded in Dresden in 1920.8 Brenner’s discussion of the DKD was recently developed further in Joan L. Clinefelter’s study, which reveals the fullest extent of the group’s activities, sphere of influence and views on modern artists, including Dix.9 More recently, 6 Brigid S. Barton, Otto Dix and Die neue Sachlichkeit, 1918-1925, Studies in fine arts (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981), 31. 7 Fritz Löffler, Otto Dix. Leben und Werk (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1960). 8 Hildegard Brenner, Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1963). 9 Joan L. Clinefelter, Artists for the Reich. Culture and Race from Weimar to Nazi Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2005).

6

Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

Jonathan Petropoulos has acknowledged the role of the DKD as a voice of extreme right-wing art criticism before 1933.10 Dix’s words on the works studied here are taken into account – and his correspondence and interviews provide numerous valuable insights. However, there is no attempt to determine the artist’s intentions at the time of the works’ creation or his approach to subject matter, unless he explicitly stated so, simply because too little evidence exists to determine them. Some studies, often valuable in other ways, have attempted to account for the scandal stirred by the war pictures and others as a deliberate career-driven tactic; such attempts drive attention away from the works and place too much attention, arguably, on Dix’s actions as a ‘businessman’, who was apparently driven to producing scandalous pictures by money and fame. Heavily recirculated quotations (e.g. ‘I’ll be either famous or infamous’) have been over-emphasized. While amusing as side-discussion, focus on such aspects informs one little on how and why the works mattered during their years of production and how they impacted upon the public first-hand. All that one can confidently say about Dix is that artistically, he painted the brutality of the war and its consequent societal effects with unparalleled veracity. The fruitlessness of focusing on intention is expressed in the often deeply divided contemporary responses to his war-related works, which generated opposing views of what the works were thought to express, and which were not always neatly divided along political lines. To contextualize the pictures’ memorialization of World War I and their reception, this study necessarily looks beyond the examples of Weimar art typically studied by art historians, that is, Expressionist, Dadaist or Neue Sachlichkeit art, and considers the role of popular war or military art, which resonated in a country conditioned to a history of universal conscription. To analyse Dix’s pictures as an integral part of Germany’s long tradition of war art in this broader sense, as well as evocative of post-World War I modernity, reveals how the pictures both referenced and challenged the re-emergence of the reactionary culture of Völkisch nationalism from the late 1920s, which promoted Germany’s military traditions and supported the National Socialists’ revanchist politics. Modes of representing combat in affirmative illustrated accounts of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1) were re-interpreted to remember World War I on equivalent terms, despite its disastrous impact on the German people. Representations of teamwork in warfare, for example, reinforced the 10 Jonathan Petropoulos, Artists under Hitler. Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).

Introduction

7

idea of the ‘will to battle’, conceived as a peculiarly German trait.11 Even the battle paintings of the wars of liberation against Napoleon, especially the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig (1813), were referenced in efforts to cast World War I in a heroic light throughout the Weimar period. As such, Dix’s work cannot be satisfactorily analyzed solely with reference to their place within the much more heavily studied examples of Dada and Neue Sachlichkeit, for example, but must acknowledge the country’s broader visual culture of war and a people theretofore united politically and culturally – on military successes. To attempt to understand the societal import of Otto Dix’s war pictures or understand why they were particularly volatile or effective is to reflect on the visual tradition of warfare into which Dix placed his art and the interpretation of that tradition during the years 1914–36. Dix’s stylistically variegated iconography of war was heavily influenced by German artistic traditions of the past centuries as well as contemporary ones but tempered by a modernist perspective on societal themes. The pictures are to some extent characterized by the term ‘Expressive Realism’ utilized by Rainer Zimmermann in his study of the so-called ‘Lost Generation’, that is, those born around in the 1890s and who fought in the war. This term, according to Zimmermann, remains sufficiently general in that it feigns no unified style. He considers the terms ‘realism’ and its determinant ‘expressive’ as identifiers of perennially recurring settings. As such, in their association, they ‘delimit possibilities described by them clearly enough from other trends, inclusive but still (allowing) a broad spectrum of individual manifestations’.12 Zimmermann, observing German art of the years 1914–34, describes it as a divergent sociological response to the war rather than a stylistically regressive turn. As such, he rejects in part Benjamin Buchloh’s argument that Neue Sachlichkeit or similarly representative art exemplified the ‘bleak anonymity and passivity of the compulsively mimetic modes of the 1920s and early 1930s’.13 Arguably, the realism of Neue Sachlichkeit could communicate across social strata more readily than abstracted modernist art. Kurt Tucholsky, one of the most eloquent voices of the Left during the period, remarked that the intellectual high ground

11 Paul Fox, ‘Visual Narratives of Conflict in Germany, 1871-1933’ (PhD University College London, 2009). 12 Rainer Zimmermann, Expressiver Realismus: Malerei der verschollenen Generation (Hirmer, 1994), 155. The phrase ‘Lost Generation’ was introduced inter alios by Gertrude Stein, to describe the work of those artists born a few years either side of 1890. 13 Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting’, October 16, no. 1 (1981): 40.

8

Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

of Avant Garde art did not connect with the ordinary people and that pacifism failed in Germany for precisely this reason.14 My approach to Dix’s work as expressive of ‘competing realms of memory’ of the lost war in Germany is informed by Pierre Nora’s Les lieux de mémoire (Sites of Memory), a starting point for many subsequent studies on memory since the publication of the first volume in 1984 and which argues for the clear distinction between national memory and national history. Witnessing what he considered to be the demise of a master narrative in his native France, Nora developed the idea of ‘a history of national memory’, which insisted on tracing ‘realms of memory’ that together, constituted a more broadly inclusive national narrative. Nora’s idea of memory realms, which allows for a plurality of national memories, has been eagerly adopted in countries where master national narratives have been ‘contested, rivalled, fractured or divided’, not least in Germany.15 Additionally, Aleida Assmann’s insights help see beyond categorizing terms and analyse memory-making objects such as war art free of the boundaries suggested by art-historical studies. Analysing the history, forms and functions of cultural memory, she treats media, the work of artists included, as material support underlying cultural memory. Her provocative analysis gets to the core of what is especially powerful in pictures as carriers of memory: ‘Pictures fit into the landscape of the unconscious in a way that is different from texts: as a boundary between the picture and dream is blurred, the picture is transformed into an internal “vision” that takes on a life of its own. Once the border is crossed, the status of the picture is changed from being an object of observation to an agent of haunting.’

Assmann recalls what Aby Warburg referred to as ‘pathos formulas’, ‘the paradigmatic example of which was the classical moving figure of the veiled nymph, which with every re-entry into a Renaissance painting would reactivate the emotional potential originally contained within it’. The repetition of this formula, Assmann notes, evoked not simply a known motif but was ‘accompanied by an embodied energy and impact that were released with its reactivation’, what 14 See for example Kurt Tucholsky, ‘Über wirkungsvollen Pazifismus’, Die Weltbühne 23, no. 10 (1927): 555–9. There are many studies on art as a political weapon. See for example Kassandra. Visionen des Unheils 1914-1945, ed. Stefanie Heckmann and Hans Ottomeyer (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2009); Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, ed., Les Désastres de la Guerre 1800-2014 (Paris: Somogy éditions d'art, 2014); Propaganda: Power and Persuasion (The British Library, 2013); Susan Bachrach and Steven Luckert, State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009); Robert Klanten, Art and Agenda: Political Art and Activism (Berlin: Die Gestalten Verlag, 2011). 15 Stefan Berger and Bill Niven, eds., Writing the History of Memory (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 137–8.

Introduction

9

Warburg called a ‘canned energy’.16 Considered in this way, Dix’s war works are shown to embody the shock of the war in German cultural memory, as containers of contentious material of memory-making; the varying memories of survivors are considered, and consideration of their varying reception deepen the historical record and resist ‘hasty ideological closure’.17 Dix’s primary agent of haunting was, of course, the German frontline soldier’s body, which he depicted in all its brokenness and at odds with the heroic model of militant masculinity that prevailed, despite the devastation of the war. Dix’s confrontational portrayal of the war’s savagery, and its impact on men’s bodies and minds, is pivotal to his mode of memorialization, especially since physical and mental trauma was played down in public discourse – a tactic driven by continually promoting a positive image of warfare through idealistic portrayals of warfare and the failure to broadly acknowledge the effects of shell shock and war trauma.18 As a survivor of the battlefield, Dix’s pictures arguably projected an empathy with and a duty to honour the fallen and maimed by exposing the war’s true destructiveness. While Dix was fortunate enough not to suffer complete mental breakdown, traumatic memory haunts his war imagery and insists on the works’ authenticity as affective war memorialization. German medical practitioner Heinz Zehmisch, in a medical history article for the Ärzteblatt Sachsen, queries if Dix’s war pictures betray a case of posttraumatic stress disorder.19 Zehmisch recalls one of the artist’s letters to his friend Helene Jakob in 1916, which described the hell of wading through chest-high blood-mud on which corpses and body parts floated, noting that this was only one of the many times the artist had experienced the hell of war.20 Citing the work of PTSD specialist Dr Peter Zimmermann with German soldiers in the Bundeswehrkrankenhaus (Military Hospital) Berlin in 2012, Zehmisch considers that the artist’s intensive drawing of war (during the war and after) was symptomatic of an individual who needed to ‘let off steam’.21 If historians have traced bitter satire in some of Dix’s war16 Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilisation. Arts of Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 215. 17 James E. Young, ‘Between History and Memory: The Uncanny Voices of Historian and Survivor’, History and Memory - Passing into History: Nazism and the Holocaust beyond Memory - In Honor of Saul Friedlander on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday 9, no. 1 (1997): 50. 18 Pension amounts were based on the perceived degree of disability; mental trauma, then called hysteria, was not recognized as an illness or disability for the purposes of pension payments. See Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men. War, Psychiatry and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890-1930, Second edn. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 223–49. 19 Heinz Zehmisch, ‘Soldat mit Palette. Otto Dix und seine Bilder vom Krieg – ein Fall von PTSD?’, Ärzteblatt Sachsen 24, no. 1 (2013): 31. 20 Zehmisch refers to Dix’s letter of 1 August 1916. 21 Zehmisch, ‘Soldat mit Palette’, 33.

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Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

related works, particularly the Dadaist pictures of war amputees, empathy can be traced in the artist’s visualizing of veterans’ physical and psychological suffering during and after the war at a time when the emasculating connotations of the term ‘male hysteria’ were defined not as an illness but as a weakness in an individual’s constitution. It was a term that arose in the late nineteenth century as an alternative to the more expressly medical term of traumatic neurosis. ‘Male hysteria’, Paul Lerner notes, allowed the state to shirk its responsibility to treat the after-effects of war on veterans’ health and remarks that it is through Dix’s remarkable images of war amputees in 1920 that the disabled veteran ‘endures as a powerful symbol of the period and denotes the Weimar state’s indifference to the war’s most abject victims’.22 Sabine Kienitz’s exploration of the relationship between (physical and mental) trauma and masculinity (which has in part informed Lerner’s study) illuminates the social conditions in which Dix’s mnemonic images of soldierhood were placed.23 Lerner’s and Kienitz’s investigations elucidate how Dix, in memorializing those men as victims of both war and their own overlords in his work up to 1933 and beyond, made visible the continued suffering of veterans.

Organization of the book Each chapter, except Chapter 1, is built around the visual and contextual analysis of one or more key war-related works at the time of their first public exhibition. In addition to so-called expert insights and opinions in dedicated art-historical and cultural publications of the years in question, reviews in the popular press, including local newspapers and magazines, shed further light on how the works were received more generally. Some of the figures who responded to Dix’s work were among the most prominent of the time and their histories are well known, such as Carl Einstein, Paul Ferdinand Schmidt and Paul Westheim. Others are forgotten, or little is known about them. While the perspectives of the latter, or their relative abilities as cultural commentators is lesser known, their voices enable a more deeply textured insight to the reception of Dix’s work, sometimes contesting the opinions of established art and cultural critics with regard to how Dix’s war art engaged with debates, or even mattered, in shaping the cultural memory of the war. 22 Lerner, Hysterical Men, 226. 23 Sabine Kienitz, Beschädigte Helden: Kriegsinvalidität und Körperbilder 1914-1923 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2008).

Introduction

11

In addition to focusing on major works, the book accounts for the overall content of the artist’s war art during the years in question in terms of theme and style and known surviving critical reviews of them. The definition of what qualifies as ‘war-related’ imagery is somewhat problematic, but for this book that definition is work that includes imagery of military figures and materiel, veterans, symbolic works and places directly connected with the experience of war. Illustrations have been necessarily limited to works most discussed in the text. In cases where a work cannot be illustrated, its location is listed. In most cases, such as those which are housed in cultural institutions, high-quality reproductions are available on their websites. Referencing Dix’s wartime correspondence, among other sources, Chapter 1 explores a cross-section of the artist’s almost 600 wartime pictures in relation to his experience as a frontline fighter – the essential key to his postwar memorialization of the conflict – from his thirteen months of training at Bautzen, near Dresden, to his initial activities on return from war duties in 1918–19, and includes his rarely referenced first-ever public exhibition of his war pictures – his first foray into publicly commemorating the war. I begin by examining some of the earliest pieces, the four pre-battlefield self-portraits and the first battlefield self-portraits, which reveal the disparity between Dix’s self-portrayal as soldier before and after arriving on the battlefield, recalling the heady idealism and subsequent cynicism of many of those who volunteered. From his portrait as Mars, which epitomized the Nietzschean (and subsequently Futurist) notion of escaping the constraints of society and regenerating oneself through the speed and chaos of warfare, to the first self-portraits made in the trenches, a considerable stylistic and apparently ideological change occurred in Dix’s self-portrayal. The chapter then looks at works that chart the artist’s remarkable artistic growth, through continuing experimentation with a range of stylistic approaches and subject matter. The first public exhibition of his war art (and the first-ever public showing of his work) in Dresden in late 1916, as part of a major exhibition of work by soldiers serving in the Saxon Army, contextualizes his work alongside that of his peers, such as the ‘star’ of the Dresden show, Otto Schubert. Schubert, and others exhibiting in wartime shows, established a mode of memorialization that in its portrayal of the harshest aspects of war was at odds with the tradition of German war art to date. Exposure to such work possibly shaped Dix’s public articulation of the war experience beyond 1918, guiding him towards a mode of memorialization that could more forcefully probe public opinion on warfare and how the war should be remembered.

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Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

Chapter 2 focuses on the artist’s portrayal of the war amputee as the antiicon of German war memorialization, in four major pictures created in the years 1919–20, alongside other key works, and their role in shaping war memory in the immediate post-war years. The transformative impact on Dix of the Berlin Dadaists – cholerically critical of those responsible for involving Germany in the war – led to a purposeful visual language that engaged directly with post-war societal vicissitudes. The reception of the works as part of the First International Dada Fair, among other exhibitions, is considered in relation to the turbulent sociopolitical background. Chapter 3 analyses the context surrounding the first public exhibition of the now-lost Trench, first shown in late 1923, and The War, the suite of fifty intaglios detailing various facets of the war experience, shown for the first time in mid-1924. This longer chapter reflects the high watermark in critical interest in Dix’s art, revealed in the number of reviews and critical sparring with regard to The Trench’s visualization of the war experience. The controversy surrounding The Trench’s voraciously realistic memorialization of the worst effects of trench warfare on German soldiers revealed the troubled nature of war commemoration in Germany. Numerous reviews of The Trench and The War, in some cases lengthy, are reproduced for their significant insight into the impact of the works and because they are not usually reproduced in English. The exhibition of The War in Germany and internationally, and the reproduction of some of the etchings in anti-war publications, marked the first widespread dissemination of Dix’s war art in print media. Chapter 4 focuses on the triptych Metropolis, at the time of its first public exhibition as part of the show, Saxon Art of Our Time in Dresden in 1928, amid the wave of renewed interest in the war due to the tenth anniversary of the Armistice. Though the triptych is not generally read in terms of war memory, the chapter shows how it communicated the war’s lingering effects through the intermediary figure of the war amputee. The work is explored through the context of Dresden’s cultural and political life, where the emergence of a number of politically motivated, opposing artists’ groups reflected the polarization of cultural life in line with politics. The targeting of Metropolis as culturally and politically undesirable, in part because of its representation of war veterans, by the extreme nationalist artists’ group, the German Art Society Dresden (Deutsche Kunstgesellschaft Dresden, DKD), led by Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder and which counted Dix’s colleague Richard Müller as a long-time member, reflected the emergence of a strong, if still uninfluential, cohort who intensified their campaign against modernist artists. Well connected to NSDAP politicians

Introduction

13

and supporters, the DKD also pilloried Dix personally in their German Art Bulletin, funded by extreme right-wing supporters in Dresden. The DKD’s interest in Dix’s art is a rarely examined facet of Dix’s career, but consideration of their criticism of Metropolis complicates its reception and broadens insight to how it engaged with its audience as war memory. Chapter 5 treats Dix’s major battlefield triptych War. Begun around 1927–8, the picture is often seen as a product of the renewed interest in World War I during the decade commemorations. But by the time the picture was first publicly exhibited in Berlin in late 1932, the country had seen many organized marches and protests by political and cultural groups as means to voice their views on the war and in some cases counter the growing support for the militant NSDAP. The humanity of Dix’s imagery of tattered, vulnerable everyman figures, hardly recognizable as German soldiers, reflected the attempts of liberal and anti-war bodies, through public protest and various media outlets, to remind the public of the consequences of militarized society and urge rejection of the NSDAP’s excessively chauvinistic patriotism. Yet, as the chapter shows, War failed to make the impression that The Trench had almost a decade earlier. Chapter 6 looks at the fate of the war pictures – reflective of the fate of Dix’s work overall – after the NSDAP came to power in January 1933. Particular focus is given to the Degenerate Art Exhibition in Dresden in late 1933, a show that counted three artists as its organizers, Richard Müller, Willy Waldapfel and Walther Gasch, and who spotlighted Dix’s War Cripples and The Trench as the high watermark of degeneracy. The chapter also looks at how the works continued to be exhibited and discussed, sometimes beyond German borders, even though Dix was banned from exhibiting in 1934. The book closes with a word on the artist’s activities up to the outbreak of World War II, including the exhibition of Flanders (1933/4–6) as part of a major exhibition of the artist’s work in Zurich in 1938, and the comparative fate of some of Dix’s contemporaries under the Nazi regime.

14

1

1914–18

On the eve of the war, 22-year-old Dix was a student at Dresden’s Staatliche Akademie für Kunstgewerbe (State Academy for Applied Arts) and only beginning to develop artistically. In shaping his personal visual style, he tested a variety of approaches, sometimes using his own image, notably his Selbstporträt mit Nelke (Self-portrait with Carnation) of 1912, one of the earliest pictures that announce his abiding interest in Northern Renaissance painting, and Selbstbildnis als Raucher (Self-portrait as Smoker) of 1913, a modernist, expressively painted experiment.1 There seemed to be little visual engagement with the world beyond the studio up to his enlistment, apart from some landscapes. After he enlisted in Dresden on 22 August 1914, the artist was detained far beyond the fury of the battlefield for the first thirteen months of the war.2 Garrisoned mainly around Bautzen, about fifty kilometres east of Dresden, until 21 September 1915, he did not appear to find the training of much interest, as he humorously described it to Otto Baumgärtel, model draftsman and one of Dix’s closest friends at the Academy for Applied Arts.3 After five weeks of training, he could report that the service was interesting – in that even the most interesting thing was boring. It was also difficult, as he and his comrades learned to work with heavy machinery, and they had no money.4 His boredom during training seems to have been eased at least intermittently by painting and drawing, where among other pieces he completed the CuboFuturist paintings Der Krieg (The War), sometimes referred to as Das Geschutz (The Gun) (possibly a pendant to Mars, discussed later) and Sterbender Krieger (Dying Warrior), in addition to a portrait of one of his officers, Bruno Alexander

1 Otto Dix, Selbstporträt mit Nelke, 1912. Oil and tempera on panel, 73 × 50 cm. Detroit Institute of Arts; Otto Dix, Selbstbildnis als Raucher, 1913. Oil on cardboard, 70.5 × 56 cm. Private collection. 2 He was recruited into Field Artillery Regiment 48 Dresden 1. Reserve infantry. 3 See Rainer Beck, Otto Dix. Zeit, Leben, Werk (Konstanz: Verlag Stadler, 1993), 34–5. 4 See Otto Dix, Otto Dix. Letters 1904-1927, trans. Mark Kanak (New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2016), 35–6.

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Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

Roscher and four self-portraits.5 The portrait of Roscher is lively if conventional and its polished appearance suggests that it may have been commissioned. The four self-portraits are an entirely different matter. Stylistically experimental, as his pre-enlistment work was, collectively these portraits could be interpreted as an attempt to articulate new-found militant identity as well as embrace evolving artistic styles. It seems that the first of the four soldier self-portraits was Selbstbildnis als Schießscheibe (Self-Portrait as Shooting Target), as its original execution date was 1914 rather than 1915.6 Portraying the artist in a recruit uniform, it is a coarse, self-deprecating caricature seen in the stiffened chin of a soldier held to attention, the oversized recruit cap, shaved hair and protruding ears emphasizing its wearer’s inexperience. The picture has a cartoonish though somewhat artless quality, with its rough-hewn outlines, flat planes of colour and empty background, which seems to poke fun at his status as green recruit. In one of the next two portraits, both dated to later in 1914 and painted on either side of the same support, Dix depicts himself, in a sketchy, unresolved mire of paint application, as an artilleryman, his purple-red face partially framed by a gleaming Pickelhaube and the bright red collar of his uniform.7 The high colour on the face possibly indicates the effects of the ready supply of alcohol and fine food given to departing recruits, and immersion into an exclusively male society of disinhibited sensuality, expressed through the swollen lips and aggressive glance.8 It is also a self-conscious, awkward look at oneself in full military uniform, with the eyes peering anxiously from the shadow of the helmet. On the reverse, and at odds with the picture with which it shares its support, is Selbstbildnis als Soldat (Self-Portrait as Soldier).9 The shaven head, deeply furrowed brow over black-red-irised eyes with their whites sharply exposed, and the swollen black-red lips and rolls of meaty flesh on the neck is an image of unchecked, animalistic masculinity. Considered as one, Self-Portrait as Shooting Target and Self-Portrait as Soldier suggests the struggle between the Dionysian and Apollonian described in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, here as inescapable 5 Der Krieg, 1914. Oil on cardboard, 98.5 × 69.5 cm. Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf. Sterbender Krieger, 1915. Oil on cardboard mounted on wood, 66.7 × 54.4 cm, Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen. Bildnis Bruno Alexander Roscher, 1915. Oil on board, 67 × 50.5 cm, George Economou Collection, Athens. 6 Diether Schmidt and Otto Dix, Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis, 2., ergänzte Aufl. ed. (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1981), 34. Otto Dix, Selbstbildnis als Schießscheibe, 1914. Oil on paper, 69.5 × 49.4 cm. Kunstsammlung Gera. 7 Selbstbildnis mit Artillerie-Helm (Self-Portrait with Artillery Helmet), 1914 (verso of Self-Portrait as Soldier), Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart. 8 Schmidt and Dix, Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis, 32. Otto Dix, Self-Portrait as Shooting Target, 1914. Oil on paper, 69.5 × 49.4 cm. Kunstsammlung Gera. 9 Selbstbildnis als Soldat, 1914. Oil on paper, 68 × 53.5 cm. Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart.

1914–18

17

facets of military life: the rigid discipline expected of all soldiers under orders coupled with the manic violence expected of them on the battlefield.10 Dix appreciated Nietzsche’s writings, describing them in 1911 as part of the ‘treasure trove’ of his knowledge, and for many creatives, Nietzsche embodied a desire for new forms of expression that better reflected a rapidly changing world.11 These two portraits also suggest attempts to articulate the transformation from civilian to soldier, or human to killing machine: his partial loss of individuality and agency effected by military training is suggested through shorn hair and uniform. The artist appears as an unleashed brute, toughened by military training to face death unconditionally. Because the portrait looks nothing like Dix physically, Self-Portrait as Soldier becomes expressive of any soldier’s process of steeling-up to face the difficulties of frontline fighting.12 The final pre-war portrait, Selbstbildnis als Mars (Self-Portrait as Mars) (1915, Figure 1), like its similarly styled pendant, The War purposefully employs a Cubo-Futurist aesthetic – employing both the analytic breaking up of the surface characteristic of Cubism and the darting planes of Futurism. Cubo-Futurism (or Russian Futurism) evolved mainly among the Russian and Ukrainian avantgarde and represented for them, among other things, the ‘cult of the machine’ as a utopian concept, where machine production could build an equitable, collective existence for all of society, regardless of class. The term Cubo-Futurism was coined in 1913 but its seed traces to the Russian Soyuz Molodyozhi (‘Union of Youth’) group inspired by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto: We shall sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness. [. . .] We declare that the world’s splendour has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. [. . .] A roaring motor car, which looks as though running on shrapnel, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. [. . .] There is no beauty except 10 In The Birth of Tragedy, 1872, Friedrich Nietzsche terms a primordial, rhythmic life force as Dionysian, after Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, excess, masquerade and violence, among other things. The Dionysian is wild and amoral, in contrast to the Apollonian, which is rational and moral. 11 Dix, letter to Hans Bertschneider, 1911 (exact date unknown). See Dix, Otto Dix. Letters 1904-1927, 12. In 1914, Dix made a bust (now lost) of the philosopher, clearly inspired by Max Klinger’s famous herm that was replicated and sold in various editions from 1904. In emulating Klinger’s iconic bust – classical in composition but modernist in its expressive rendering of Nietzsche’s features – Dix emphasized even further the melancholy of Klinger’s portrait. The latter was commissioned for the Nietzsche Archive, which was relocated from Naumburg to Weimar in 1903. The provisional bust made for the opening in 1903 (until a suitable block of marble could be found for the final version) was that replicated and sold. The popularity of the bust, and republication of Thus Spoke Zarathustra alongside Ecco Homo (being published for the first time) in deluxe editions in 1908, heralded the revival in interest in Nietzsche that continued up to the war. 12 Nietzsche’s Übermensch does not translate simply as ‘superman’ but described a higher state that humans might aspire to.

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Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

Figure 1  Selbstbildnis als Mars (Self-Portrait as Mars), 1915. Oil on canvas, 81 × 66 cm. Städtische Kunstsammlung, Haus der Heimat, Freital. © Estate of Otto Dix, BildKunst Bonn / IVARO Dublin, 2023. in strife. No masterpiece without aggressiveness. [. . .] We wish to glorify war – the only health giver of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful ideas that kill, the contempt for woman. [. . .] Museums, cemeteries! [. . .] What can one find in an old picture unless it be the painful contortions of the artist striving to break the bars that stand in the way of his desire to express completely his dream? To admire an old picture is to pour our sensitiveness into a funeral urn, instead of casting it forward in violent gushes of creation and action. [. . .] Look at us! [. . .] Our heart does not feel the

1914–18

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slightest weariness! For it is fed with fire, hatred, and speed! That surprises you? It is because you do not remember even having lived! [. . .] We stand upon the summit of the world and once more we cast our challenge to the stars!13

Dix depicts himself at the centre of a storm of violence and destruction – it both works through him and emanates from him. As the Mars despised in Greek literature rather than the Roman Mars, who symbolized war as means to secure peace, the world around him is hurled into nightmare, with burning buildings, screaming animals and human eyes and mouths that drip with blood in the all-pervasive destruction left in his wake. The red-eyed skull to the right may represent death, who follows Mars’ trail. This Mars was expressive of the Futurists’ will to destroy outmoded traditions through war to remake the world for modernity. Yet, this violent, militant masculinity exalted by the Italian Futurists was at odds with the popular, pre-war image of German soldiery, which was essentially heroic. While the idea of the soldier-hero was nothing new and was invoked by all the belligerent nations in 1914, the heroic had been immensely popular in German culture since the late nineteenth century, such as in the figure of Siegfried (in Wagner’s musical drama Ring of the Nibelung), which was invoked countless times in wartime and post-war propaganda and Rainer Maria Rilke’s prose-poem The Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke, published with enormous success in 1912. The heroic sacrifice of German youth was central to German wartime propaganda from the beginning of the conflict, as in the so-called Langemarck Myth, construed by the German High Command to conceal the tactical disaster at Langemarck, Belgium on 10 November 1914, in which thousands of men were killed in a battle of no significance. The report that German regiments sang the ‘Deutschlandlied’ as they faced death (which may not have been true), a song that expressed German martial unity, meant that Langemarck quickly came to symbolize the heroism and patriotism of German soldiers in the nation’s struggle. In the flood of romantic images of battlefield life and death that the Myth spawned, Dix’s reflection of self as impassive locus of violence, is fiercely ironical in a work by a German Freiwilliger, all too aware of the potency of the heroic ideal in German consciousness, before and during the war. In some respects the irony of Dix’s portrayal symbolized the unheroic actions by some of the German army in the earliest months of the war, when it raped Belgian towns and cities and murdered innocent civilians. The reports of 13 Filippo Marinetti, ‘Initial Manifesto of Futurism’, in Exhibition of Works by the Italian Futurist Painters, ed. Sackville Gallery, Filippo Marinetti and Umberto Boccioni (London: Sackville Gallery, 1912).

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these atrocities in the enemy presses, as well as those relating to the sinking of the Cunard liner Lusitania by a German U-boat off the south coast of Ireland on 7 May 1915 – killing 1,198 civilians and threatening US-German diplomacy, fuelled the demonization of the German soldier in Allied propaganda. But Mars was at extreme odds with the artist’s vision of the battlefield expressed in other works while he was still at Bautzen. The drawings Kämpfende Soldaten (Fighting Solders) and Schlacht (Battle), both from 1914, describe tangled messes of bloodied fighting soldiers and smashed corpses, with German soldiers identified by the Picklehaube worn in the early months of the war. Both include a flagbearer wielding a tattered flag of unidentifiable origin. The drawing Sterbender Krieger (Dying Warrior), possibly a preparatory drawing for the painting of the same name but less confidently dated to before Dix’s transfer to the front, shows the head of a soldier whose face is twisted in agony, with blood flowing from the mouth.14 Clearly demonstrating some ability for army life, he was appointed Corporal on 17 September 1915, just four days before leaving for the Western Front.15 His first exposure to battle was the Autumn Battle of Champagne (25 September–3 November 1915), during which he was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class on 12 November and which he proudly and humorously recorded on a field postcard drawing with the text ‘Unteroffizier Dix nebst Gemahlin’ (Sergeant Dix and his Wife) to the woman who seems to have been the first to focus his affections, EvaMaria (Marga) Kummer.16 Remaining in Champagne until 17 July 1916, Dix had already captured many aspects of life at the front: soldiers fighting and at rest, brothel visits, field hospitals, portraits of self and comrades, battered landscapes, towns and villages, burials and the dead, among other subjects. Like others who witnessed the war directly, his sketches quickly began to trace the realities of the battlefield, in contrast to the generally idealized material produced on the home front, which like that in all the belligerent nations, was designed to encourage public support of the war effort. Dix’s body of wartime work does not appear to express a particular attitude to war but some pieces from these earliest months trace a sense of disillusion as well as much experimentation with 14 Kämpfende Soldaten, 1914. Ink over lithographic chalk on card, 65.7 × 48.9 cm, KupferstichKabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, C 1950-3. Schlacht, 1914. Black chalk and ink on paper, 68 × 49 cm. Kunsthalle Bremen, 1950/10. 15 Dix left the garrison for the Western Front with the field machine gun train 390, XII. Reserve and by 25 September 1915 was involved in the Autumn Battle (or Second Battle of) Champagne. Lorenz, Otto Dix. Das Werkverzeichnis der Zeichnungen und Pastelle, 283. 16 Feldpostkarte, Unteroffizier Dix nebst Gemahlin, Otto Dix an Eva-Maria Kummer, c. early 1916. Pencil, 9.4 × 14.7 cm. SLUB/Deutsche Fotothek, Dresden, Mscr.Dresd.App.2581,26.

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style. In addition to pencil and pen, he took to using gouache above watercolour because, as Löffler recalls, unlike watercolour, the opacity of gouache allowed him to amend compositions with fresh layers of paint.17 Two simple black chalk sketches, both named Selbstporträtkopf im Spiegelscherben (Self-Portrait in Mirror Shards) I/II (1915) depict the artist as little more than a skull, the persona of Mars completely upended (Figure 2). Brustbild mit Mütze (Self-Portrait–Bust with Cap) and Selbstbildnis im Unterstand (Self-portrait in the Dugout) are moody and careworn.18 The gradual dissipation of Cubo-Futurism in this drawing is revealed in the character of the line, which retains the darting planes of Futurism but is much softened. Self-Portrait as Smoking Soldier with Cap portrays an individual seasoned and aged by battle-hardiness.19 Dix also began to make many studies of wounded landscapes and townscapes, sometimes populated by the dead, though rarely by the living. In a postcard to his friend Helene Jakob in March 1916, on which he also sketched the shelled landscape, he wrote about how everything was subjected to huge, symmetrical craters of ‘mad, painful, fantastical lines [. . .]. There are holes everywhere filled with stones, or barren skeletons. It is a peculiar, rare beauty that speaks here’.20 In another letter to Jakob on 1 July 1916, in which he requests some art materials from her, he expresses frustration at not being able to draw more often and describes the travails typical of frontline experience. The French position appeared as an ‘impregnable map’. There was dead silence and emptiness, nothing except the ‘labyrinthine trenches and passages arising from the grey-green of the earth’. He described three hours of continuous barrage from the enemy, which left the ditches saturated with metal fragments. And quietly wearing one away was the boredom, lice and fleas.21 In numerous further correspondences with Jakob, he described what he saw in words and pictures. One letter described the dignity and indignity of battlefield burials, where countless human subjects, namely his dead, dying or maimed comrades and belligerents, now offered themselves as subject matter:

17 Fritz Löffler, Otto Dix. Life and Work, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982), 15. 18 Brustbild mit Mütze, 1916. Black chalk, 43 × 34 cm. Serge Sebarsky Collection, New York; Selbstbildnis im Unterstand, 1917. Graphite on Field postcard, 14.2 × 9.2 cm. Otto-Dix-Sammlung, Gera. 19 Selbstbildnis als rauchender Soldat mit Mütze, 1917. Black chalk on paper, 40.3 × 35.4 cm. Staatliche Museen, Sammlung der Zeichnungen, Berlin. 20 Otto Dix, field postcard to Helene Jakob [exact date unknown], March 1916. Otto-Dix-Stiftung, Vaduz. 21 Dix, Otto Dix. Letters 1904-1927, 43–4.

22

Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

Figure 2 Otto Dix, Selbstporträtkopf im Spiegelscherben 1 (Self-Portrait in Mirror Shards 1), 1915. Black chalk, 44.1 × 34.4 cm. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. © Estate of Otto Dix, Bild-Kunst Bonn / IVARO Dublin, 2023. The studies I’m sending you today may perhaps appear somewhat strange to you. Trenches between Aubérive and Jauplet. 1. Grave of a French soldier. He fell here, in this place. Perhaps no one even knows his name. He was placed into a large 21-er grenade crater and covered with earth. The helmet on top! A wooden cross, upon which is written: ‘Here lies a brave French soldier.’ This is written on every one of these wooden crosses. It is a beautiful grave, some three meters

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Figure 3  Otto Dix, Ein schönes Grab (A beautiful Grave). Field postcard to Helene Jakob with drawing of a French soldier’s grave, 17 January 1916. Graphite, 9.4 × 16.8 cm. Kunstsammlung Gera, D/Z 12. © Estate of Otto Dix, Bild-Kunst Bonn / IVARO Dublin, 2023. deep. 2. This is barely a metre deep. Coincidentally, the communication trench was later dug out there, and now the man is stretching his leg out over the trench . . . Yet it would be much less beautiful, however, if he just happened to stick his head out over the trench. At Marie-à-Py and Douarin, whole lines of defence consist of dead men whose heads are sticking out.22

Dix’s letter was accompanied by two field postcards, each with a drawing, one descriptive of ‘a beautiful grave’, which recalled the care given to the graves of fallen belligerents as expressed through the specially created plaques sometimes attached to the crosses (Figures 3–4), and another with ‘a bad grave’ showing the soldiers’ sparsely covered remains. Another Feldpostkarte with a tangled little drawing has written on the reverse, somewhat poetically, ‘The trench winds through a little pine forest. Like waves in the sea the earthen barriers sway, above, over the edge it’s flooded – mangled trees, as if the sea had spewed it forth, and beneath it all, animals, living in caves, the rats, mice, men, lice and fleas. The steel roots, deeply sunk in the earth’s entrails, but those below not moving an inch.’23 22 Otto Dix to Helene Jakob, 17 January 1916, Dix-Archiv, Kunstsammlung Gera. 23 Otto Dix, Das Batallionswäldchen, 1916. Postcard, Otto-Dix-Sammlung, Gera.

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Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

Figure 4  Memorial plate made by German soldiers for a French war grave, which reads: ‘Here lies one brave French warrior, fallen on 22 August 1914.’ Musée de la Grande Guerre du Pays de Meaux.

Later, Dix said of his time in Champagne: ‘Even the impressions on the way to the front were terrible. Wounded and the first victims of gas, with sunken yellow faces. [. . .] Then it went into the crotchety dugout system of trench warfare, in the soggy chalk white trenches of Champagne where one was tormented by the stench of the corpses of the dead.’24 Involved in the Battle of the Somme from 24 July 1916, in August he wrote an unusually long letter to Jakob in Esperanto, possibly a tactic to avoid his explicit description of the fighting being censored: Thank God the terrible days of summer have passed. [The French] began drumming away at us. [. . .] It was awful! The b. position was so chewed up that one couldn’t tell where the trenches were anymore. [. . .] With each shot, our little enclosure threatened to collapse in on itself. [. . .] Suddenly, a 28er blew so much dirt into the hole that we were up to our chests in it. The gun was buried [. . .]. Then it started from the left too (the shooting had begun from the right). I lay there [. . .], stuck in the barrage for hours with another infantryman. [. . .] The following days were almost even more horrible. [. . .] The losses of this regiment were terrible. In the evening, the enemy attacked. [. . .] Terrible confusion; terrible losses. The corpses lay about, arms and legs strewn and blown about. From the 6th company of this regiment, nine men remained. [. . .] You cannot possibly imagine such a thing. Now we are far behind this hell in a place called Maurois. Perhaps soon I [may?] be furloughed. Many good comrades were left out there, too bad for those guys.25 24 Otto Dix quoted in an interview with Otto Conzelmann in 1949, reproduced in Otto Conzelmann and Otto Dix, Der andere Dix: sein Bild vom Menschen und vom Krieg (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1983), 78. 25 Otto Dix to Helene Jakob, 1 August 1916, Otto-Dix-Stiftung, Vaduz. A company consisted of between eighty and 250 men.

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Though directly involved in such extreme combat, the artist, for whatever reasons, did not yet record them with the directness that characterized the post-war pictures. The abstract nature of many of his battlefield works created something of a distance between the realities of warfare and the viewer. Dix was presented with the opportunity to exhibit his work in the Zweite Ausstellung Dresdener Maler die im Heeresdienste stehen (Second Exhibition of Dresden Artists in Military Service), held in one of Dresden’s most prestigious commercial galleries, the Galerie Arnold from 27 September to 29 October 1916. This exhibition and others like it across the country, together with illustrated periodicals dedicated to war art, offered serving artists the opportunity to disseminate their work. While much of the work on show described no more than everyday activities outside the fighting or followed the long tradition of offering a positive image of the nation on the battlefield, the high numbers of independent artists who served as soldiers and the basic fact of the war’s devastating impact on the body generated numerous personal, ‘snail’s eye’, warts-and-all pictures of wartime, on and off the battlefield. The unprecedented number of explicit images of wartime violence, though still uncommon, arguably became the most defining characteristic of the visual culture of World War I. For example, Willy Jaeckel’s remarkable series of Goya-inspired lithographs Memento 1914/15 (1914–15), and several of his lithographs for Paul Cassirer’s otherwise rather hawkish periodical Kriegszeit, were powerful, unflinching depictions of human cruelty and suffering in wartime (Figures 5–6).26 An edition of forty of Jaeckel’s Memento series was published by Israel B. Neumann in Berlin in 1915 and exhibited in June 1915 in Neumann’s Graphisches Kabinett in Berlin. They were exhibited at least twice more during the war, each time as part of the twenty-seventh (October 1915) and twenty-eighth (early 1916) exhibition of the Berlin Secession. Even some official artists, about a generation older than Dix, demonstrated unusual freedom in portraying the harsher aspects of warfare. For example, German Dead and Wounded in a Trench by experienced war artist Theodor Rocholl (1854–1933) was remarkable among official art for its depiction of wounded and dead German soldiers (Figure 7). Another, Max Slevogt, one of Germany’s most celebrated Impressionists, created a number of illustrations for Cassirer’s anti-war periodical Der

26 In citing the exhibitions, Dietrich Schubert points to several sources that have incorrectly stated that Jaeckel’s lithographs were immediately banned after publication. See Dietrich Schubert, ‘Memento 1914/15. Lithographien von Willy Jaeckel’, in Der Erste Weltkrieg im Spiegel expressiver Kunst: Kämpfe - Passionen - Totentanz, ed. Gerhard Schneider (Bönen: Stadt Reutlingen, 2014), 54–5.

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Figure 5  Willy Jaeckel, Serbisches Schicksal (Serbian Destiny), Kriegszeit, vol. 1, no. 56 (1 November 1915), p. 225.

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Figure 6  Willy Jaeckel, Memento 1914/15, ‘Vergewaltigung’ (Rape), Sheet 8 of 11, 1915. Lithograph, 49.6 × 64.2 cm. Berlinische Galerie, Berlin.

Bildermann in 1916, and would later weigh in on the farce of wartime rhetoric with the sourly ironic Heldengrab im Osten 1917 (Hero’s Grave in the East, 1917), which served as an illustration for Hugo Zuckermann’s poem Soldatengrab (Soldier’s Grave) in a collection of wartime poetry. In this work, the hero’s grave, instead of being surrounded by family and friends, is shown abandoned to the attention of hungry dogs attempting to dig up the corpse (Figure 8).27 The Dresden exhibition, launched with considerable pomp by Prince and Princess Johann Georg of Saxony and attended by local dignitaries and army officers, was much bigger than the 1915 show and was accompanied by a catalogue, indicating the extent of participation in the war among Dresden’s artists.28 Indeed, the art journal Kunstchronik reported that the numerous art

27 Various authors, Hindurch! Deutsches Volk im Kriege. Bilder des Kalenders Kunst und Leben 19141918 (Berlin: Heyder, 1920), 27. Zuckermann was killed in the war in December 1914. 28 Galerie Arnold, Zweite Ausstellung dresdner Künstler die im Heeresdienste stehen (Dresden: Galerie Arnold, 1916). See also Ruth Negendanck, Die Galerie Ernst Arnold in Dresden 1893-1951 (Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 1997), 141, 465–6. In addition to the royals, the Dresdner Anzeiger lists in attendance influential politician Count Georg von MetzschReichenbach, the aristocrat Count Georg Vitzthum von Eckstädt and the director of the Dresden Gallery (Gemäldegalerie) and future founder of the Galerie Neue Meister in Dresden, Hans Posse,

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Figure 7  Theodor Rocholl, Deutsche Tote und Verwundete in einem Schützengraben (German Dead and Wounded in a Trench), 1915. Watercolour, 21.5 × 20.8 cm (painted area). Stadtmuseum, Hofgeismar.

exhibitions at various locations in Dresden demonstrated clearly that the war had caused no standstill there – at least to artists.29 The exhibition drew a staggering among others. Anonymous, ‘Dresdner Künstler im Heeresdienste’, Dresdner Anzeiger (Dresden), 28 September 1916, 5. 29 Anonymous, ‘Ausstellungen’, Kunstchronik 28, no. 5 (1916): 37–8. No author cited, published 27 October 1916. The launch and attendance were noted by the Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, which also noted that the exhibition launched on 28 September and not 27 September, as written on

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Figure 8  Max Slevogt, Heldengrab im Osten 1917 (Hero’s Grave in the East, 1917), as illustrated in Hindurch! Deutsches Volk im Kriege, 1920, p. 27.

2,500 submissions, from which 743 works by 130 Dresden-based artists were selected for exhibition30 and according to Kunstchronik were ‘displayed in all rooms in the gallery in a clear and aesthetically pleasing manner’.31 The Arnold’s proprietor, Ludwig Gutbier, expressed his wish that ‘the fighting artists should hereby express the participation of their homeland, and at the same time be given the opportunity to show that, even during the war, they also try to preserve their artistic life’. In both aims, he thought, they had succeeded excellently.32 Through these pictures, continued the Kunstchronik, ‘the whole variegation of war life confronts us in numerous pictures of ever-new interpretations and versions’. Soldiers’ sketches created on the spot or shortly thereafter, were also exhibited.33 Though the catalogue illustrations suggest a conservative body of work and surviving reviews comment little on matters of artistic style, reviews in the the catalogue. See ‘Die Austellung der im Felde stehenden dresdner Künstlers’, Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten (Dresden), 28 September 1916, 3. 30 See Negendanck, Galerie Arnold in Dresden 1893-1951, 141. 31 Anonymous, ‘Kunstchronik’, Kunstchronik 28, no. 5 (1916): 37. The gallery proprietor Ludwig Gutbier’s future support for younger artists ensured their share of major shows in Dresden up to 1933. See Negendanck, Galerie Arnold in Dresden 1893-1951, 175–7. 32 Ludwig Gutbier, quoted in Negendanck, Galerie Arnold in Dresden 1893-1951, 141. 33 Anonymous, ‘Kunstchronik’, 36.

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Dresdner Volks-Zeitung and the Dresdner Anzeiger indicated that a quite broad range of experiences were recorded, some being rare depictions of destruction and death.34 Dix’s missing correspondence for the dates from 15 August 1916 to 14 August 1917 might have explained why the pieces chosen – by either Dix or the gallery – for this very first public exhibition of his art – eleven pictures of the war landscape – were arguably among his least sensational – or remarkable.35 In terms of content, his selection of shelled landscapes, streets and trench life outside the fighting were in keeping with most wartime art of the time, which typically avoided showing the harsher aspects of the war.36 Dix had already produced many paintings by then, as fellow artist Otto Griebel recalled. Griebel came upon Dix one morning early in the summer of 1916, when the latter showed him ‘a whole stack of tempera (gouache) paintings and ink drawings on which he had worked very hard during his free hours’ and were ‘cubist compositions, mostly war themes’.37 Among the gouaches was Grab eines Franzosen (Champagne) (Grave of a Frenchman (Champagne)) (Figure 9) one of several pictures of graves from 1915–16. Recalling the experiences described in the letter sent to Helene Jakob on 17 January 1916, the skeleton of a French soldier, identified through his blue uniform, lies in a shallow grave whereon the spring flowers, including the poppy now symbolic of the Western Front, have begun to bloom on his sparsely covered remains. Other pictures from 1915 to 1916, more richly descriptive of the experiences of frontline soldiers, include Der Mond (Gefallene) (The Moon (Fallen)) (1916), which depicts fallen soldiers buried or half buried in

34 M. M., ‘Galerie Arnold’, Dresdner-Volks-Zeitung (Dresden), 30 September 1916, 13. Anonymous, ‘Dresdner Künstler im Heeresdienste’, 5. For myriad reasons, many of the works exhibited are no longer accessible. Those by Dix’s future NSDAP enemies, Walther Gasch and Willy (Wilhelm) Waldapfel, are either lost or in private collections. According to the catalogue, Gasch exhibited ten works and Waldapfel thirteen. 35 T he gap in correspondence is explained partly by Dix’s illness from 17 December 1916 to 2 March 1917. See Lorenz, Otto Dix. Das Werkverzeichnis der Zeichnungen und Pastelle, 284. He was hospitalized for some of this time, as evidenced by a photo postcard dated 25 January 1917 (Dix-Archiv, Kunstsammlung Gera). There also exists an undated letter from 1917, written in the military hospital in Hénin, to Otto Baumgärtel. See Dix, Otto Dix. Letters 1904-1927, 1, 57. 36 T h e works exhibited by Dix were listed in the catalogue section ‘Watercolours, Drawings and other [media]’ and named as follows: Granatloch [Shellhole], Friedhof St. Hilaire [St Hilaire Cemetery], Stollen zum Unterstand (Dugout Tunnel), Betonierter Schützengraben (Concreted Trenches), Minenstollen (Mine Tunnels), Strasse Souplet-Aubérive (Street at Souplet-Aubérive), Schlafender Soldat, Pont Faverger (Sleeping Soldier, Pont Faverger), Granattrichter mit Blumen (Shellhole with Flowers), Vontrieu (Vontrieu), and Laufgraben und Drahtverhau (Communication Trenches and Barbed Wire). 37 Griebel, Ich war ein Mann, 58–9. According to the catalogues raisonné, few of those that remain are cubist. It is possible the cubist-influenced pictures were lost or destroyed.

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Figure 9 Otto Dix, Grab eines Franzosen (Champagne) (Grave of a Frenchman (Champagne)), 1915. Gouache over pencil on paper, 29 × 28.3 cm. Museum Gunzenhauser, Chemnitz. © Estate of Otto Dix, Bild-Kunst Bonn / IVARO Dublin, 2023.

the pummelled battlefield terrain,38 and Schlamm (Mud) (Figure 10), expressive of the living nightmare of the battlefield. These pieces indicate his snail’s eye view of the fighting, his participation in it, his witnessing of its bloodshed and extreme loss of life. But in Dresden in 1916, the work exhibited by the artist who would become the war’s most unrelenting documenter revealed only wounded, ravaged French territory.39 38 Der Mond (Gefallene), 1915. Black chalk on paper, 40.3 × 39 cm. Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart. See Lorenz, Otto Dix. Das Werkverzeichnis der Zeichnungen und Pastelle, 449. Conzelmann dates the picture to 1915, Conzelmann, Der andere Dix, 90. 39 It is possible that the Arnold had possession of more than the eleven pieces exhibited. Dix stated in December 1917 that the gallery had all his works, see letter to Helene Jakob, 12 December 1917,

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Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

Figure 10  Otto Dix, Schlamm (Mud), 1916. Black chalk on yellowish paper, 41 × 39.5 cm. Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart. © Estate of Otto Dix, Bild-Kunst Bonn / IVARO Dublin, 2023.

Dix was in any case one of the select few whose work was reproduced in the catalogue, with Stollen zum Unterstand (Dugout Tunnel) (Figure 11) and he was evidently proud of his success, later writing to his parents that he had received very positive newspaper reviews from the critics and that one piece had been printed in the catalogue.40 He also received a positive review from the Kunstchronik, which remarked that Dix ‘exhibits for the first time and in Dix, Otto Dix. Letters 1904-1927, 1, 59. As such, it is possible that the gallery already had other works in their possession for the exhibition in 1916 but which they chose not to show. It is also of note that Dix stated in a letter to Otto Baumgärtel in either late 1918 or somewhat later that ‘there are no publications about me yet. Now as before, I am controversial’. See Dix, Otto Dix. Letters 1904-1927, 1, 61. 40 Undated letter to Franz and Louise Dix, 1917. See Dix, Otto Dix. Letters 1904-1927, 1, 59.

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Figure 11  Otto Dix, Stollen zum Unterstand (Dugout Tunnel), 1916. Chalk on paper, 28.9 × 28.4 cm. Zeppelin Museum, Friedrichschafen. © Estate of Otto Dix, Bild-Kunst Bonn / IVARO Dublin, 2023.

is proving to be a remarkable talent’.41 But as far as the local art world was concerned, the star of the show was another young artist, the Dresden-born Otto Schubert (1892–1970). With one of Schubert’s works also illustrated in the catalogue and praised by the Kunstchronik, the Dresdner Volks-Zeitung, overlooking Dix, commented that ‘among the overwhelming abundance of war picture production’, in which some stood out due to their ‘peculiarity and power of design’, the ‘shocking drawings of destruction and death by Otto Schubert should also be mentioned’.42 Schubert’s work depicts six dead or dying soldiers scattered on the ground next to charred woodland, with two rifles with their bayonets driven into the ground as grave markers.43 The 1916 show led to his winning the prestigious Saxon State Prize, after which he became a master student at the Dresden Academy (1917–18).44 During the remainder of his 41 Anonymous, ‘Kunstchronik’, 37. 42 M. M., ‘Galerie Arnold’, Dresdner Volks-Zeitung, 30 September 1916. 43 It has not been possible to verify the title of this work, or its medium. See Zweite Ausstellung Dresdener Maler die im Heeresdienste stehen, Galerie Arnold, 27 September to 29 October 1916, 39. 44 Schubert was celebrated in post-war years, with prominent art critic Will Grohmann describing his graphic work as ‘black and white ballads of life’ [schwarz und weiβ Balladen des Lebens].

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Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

tenure on the Western Front, and a short stint on the Eastern Front in late 1917, Dix produced many more drawings and paintings, and continued to experiment with style and subject. Cubo-Futurist and Expressionist leanings continued to feature alongside naturalistic, representational works, with many executed in black chalk or black ink or a combination of both, of the war landscape and various aspects of front experience. Many of these works are characterized by strong contour lines and contrasting tones. Most works from the final year of the war were composed exclusively in black ink and include a number of abstract works, arguably the most strikingly modernist among Dix’s entire oeuvre. These Dix referred to in his war diary as the ‘cool bath of abstraction, [. . .] in which the idea is purified of the earthly’.45 Showing remarkable drive, Dix attempted to exhibit work several more times during the war years, somewhat overstating his success to date in approaches to galleries. In the undated letter to Otto Baumgärtel from 1917, he asks him to contact the Gerstenberger Gallery in Chemnitz about exhibiting a number of his field works and to tell the gallery that his work in the 1916 exhibition was ‘reviewed very favourably by the entire press’.46 It appears that no exhibition resulted at the Gerstenberger but he did exhibit drawings as part of the Künstlervereinigung Dresden’s autumn exhibition on Lennéstraβe, which opened on 15 August 1917.47 Dix mentioned in a letter to Jakob that he was invited on 11 December 1917 to exhibit five pieces at the Nassauischer Kunstverein in Wiesbaden and contacted the Galerie Arnold to have it framed and sent there.48 According to the surviving records, he did exhibit there in January 1918, as part of the exhibition Sammlung Rudolf Will Grohmann, ‘Graphik der “Gruppe 1919” Dresden’, Menschen. Sonderheft von Graphik der ‘Gruppe 1919’ Dresden 2, no. 62/65 (1919): 2. Schubert associated with the members of Die Brücke before the war and in 1919, was a founding member of the Dresden Sezession Gruppe 1919 as well as influential art critic Julius Meier-Graefe’s champion. Meier-Graefe’s support led to Schubert becoming a contributing artist for the yearbook of the Marées-Gesellschaft, Ganymed. Blätter der Marées-Gesellschaft (Spamersche Buchdruckerei, Leipzig), published from 1919 to 1925. Other contributing artists were Max Beckmann, Erich Heckel and Alfred Kubin as well as literary contributions from renowned authors such as Alfred Döblin. Like Dix, Schubert was blacklisted by the Nazis, his work included in their degenerate art exhibitions and in part destroyed in the pyre of the Kulturschande in 1937. Meier-Graefe heavily criticized Dix’s Trench in 1923. 45 Lorenz, Otto Dix. Das Werkverzeichnis der Zeichnungen und Pastelle, 466. 46 Otto Dix to Otto Baumgärtel, undated, 1917, written from the field hospital at Hénin, Dix, Otto Dix. Letters 1904-1927, 1, 57. The Galerie Gerstenberger in Chemnitz (1902–51) actively promoted modernist art during the Weimar years. To date there is no evidence that Dix’s request resulted in an exhibition in the Gerstenberger. 47 Dix, Otto Dix. Letters 1904-1927, 1, 58–9, 62–4. R. St. (Richard Stiller), ‘Herbstausstellung der dresdener Künstlervereinigung’, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 41, no. 3 (1917): 101. It is not recorded which works by Dix were exhibited. 48 Dix, Otto Dix. Letters 1904-1927, 1, 59. The exhibition was titled Otto Dix, Sonja u. Louis Delaunay, Gleize, Lhote; Plastik: Laurens. See the exhibition archive at the Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden, https://www.kunstverein-wiesbaden.de/edition/otto-dix-sonja-u-louis-delaunay-gleizelhote-plastik-laurens. The exact dates of the exhibition are unrecorded.

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Busch – Kupferstiche, Radierungen von Dürer, Rembrandt u.a. – Kollektion Hans Völcker 1890–1918.49 ‘My “fame” is already spreading well beyond Dresden!’, he wrote to Jakob; lamentably, his reaction to being exhibited alongside Dürer, Rembrandt and Martin Schongauer, as well as more established contemporaries Ludwig Meidner and Emil Nolde is unrecorded in available sources, as are the works exhibited. In a letter to the Gera City Council in early 1918, in which he asked if ten to fifteen of his war pictures could possibly be exhibited in the Gera town museum, he stated that he had ‘frequently exhibited at [the] Galerie Arnold in Dresden and the Kunstverein’. The Gera City Council responded on 14 January 1918 that the exhibition was approved but without heating, lighting or maintenance, possibly due to the straitened post-war conditions; Dix did not respond further.50 He exhibited at the Nassauischer Kunstverein again in January 1919 and an undated letter from December 1918 lists five works, two of which can be definitively identified as wartime pictures: Sonnenuntergang bei Ypern (Sunset at Ypres) and Gelände bei Ypern (Terrain near Ypres ).51 To summarize, at the close of his war tenure, Dix had created a substantial visual portfolio of the war experience, which would later provide important thematic references, if not stylistic ones, for his memorialization of the war. The skipping from one stylistic approach to another in these early works were experimentations, as art critic Will Grohmann wrote in 1961, ‘of a naive artist who had not yet found his way’ but also, as it would prove, one who continued to be receptive to new modes of expression that could effectively – and affectively – engage with debates on how the war should be memorialized.52 The reproduction of his work in the Arnold’s exhibition catalogue and the positive review by the important Kunstchronik, published by the Verbandes der deutschen Kunstgewerbevereine (Associations of German Arts and Crafts), served to bring his work to public attention, and announced the entry of one of the most famous – for some, infamous – memorializers of the war.

49 See the exhibition archive at the Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden, https://www​.kunstverein​ -wiesbaden​.de​/en​/exhibition​/sammlung​-rudolf​-busch​-kupferstiche​-radierungen​-von​-duerer​ -rembrandt​-ua​-kollektion​-hans​-voelcker​-1890​-1917​-1. 50 Otto Dix to the Stadtrat der Stadt Gera, 1 April 1917, Otto-Dix-Stiftung, Vaduz. 51 Otto Dix to the Nassauschen [?] Kunstverein Wiesbaden, exact date unknown, December 1918, Otto-Dix-Stiftung, Vaduz. 52 Will Grohmann, in Otto Dix, Will Grohmann and Florian Karsch, Otto Dix: Bilder, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, das graphische Gesamtwerk 1913-1960: Ausstellung vom 16.1. bis 27.4.1961 (Berlin: Galerie Meta Nierendorf, 1961), Unpaginated.

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2

The war amputee as anti-icon

Discharged from war service on 22 December 1918, Otto Dix arrived home to a Germany already convulsed by revolution. Following the naval revolts at Wilhelmshaven (from 24 October 1918) and the Kiel Mutiny on 3 November, civil unrest spread across the country, leading to the abdication and flight of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the bloody power struggle between the newly declared German Republic (encompassing the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and army, supported by the Freikorps and Stahlhelm) and a coalition of communist groups led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Relative peace would not come until early August 1919. Despite the impact of the war on Germany – two million dead, four million physically and mentally disabled and a shattered economy – militarism found renewed fervour in the many independent Stahlhelm and Freikorps regiments made up of veterans and fresh recruits that called for German rearmament. In response, an anti-war movement grew, which likewise included many veterans. This divided response to the German defeat was never completely resolved during the Weimar Republic and meant that no united memorialization of the war could happen. Visual culture and the arts in general were expressive of Germany’s fractured war memory. Alongside the typical commemorative works in official art and public memorials designed to soothe and comfort the public were those, usually in a range of print media, such as the Freikorps and Stahlhelm’s posters encouraging youth to join them in the void created by forced disarmament, works that targeted the liberal government and sometimes attacked Jewish politicians (as in the stab-in-the-back theory) for the loss of the war and those of anti-war artists such as Käthe Kollwitz and the radical pacifist Berlin Dadaists, established by Raoul Hausmann and which included George Grosz, Hannah Höch and John Heartfield, among others. Some Dadaists, including Grosz and Heartfield, were members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Dix, quickly considered worthy of discussion as a key young artist by important local critics, meant that attention was drawn to his war-related pieces from

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the earliest post-war exhibitions.1 Becoming a master student at the Dresden Academy and quickly immersing himself in Dresden’s artistic scene, at the end of January 1919 he became a founding member of the Dresden Sezession Gruppe 1919, a second-wave expressionist group that also counted Otto Schubert, Conrad Felixmüller, Laser Segall and Constantin von Mitschke-Collande, among others, and the close collaboration of noted art critic and modernist art champion, Will Grohmann. Dix designed the expressionistic poster announcing the group’s first exhibition in February 1919 at the Emil Richter Gallery on 13 Prager Straβe.2 Reviewing Dix’s submissions in an early article on the February show, which included the vaguely titled Kanonier (Gunner),3 Grohmann wrote that ‘Dix is pure instinct, hostile to all considerations, does not think about himself but experiences himself. [His] unrestrained imagination, believing in miracles, a miracle himself. [His art is] the last extract of his memories; no analysis, no art of vocabulary. [. . .] So much is his art pure representation of affect. [. . .] Der Kanonier: the hell of destruction and yet victory’.4 Reviewers in the daily press had much less to say, if anything at all. At the group’s so-called special exhibition in April 1919, also at the Richter, Dix exhibited at least one war picture, which Carl Puetzfeld’s review referred to as Selbstportrait als Kavallerist (Self-Portrait as Cavalryman) and which, based on Puetzfeld’s description, likely refers to Selfportrait as Mars. Puetzfeld, a locally well-established cultural writer, saw some potential in Dix’s ‘unbridled energy’ but considered Cavalryman as evidence of his immaturity ‘where the painted memories of war, artillery, stretches of landscape, heroes’ cemeteries, medals and whatever whirl around wildly’; ‘at best, that’s a futuristic salad, just no picture’, he concluded.5 In July that year, at 1 Dix was mentioned in at least fourteen publications in 1919, all in relation to the Dresden Sezession Gruppe 1919, including two by Will Grohmann, two by the Richter Gallery and a number of reviews. 2 Otto Dix, Gruppe 1919 Kunstausstellung Emil Richter, 1919. Lithograph on brownish paper, 87.5 × 56.5 cm. Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. It was commissioned by the Kunstverein, which Dix noted in a letter to Kurt Günther in February 1919. Dix, Otto Dix. Letters 1904-1927, 1, 66–8. 3 Dix created two little-known works around 1914: Der Kanonier (oil on paper) which is a lightly expressionistic half-figure image of a gunner with a fixed, outward gaze, and Kanonier Löwe (oil on canvas), possibly based on a figure in Dix’s barracks. It seems unlikely that Grohmann was referring to either of these pictures. Both are illustrated in Conzelmann, Der Andere Dix. Sein Bild vom Menschen und vom Krieg, 69. 4 Will Grohmann, ‘Dresdner Sezession “Gruppe 1919”’, Neue Blätter für Kunst und Dichtung 1, March (1919): 259. Grohmann also lists a work titled Leda (Leda and the Swan, 1919), an oil on canvas painting also in Dix’s Cubo-Futurist style, now held at the Los Angeles County Museum. 5 See Carl Puetzfeld, ‘Dresdner Sezession’, Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten (Dresden), 18 April 1919, 2. Löffler does not mention Mars in relation to Dix’s exhibited works in this first exhibition. See Löffler, Otto Dix. Life and Work, 19–20. Will Grohmann’s review describes a ‘Kanonier’ which may refer to the picture entitled Kanonier (Gunner) (1914) now at the San Diego Museum of Art. See Grohmann, ‘Dresdner Sezession “Gruppe 1919”’, 257–60.

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the exhibition Dresdner Sezession Gruppe 1919 mit auswartige Gästen (Dresdner Sezesson Gruppe 1919 with Guests), again at the Richter Gallery, Dix exhibited at least two more of his wartime drawings: Heiliger Sebastian (St Sebastian), probably created in 1914, and Tanzende Krieger (Dancing Warriors) (1918).6 The critic for the Dresdner Anzeiger, Richard Stiller, also a painter in the vein of nineteenth-century German realism, overlooked the war pieces and dismissed two other works, Pregnant Woman and Moon Woman as lacking meaning.7 But critical interest was growing. Dresden-based artist and publisher Hugo Zehder, who founded the Neue Blätter für Kunst und Dichtung (The New Journal for Art and Literature) in May 1918, saw in Dix a renewed – and essential – artistic vigour borne of the war experience and truly expressive of societal chaos: [Dix is] an Indian, a Sioux chief. Always on the warpath. He swings the brush like an axe and every blow is a scream of colour. His restrained wildness thirsts for the glowing noises of pure erupting colors. For him, the world is childbearing chaos, which gives birth to a splendid, lust-quivering, angry, unique and rapidly changing appearance. [. . .] Dix marches, runs, stumbles valiantly towards what will come tomorrow [. . .]. In the hours of his marching days, he feels the vital impulses of his existence, hears the process of eternal renewal in the rush of blood, soothes, by means of colourful dreams, the powers that are always ready to jump and terrifies, to pass the time, the lame petty bourgeoisie of all professions and classes. He paints pictures. [. . .] For whom? For the majority, who probably need these pictures and refuse to tolerate ‘art education’.8

Yet, Dix’s continuing experimentation with style suggested dissatisfaction and a search for a new direction that would lead to his first major post-war pictures. In a 1961 interview with Hans Kinkel, Dix remarked that standing before his pre-1918 pictures, he felt that one side of reality was not being depicted at all: the ugly. When Kinkel asked him if his war pictures after 1918 followed a certain bias, he replied, ‘A bias? Yes, of course. Do you know what it was? Anti-Anton von Werner.’9 This new interest in the grotesque and focus on war veterans arose with his connection to the Berlin Dadaists from January 1920, whose revolutionary 6 Emil Richter, Ausstellung Gruppe 1919 mit Gästen (Dresden: Emil Richter, 1919), Catalogue. Unpaginated. Heiliger Sebastian (mixed media, 55.8 × 46.6 cm. Dresden State Collections); Tanzende Krieger (Indian ink on yellowish paper, 39.7 × 38.9 cm. Galerie Albstadt). 7 Richard Stiller, ‘Dresden Sezession Gruppe 1919’, Dresdner Anzeiger (Dresden), 8 July 1919, 2. 8 Hugo Zehder, ‘Otto Dix’, Neue Blätter für Kunst und Dichtung 2, no. 6 (September 1919): 120. 9 Schmidt and Dix, Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis, 252. Prussian artist Anton von Werner (1843– 1915) was celebrated for his sumptuous, minutely detailed, monumental battle-pieces, such as Generalfeldmarschall Graf Moltke vor Paris [Field Marshall Count Moltke near Paris] (1873), which, typical of their time, were idealized visions of the battlefield.

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anti-art, mostly composed of collage, photomontage and found objects, was a pointed rejection of the culture borne of a militarized German society that for them led to the war.10 Wieland Herzfelde, in his introduction in the catalogue to the First International Dada Fair in 1920, defined the Dadaists’ programme as ‘the obligation to make what is happening here and now – temporally as well as spatially – the content of their pictures’, with ‘the illustrated newspaper and the editorials of the press as the source of their production’.11 The Dadaists found their source material not only in the press but all around them: political and social disarray in the wake of the war and the violent revolution that followed, the organized protests by ex-soldiers and their families who had suffered in various ways because of the war, and the war amputees, sometimes begging, who populated the streets.12 Though Dix never involved himself in politics directly, the Dadaists’ criticism of contemporary politics regarding the impact of the war, expressed through their savage subversion of art-making traditions and summed up later in Tristan Tzara’s urging that art ‘be a monstrosity that frightens servile minds’, made a significant impression on his work, stylistically and ideologically.13 Dix and Otto Griebel were part of the ‘Dada Soiree’ in the Dresdner Kaufmannschaft on 19 January 1920, an effort to establish Dada in Dresden and attended by leading Dadaists Hausmann, Johannes Baader and Richard Hulsenbeck.14 In a letter to artist Kurt Günther, the revolutionary ethos of the Dadaists is mirrored in Dix’s artistic aims, where despite difficulties exhibiting work in Dresden, even at the Richter Gallery, he asserted that he would not present himself as a ‘petit-bourgeois lapdog’, and that his pictures would ‘plague the bad consciences of all art dealers, aesthetes, expressionists, and other elderly aunties and geese. [. . .] I’ve made some new things, which provide an opportunity

10 Two letters from Dix to George Grosz in the Grosz Archive in Berlin are possibly from 1919. In them, Dix refers to himself as ‘Dixtaturdadadix’ and ‘Dixatotur en ALADADADIX’, both followed by ‘Inventor of Illuminism’. See Dix, Otto Dix. Letters 1904-1927, 1, 65–6. 11 Brigid Doherty and Wieland Herzfelde, ‘Introduction to the First International Dada Fair’, October 105, no. 2 (2003): 102. 12 For a detailed discussion on the situation and activities of war victims, see Robert Weldon Whalen, Bitter Wounds. German Victims of the Great War 1914-1939 (London: Cornell University Press, 1984). 13 Tristan Tzara, ‘Dada Manifesto 1918’, in Art in Theory 1900-1990, ed. Charles Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 254. 14 T h e ‘Soiree’ was titled ‘Der Oberdada spricht über Dada’. According to eyewitnesses, the evening ended with a wild brawl. The press reacted with indignation to Dix’s and Griebel’s behaviour. See Birgit Dalbajewa, ed., Neue Sachlichkeit in Dresden. Malerei der zwanziger Jahre von Dix bis Querner (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2011), 24.

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Figure 12 Otto Dix, Streichholzhändler (Match Seller), 1920. Oil and collage on canvas, 141.5 × 166 cm. Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. © Estate of Otto Dix, Bild-Kunst Bonn / IVARO Dublin, 2023.

to shock those with bad nerves; for moralists, the disgusting, and for dancers, jolly tightropes and vaulting horses’.15 By mid–1920, Dix’s engagement with war memorialization began in earnest with his provocative, brutally dystopian socially critical visual narratives centred on what was an explosive topic that year – the fate of physically and 15 Otto Dix to Kurt Günther, 1920. Dix-Archiv, Kunstsammlung Gera.

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Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

psychologically injured veterans. By the close of the year, he exhibited four major paintings of war amputees, each of which interrogated the attitudes of a somewhat ambivalent public, governmental management of veterans’ welfare and indirectly, the continuing tolerance for militarism in German society. Streichholzhändler (Match Seller, Figure 12) was shown at the exhibition Deutscher Expressionismus Darmstadt 1920 (10 June–30 September), organized by the Darmstädter Sezession, alongside almost a thousand works by artists from across Germany but also a number from abroad, including Picasso and Henri Rousseau.16 Dix exhibited as part of the Dresdner Sezession Gruppe 1919’s group submission. Match Seller depicts a quadruple amputee, who appears to be blind, sitting against a fashionable street wall and selling matches, from whose mouth emanate the words ‘Streichhölzer, echte Schwedenhölzer’ (matches, genuine Swedish matches). The veteran’s calls go unnoticed or ignored by the well-heeled passers-by – so unnoticed in fact that a dachshund perceives him as part of the street furniture and urinates on his stumps. The picture was deeply significant in 1920 because it both foregrounded a figure largely absent from popular visual narratives of war memory at that point (and who was also the most visible reminder of the war experience) and through its deictic structure confronted society’s failure to acknowledge veterans’ continued suffering. Though there is a flattening of space, visible in the unnaturally tilted footpath and passing figures, the viewer engages with the central figure from a higher viewpoint and is clearly positioned as a passer-by on the vanishing line formed by the footpath, which continues into the viewer’s space on the left and occupies the vertical dividing line of the Golden Section on which the amputee is placed. One is then drawn to the tray hanging from his neck and resting on his stumps, and which holds matches and a few crumpled banknotes. The re-use of real fifty Pfennig notes as collage indicates their small value and suggests the paucity of the veteran’s earnings, but the dog’s urine, which spills away from the veteran and into the gutter, leads the eye to something deemed more worthless: a real newspaper article torn from a newspaper, titled ‘Bürgerkrieg und Gemäldegalerie’ (Civil War and (the) Picture Gallery). The article contains an open letter by the artist Oskar Kokoschka, then a professor at the Dresden Academy, reproduced in numerous German newspapers and

16 T h e title of the show is a misnomer; the exhibits included Dadaists, Cubists, Futurists, postImpressionists and Constructivists, among others.

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seemingly urging those involved in violent civic unrest to carry out their fighting a safe distance away from Dresden’s art.17 The context explains Dix’s apparent disgust at Kokoschka’s plea. The counterrevolutionary Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch had begun on 13 March 1920 in Berlin as an attempt to undo the revolution of 1918–19, bring down the Weimar government and establish in its place a right-wing, autocratic government. The Putsch was supported by right-wing factions and much of the army (Reichswehr), who in promoting the stab-in-the-back theory blamed members of the coalition Weimar government for undermining the efforts of soldiers and thus causing the loss of the war. It had reached Dresden by 15 March, where the aftermath, as in a number of other cities, was bloodier than in Berlin. In Postplatz, Dresden, the strike against the Putschists broke into open battle, resulting in fifty-nine demonstrators being shot dead by the army. The violence around Postplatz led to bullets passing through the windows of the Rubens rooms in the Gemäldegalerie, which as part of the Zwinger, was just metres away, and where a bullet had passed through a strand of the central figure’s hair in Rubens’ Bathsheba. Kokoschka urged: Since pictures have no possibility of saving themselves from where they are no longer under the protection of mankind, and also because the Entente could justify a raid on our galleries with the fact that we have no feeling for pictures, then it would fall on the artists of Dresden, who cling and tremble with me and are aware that they would not be able to create such masterpieces themselves if those entrusted to us were destroyed.18

Locally, the Dresdner Nachrichten asked that Kokoschka’s wishes must be extended in a way that also spared human life19 while the Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten understood Kokoschka’s address as full of bitter irony: ‘He who is undoubtedly one of the staunchest opponents of reaction condemns all methods of violence. Kokoschka fought and suffered in the war. His irony, which is by no means to be taken as a joke, is directed against any violent settlement of political differences.’20 If Kokoschka was being ironical, it was lost on the Dadaists. His letter, appearing alongside articles covering the aftermath of the violence, just 17 Brigid Doherty cites over forty newspapers. Brigid Doherty, ‘The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada’, October 105 (Summer 2003): 73. 18 Anonymous, ‘Kokoschka zu den Straßenkämpfen’, Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten (Dresden), 19 March 1920, 2. 19 Anonymous, ‘Einem Anruf zum Schutz der Dresdner Kunstschätze’, Dresdner Nachrichten (Dresden), 19 March 1920, Vorabendblatt, 2. 20 Anonymous, ‘Kokoschka zu den Straßenkämpfen’, 2. Kokoschka was seriously injured by a bullet to the head and a bayonet to the chest during the war.

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four days after the tragic events and in which he seemed to place the safety of paintings on a par with that of human life, sparked the disgust of some of his fellow artists. George Grosz and John Heartfield responded with Der Kunstlump (The Art Scab) published in Der Gegner, calling him as a republican intellectual coward who put art before the lives of people and who was complicit in the cultural swindle of the bourgeoisie: ‘we urgently request all who have not yet become such complete imbeciles as to concur with the snobbish statement of this art scab to oppose it publicly. We exhort everyone to whom it is inconsequential that bullets damage masterworks, since they tear human beings to pieces, to rescue themselves from the fangs of the bloodsuckers’.21 Disappointingly, critical reviews omitted Match Seller, though the show, which received a mixed reception, gave the artist further exposure.22 Closer to home however, Conrad Felixmüller, who also exhibited as a Sezession member, wrote with evident sarcasm to his patron Heinrich Kirchhoff about Dix’s ‘beautiful picture in Darmstadt, Straβenbettler (Street Beggar)’; continuing that ‘unfortunately the man is gone completely Dadaist and paints pornographic pictures of the worst kind’.23 For the expressly anti-war First International Dada Fair, held in Dr Otto Burchard’s gallery from 1 July to 25 August 1920, Dix submitted four pieces, two as ‘Otto Dix, Dresden’ and two as a fictitious collaboration.24 One was the largest wall-based work in the Fair, 45% Fit for Work (Figure 13), the title of which today is usually given as War Cripples (45% Fit for Service), and pointed to the inability of medicine and technology to restore what war machinery had taken away.

21 ‘Der Kunstlump’, Der Gegner 1, 10–12 (Malik Verlag, 1920), 48–56, reproduced in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg, The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 483–6. Der Gegner, published by Wieland Herzfelde’s Malik Verlag, discussed the relationship between artists and society. 22 For example, the Feuer’s review lamented the lack of preparation and the show’s many weak and dead points, while praising the inclusion of some important works. See Wilhelm Michel, ‘Deutscher Expressionismus Darmstadt 1920’, Feuer: Monatschrift für Kunst und Künstlerische Kultur 1, no. 8 (1920): 789–802. On the other hand, Der Cicerone’s review commended the show’s inclusion of many works in private hands that might not otherwise be seen. Joachim Kirchner, ‘Eine Ausstellung aus Darmstädter Privatbesitz’, Der Cicerone 12, no. 15 (1920): 588–9. 23 Conrad Felixmüller, 27 July 1920, quoted in Galerie Nierendorf, 60 Jahre Galerie Nierendorf. Jubiläum, Rückblick, Dokumentation, ed. Galerie Nierendorf (Berlin: Galerie Nierendorf, 1980), 16–17. Felixmüller’s sarcasm may have stemmed from the known tensions between the two that may have begun in 1919. In a letter to Felixmüller that possibly dates from 1919, Dix expresses disgust at Felixmüller’s descriptions of his pictures to some ‘philistines’. See Nachlaβ Conrad Felixmüller, DKA, GNM. See also Dix, Otto Dix. Letters 1904-1927, 1, 69–70. 24 Both 45% Fit for Work and Butcher’s Shop were attributed to ‘Otto Dix, Dresden’. Montage of Mobile Figures was attributed to ‘Otto Lasker-Dix, Dresden’ and Of What Use to the Emperor is His Crown, Of What Use to the Sailor His Money (Was nützt denn dem Kaiser die Krone, was nützt denn dem Seemann sein Geld) was attributed to ‘Otto Else Lasker-Dix, 1919, Dresden’. Dr Otto Burchard Kunsthandlung, Erste internationale Dada-Messe (Berlin: Kunsthandlung Dr Otto Burchard, 1920), 4.

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Figure 13  Otto Dix, Kriegskrüppel (45% erwerbsfähig) (War Cripples (45% Fit for Work)), 1920. Mixed media on canvas. Lost. © Estate of Otto Dix, Bild-Kunst Bonn / IVARO Dublin, 2023.

It depicts four war amputees shuffling down an elegant street punctuated by cutout motifs styled as Dadaist montage and which comment on the men’s disabilities. Each amputee has been ‘reconstructed’ – grotesquely – with prosthetics, effectively satirizing, like other works in the show, the heroic imagery of German soldiery in popular culture in the wake of the war, pompous military marches and Germany’s technological advancements, which excelled in the production of death and debilitation but could not rebuild shattered bodies and minds. Resembling Dada-like cut-outs, motifs of bodily wholeness, an outstretched arm, a boot and a profile of a human head marked with what appears to be the crosshair of a weapon, contrast with the ravaged bodies in the foreground.25 25 Diether Schmidt considers the cut-out head to be a self-portrait, based on the stylized self-portrait Roter Kopf [Red Head] (1919). See Diether Schmidt, Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis, 2. ergänzte Aufl. (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1981), 56.

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The first figure on the right wears a pathetically reconstructed jaw which opens and closes with a crude spring mechanism, and which is mysteriously signed, like his left eyeglass/eyeball, with ‘DRP’. He holds an alphabet card, also signed DRP, similar to that of George Dalgerno’s alphabet card of the 1680s and of a type given to war veterans who had lost speech, that enables him to spell out words by pointing to them.26 The head of the figure second from the left, shown in profile and frontally, and the double outlines of his right hand, suggest the shivering movements of a war trauma sufferer, and in connection with Dix’s title for the image at the Fair, 45% Fit for Work, pointedly referenced the underrecognition of war trauma as an illness. The rationalization of war pensions in May 1920 with the implementation of a new law, the Reichsversorgungsgesetz (RVG), meant that on applying for a pension through a local office, doctors then examined the veteran to determine if his physical wounds were the result of war service and then calculated, where appropriate, the extent to which the disabilities decreased his earning power. Loss of earning power was measured on a scale of 10 to 100 per cent. However, such a system could not work in the case of war trauma – or war hysteria as it was sometimes called – which was still poorly understood. A pension application could be rejected on extremely arbitrary grounds: naturally occurring mental weakness was thought to account for mental breakdown on the battlefield, such as poor performance at school or having a ‘nervous’ sickly or alcoholic relative.27 Because mental strength was central to male identity, traumatized soldiers were shamed by the inability of their minds to withstand warfare. The facial disfigurement of two of the figures also recalls that not only the loss of limbs caused suffering but also the reactions caused by their sometimes horrifically distorted features. Yet, an exhibition which toured German cities in 1918 evidently encouraged the view that physically maimed veterans were not to be pitied, as science could more or less put them back together again. Scholar and diarist Victor Klemperer recalled that among the many depressing days following the Armistice, the day he visited this exhibition (in Leipzig) was the worst, in that:

26 Lucia Reilly et al presents and analyses Dix’s inclusion of this card as evidence of the use of a low-tech communication device before the formal establishment of augmentative and alternative communication. They point out that Dix’s leaving out the J and Y was like that of George Dalgerno’s alphabet card of the 1680s. Lucia Reily, Helena Panhan and Ariane Tupinamb, ‘Early Evidence of Low-Tech Communication in an Otto Dix Painting of 1920’, AAC: Augmentative & Alternative Communication 25, no. 4 (2009). https://doi​.org​/10​.3109​/07434610903322011 (accessed 13 July 2021). 27 Lerner, Hysterical Men, 232–4.

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One could not have devised a more tactless, more defeatist exhibition than this. [The exhibition] gathered and demonstrated what was or should be done for the war victims, from hospitals to home. [. . .] One could see orthopaedics on large models: stretching, storage, dressing – that was all neat and comforting. But one also saw fresh and scarred wounds imitated in coloured waxes, saw trephinations, saw the condition before and after resection, transplant, and plastic [surgery]. For the doctor, everything was unquestionably artful and edifying, for the laity very horrible. the jaw injuries especially often offered horrible sights. The worst heads, jawless, with raw flesh, chopped, dismembered, half covered by cloths, behind display cases with the address: Only for doctors.28

Klemperer was struck by the attitude expressed on a sign next to examples of how blinded soldiers were ‘rehabilitated’ through surgery: ‘The blinded ask you not to bother them with expressions of sympathy.’ Like a sign at a zoo, wrote Klemperer, it read like ‘don’t feed the animals’.29 Protest marches, such as the 10,000-strong march on Sunday, 22 December 1918, organized by the Reichsbund der Kriegsbeschädigten und Kriegsteilnehmer (Imperial Association of War Veterans and War Wounded) and which included many disfigured veterans, may have inspired Dix’s parade-like arrangement in 45% Fit for Service, which recalled the march’s bitter parody of the excited marches of volunteers through Berlin in August 1914. Culminating in front of the War Ministry in Berlin, the march contained ‘row after row of war victims’ no longer capable of orderly military marching, ‘bundled in tatters of uniforms’ where ‘trucks carrying paraplegics led the way. The blind guided by their dogs, followed, and then came the widows and orphans’.30 Even by 1920, when the Dada Fair took place, facially injured men were still hidden away in military hospitals. Erich Kuttner, one of the founders of the Imperial Association of War Veterans and War Wounded and editor of the Social Democrat organ Vorwärts, was prompted to write the article Vergessen! (Forgotten!) published in Vorwärts on 9 September 1920, where he discusses his visits to several military hospitals, including the provision hospital in the Thüringer Allee in Westend, a remote location outside Berlin: How many people have the slightest idea that there are still about twenty military hospitals in Berlin with more than two thousand inmates, filled with victims of 28 Victor Klemperer, Curriculum Vitae, 1st edn, 2 vols., vol. 2 (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1996), 609. 29 Klemperer, Curriculum Vitae, 2, 609. 30 ‘Unsere Demonstration vor dem Kriegsministerium’, Reichsbund, 27 December 1918; ‘Der Erfolg unserer Demonstration’, Reichsbund, 8 January 1919, quoted in Weldon Whalen, Bitter Wounds. German Victims of the Great War 1914-1939, 124–5.

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Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture the war that ended almost two years ago? And how many of those who know about this have asked themselves how a man’s body might look considering that this man is still unable to leave hospital even after two, three, five or six years of medical treatment [. . .]. These men are not just war-disabled, they are the war-crushed! [. . .] Here one can find people from whom the war has taken the most beautiful and noble part of their body – even if this is a terrible thing to say: men without faces. At the request of the hospital commission, a man with a bandage across the middle of his face enters the small office [. . .]. He takes it off and I stare into a palm-sized circular hole that runs from the bridge of the nose to the jaw. The right eye is destroyed, the left half closed. As I talk to the man, I see the entire interior of his oral cavity. [. . .] Even those who have seen battlefields find it hard to bear the sight. [. . .] Meanwhile, the man has survived his eighteenth operation. But that’s not a record. Soon after, I meet people who survived 30 and even 36 operations. When one of them enters, I involuntarily recoil. [. . .] The uncomfortable existence of these war victims has been forgotten. [. . .] Admittedly, the state bears a great deal of responsibility for the fact that the public knows so little about the existence of these war victims. [. . .] At Westend, I was shown a collection of plaster busts that are kept in a quiet corner. They are the face masks that are made of those with injured jaws when they are admitted. The patched-up face is then also cast later and kept for comparison. Why are those monuments of terror hidden? They should be set up in Siegesallee in front of Wilhelm’s glorious ancestral gallery. One should show them to the youth so that they find out what war is. [. . .] But the jaw-injured in Westend are forbidden – due to a regulation from 1914 – to own photographs of themselves. Should the true face of the war misery be kept a secret even today?31

In making those ‘men without faces’ visible, War Cripples also criticized, in true Dadaist form, a hypocritical system: images of the body ‘restored’ through the addition of sophisticated prostheses, as Klemperer recalled, were highly visible at a time when the facially maimed were hidden from view; as such, veterans’ identities were reduced to the worth they represented to the medical profession and the market that created a new kind of war profiteer – the prosthetics manufacturer. In the exhibition, revealed by surviving photographs, two rectangular objects are mounted directly on the painting, which, while oddly concealing important 31 Erich Kuttner, ‘Vergessen! Die Kriegszermalmten in Berliner Lazaretten’, Vorwärts (Berlin), 9 September 1920, Abend-Ausgabe, 1–2. The march was organized to force Berliners to come face to face with the victims of the war and to agitate for better pensions which the Bund wanted to be financed by means of taxes on war profits. Kuttner (1887–1942), a leading voice in support of disabled veterans, later used his journalism to resist Nazism. He was murdered in Mauthausen concentration camp on 6 October 1942.

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Figure 14  Unknown photographer, opening of the First International Dada Fair in the bookshop of Dr Burchard in Berlin, 1920, showing, on the left, Dix’s War Cripples (45% Fit for Service) with Grosz’s Victim of Society and Who is the most Beautiful mounted on its surface.

features of Dix’s painting, also extend its commentary on the fate of disabled veterans. The pointed finger of the outstretched arm points to one of these objects, Grosz’s work Ein Opfer der Gesellschaft (A Victim of Society) (1919), placed directly over the head of the first amputee on the left (Figure 14). Wieland Herzfelde wrote of this work in the catalogue that ‘on the man’s forehead lies a big question mark. The gist of the question has passed away. It has faded and is resting; hence non-understanding is habitualized now; at the back of it, the dull awareness of being a freak oppresses the head like a stone’. The other object, hanging on the window between the two amputees in the centre, is another work by Grosz, the cover illustration to the first (and only) issue of Herzfelde’s Jedermann sein Eigner Fussball, titled ‘Galerie deutscher Mannesschönheit, Preisfrage, Wer ist der Schönste?’ (Gallery of German Manly Beauty, Prize Question ‘Who is the Most Beautiful?), which shows a ‘gallery’ of male figures on a fan (Figure 15). Hanna Bergius has pointed to the deliberate placing of objects on Dix’s painting as a way in which the amputees’ identities are further fractured.32 45% Fit for Service was placed in close dialogue with Grosz and Heartfield’s parody of the heroic warrior 32 Hanna Bergius, “DADA Triumphs!”, Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle, 2003, 248. https://www​.burg​-halle​.de/​~bergius​/buecher​/dada​-triumph​-Endfassung​-vor​-Druck​.pdf (accessed 1 February 2019). Jedermann sein Eigener Fussball was produced by Wieland Herzfelde’s Malik Verlag and published in February 1919.

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Figure 15  Front cover of Jedermann sein Eigner Fussball, February 1919.

male, Der wildgewordene Spießer Heartfield (The Philistine Heartfield Run Wild) (1920), the castrated, deformed cyborg born of industrialized warfare who wears the Order of the Black Eagle, the highest order of chivalry in Prussia. Montage of Mobile Figures, now lost, in a blackly comical manner points to the haphazard way in which the war maimed were ‘reconstructed’ through prosthetics (Figure 16). Dix’s Figure was three figures – a man, a woman and a bull – assembled one on the other and, as the picture suggests, rotated on a central axis that allowed moving each figure in either direction to form new configurations. The sign posted above it read Nur zupacken und festhalten (Just grab it and hold onto it). The third of Dix’s works, the nightmarish Fleischerladen (Butcher’s Shop) clearly alluded, like several other works in the show, to the Frontschwein, literally ‘front pig’, slang for front soldier.33 These included Rudolph Schlichter and John Heartfield’s notorious ceiling-mounted assemblage, Prussian Archangel, suspended from the ceiling close to 45% Fit for Service and featuring a pig’s head in place of a human one, and accompanied by the note: ‘In order to understand this work of art completely, one should drill daily for twelve hours 33 Otto Dix, Fleischerladen, 1920. Oil on canvas, 80.5 × 70 cm. Private collection. A rare colour reproduction is contained in Karsch, ed., Otto Dix: Bilder, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, das Graphische Gesamtwerk, 1913-1960, 5.

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Figure 16  Wieland Herzfelde with Dix’s Bewegliches Figurenbild (Montage of Mobile Figures) at the First International Dada Fair, 1920.

with knapsack and in heavy marching order in the Tempelhof Field’ (a drill ground in Berlin). Another work, Musketier Helmhacke auf dem Felde der Ehre gefallen (Musketeer Helmhacke Fallen on the Field of Honour) by the unknown artist Johannes Sokrates Albrecht (possibly a pseudonym), featured a group of facially deformed soldiers, one with a pig’s nose.34 Featuring vicious, halfhuman, half-pig ‘butchers’, one of which grapples with a pig’s torso while another appears to try on the piece of the animal he has been butchering, Dix’s piglike butchers in Butcher’s Shop are humans becoming animals, reflective of the transformation of ordinary men into killers on the battlefield but also of what the Dadaists considered to be a cruel post-war society indifferent to suffering. The picture includes a small boy as customer, wearing a naval hat on which is written ‘Wilhelm II’, alluding to the lost war and perhaps the typical attraction of youth to flashy uniforms, who remain ignorant of the truth about war. Notably, in this painted version and in the etched version of the same year, Dix has written ‘F A 48’ – Feldartillerie 48 (Field Artillery 48) – the name of the artillery unit in 34 Johannes Sokrates Albrecht, Musketier Helmhacke auf dem Felde der Ehre gefallen, 1920. Missing. Illustrated in Bärbel Schrader and Jürgen Schebera, eds., Die »Goldenen« zwanziger Jahre (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1987), ill. 26.

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which he served during the war – on the raised arm of the pig-headed butcher, thus registering his status as ex-soldier.35 In reprimanding conservatives and reactionaries, the exhibition mirrored the sentiment of the burgeoning Nie wieder Krieg (No More War) movement that from August 1920 gathered large crowds on Berlin’s Lustgarten and elsewhere to protest against future rearmament. Critical responses to the exhibition reflected these social divisions and were no more or less than what the organizers expected. The review by a certain P. F. and titled ‘Dada-Bolshevism’, in the Neue Preuβische Zeitung, a voice of the conservative upper class, pretended to quote from the Dadaists themselves. The strategy of uniting Dada with Bolshevism, which prefigured the Nazis’ slating of modernist art as communist-affiliated, ‘degenerate’ art, had the desired effect of exposing the immovable stagnant conservatism that the newspaper represented: The whole thing is enormously lacking in wit and is intellectually so impoverished. [. . .] Great art of the past is merely negated, impudently and brazenly, with terms of abuse, or is hidden beneath inanely affixed scraps of photographs. [. . .] The only thing that these trainee marksmen do bring off is a loathsome hatred for our military leaders in the World War, whom they defile in a drunken manner as cheap as it is repulsive. [. . .] In one especially inspired moment, one of these babbling Dada-sophists wrote his own critique of this Dada exhibition. I cannot resist citing it here, word for word, and I have to add that I fully agree with it: ‘Let it be said right from the beginning that this Dada exhibition is simply another common bluff and not worth visiting. [. . .] While Germany is shaken by a government crisis [. . .], these characters produce trivial jokes out of old rags, kitsch, and photographs. [. . .] What is being shown in this exhibition is of such a low standard throughout that one is forced to wonder how a gallery can have the courage to show these lousy works and charge a high entrance fee’.36

P. F.’s article was, as Hanna Bergius recalls, reprinted by Hausmann on page two of the catalogue three weeks later as a skit and titled ‘What art critics will have to say about the Dada exhibition, according to the “Dadasoph”’.37 Yet, the group received solid support from the important social-art theorist and historian Adolf Behne (1885–1948), who considered Dix’s Butcher’s Shop to be an ‘outstanding work’, though not an example of ‘orthodox Dadaism’, probably 35 Otto Dix, Fleischerladen, 1920. Drypoint on wove paper, 29.6 × 25.8 cm. Private Collection. 36 P. F., ‘Dada-Bolschewismus’, Neue Preussische (Kreuz-) Zeitung (Berlin), 3 July 1920, quoted in Bergius, “DADA Triumphs!” 265–6. 37 Bergius, “DADA Triumphs!” 265–6.

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because of Dix’s adherence to traditional painting methods (though a shared attitude to contemporary society rather than choice of media determined what was Dadaist or not). Behne provided perhaps the most incisive of the liberal reviews: The Dadaists Hausmann, Dix, Albrecht, Gross, Hannah Hoch, and some others have opened an exhibition at the Salon Burchard, [. . .], for which they charge an entry fee of three marks and 30 pfennigs, probably in the expectation that only the purse-holders of the West End will pay a visit. [. . .] Dada wants to liberate us from all bourgeois lies. It wants to undermine the windy rhetoric, the conventions, and the hypocrisy of the bourgeois mentality; and it has succeeded brilliantly in some sure-footed hunting out of the bourgeois in disguise. [. . .] The state of the intellect in 1920 is shown by the Dadaists in images that have been glued together out of advertising logos, photographs, driver’s licenses, iron crosses, razor blades, scraps of braid, uniform insignia, and newspaper clippings. They swap the heads on photographs, cut them off and recombine them, and have evolved a technique that produces an uncanny tension and that undeniably enriches our conventional approach to making paintings.38

The earnest ethos binding together the works’ purposeful materiality was clearly not lost on Behne, but was, perhaps tragically so, on Gertrude Alexander, the reviewer for the communist paper Die Rote Fahne, who even asked that the Dadaists not call themselves communists: We find it hard to comprehend how A[dolf] Behne [. . .] can take a charitable view of such revolutionary nonsense, treating figures in a panopticon and the magic of the cinema as examples of art, proposing the ‘enlightenment’ of the workers, and speaking of ‘values’. [The worker revolutionary] self-aware fighter does not need to destroy works of art, as Dada does, in order to free himself from being ‘bourgeois.’ For ‘bourgeois’ is precisely what he is not. But a person who can do nothing but glue stupid pieces of kitsch together, as practitioners of Dada do, should keep his hands off of art.39

Dix’s war-related works were, in such conditions, placed squarely in the liberal, pacifist camp, among the most revolutionary practitioners, even if his work was not given particular attention in the press and the Dada exhibition not well attended.40 But in addition to Behne’s review, an important outcome was 38 Adolf Behne, ‘Dada’, Freiheit (Berlin), 9 July 1920, Abend-Ausgabe, 2. 39 Gertrude Alexander, ‘Dada-Ausstellung am Liitzowufer 13, Kunstsalon Burchard’, Die Rote Fahne (Berlin) 1920. 40 For insight to ticket sales, see Bergius, “DADA Triumphs!”, 263.

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the purchase of 45% Fit for Service for Dresden’s Stadtmuseum (City Gallery), through its director, Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, who would support Dix’s work into the Nazi era.41 Dix took his post-war narratives to Dresden for the first time in his submission to the Dresdner Sezession Gruppe 1919’s exhibition, which took place from 16 October 1920, and where the group exhibited for the first time at the Galerie Arnold.42 Exhibited as a triptych of sorts, Die Skatspieler (The Skat Players) and either Pragerstraβe (Prague Street) or The Match Seller were exhibited with Barricade, the latter now lost.43 Schmidt, in his review of the Dresden show, describes a picture vaguely titled as Bettler (Beggar) alongside Barricade and The Skat Players, although a photograph of Dix’s submission to an exhibition of work by the Berliner Sezession’s younger artists the following year shows Prague Street and The Skat Players either side of Barricade (Figure 17). Prague Street (Figure 18a), like Match Seller, was deeply significant for its foregrounding of the fate of disabled veterans, again through a compositional strategy that purposefully confronted societal ignorance. Like Match Seller, it focuses on a triple amputee sitting against the wall of a fashionable street, this time clearly identified as one of Dresden’s most fashionable thoroughfares, Prager Straße (Prague Street), and again for the most part ignored by the public. Dix may well have observed veterans begging there when he visited the Emil Richter Gallery (Emil Richter Kunstsalon) at 13 Prague Street, where he showed work as part of the Dresdner Sezession Gruppe 1919 exhibitions. The amputee wears, as his bleeding knees suggest, cheaply produced prosthetics which barely improve his mobility. The outstretched arm suggests he is begging. Another amputee, who has lost both legs, rolls past on a trolley, under which is collaged a printed sheet with the heading ‘Juden Raus!’ (Jews Out!), a reminder of the anti-Semitic element of the stab-in-the-back theory which blamed Jews in part for Germany’s failed war effort. Just behind this figure’s head is collaged, upside-down, another 41 See for example Dietrich Schubert, ‘Krüppeldarstellungen im Werk von Otto Dix nach 1920: Zynismus oder Sarkasmus’, in Krieg und Utopie: Kunst, Literatur und Politik im Rheinland nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann, Gerd Krumeich and Ulla Sommers (Essen: Klartext, 2006), 298. 42 At this stage, Conrad Felixmüller, and, given the absence of their work at the exhibition, probably Otto Schubert and August Böckstiegel had already left the Sezession. The exhibition was bolstered by guest submissions, including those by George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Kurt Schwitters and Lionel Feininger. See Negendanck, Galerie Arnold in Dresden 1893-1951, 483. 43 Löffler’s essay on the Gruppe 1919 does not offer specific information on the works exhibited. See Fritz Löffler, ‘Dresden from 1913 and the Dresdner Sezession Gruppe 1919’, in German Expressionism 1915-1925. The Second Generation, ed. Stephanie Barron (Munich: Prestel, 1988), 57–80. Negendanck lists two journals that contained reviews of the show, Der Kunstwanderer and Der Cicerone, as discussed here. No catalogue was produced. See Negendanck, Galerie Arnold in Dresden 1893-1951, 483.

Figure 17  Left-right: Die Skatspieler (The Skat Players), Barrikade (Barricade) and Pragerstraβe (Prague Street) shown as exhibited, April-June (?) 1921 at the Berliner Sezession’s show. © Otto Dix/IVARO.

Figure 18a  Otto Dix, Pragerstraβe (Prague Street), 1920. Oil and collage on canvas, 101 cm × 81 cm, Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart. © Estate of Otto Dix, Bild-Kunst Bonn / IVARO Dublin, 2023.

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Figure 18b  Prague Street, detail.

fragment of printed matter, urging the public to vote for Wilhelm Buck, the SPD’s (winning) candidate in the elections for the new Ministerpräsident of Saxony. The cane and prosthetic hand in the bottom left denote a figure possibly about to enter the picture space, and who, along with angle of the path, works to position the viewer’s gaze, again from a higher viewpoint. A fourth figure, of whom only a yellow-gloved arm is visible on the left side, throws the begging amputee a stamp. To the right is the exiting figure of a woman in a pink dress and platform boots. In the background are two windows, which appear to be those of a wig shop and prosthetics shop, and a small girl scribbling on the surrounding walls. The scrawled lines that appear superimposed on the entire scene, running diagonally from bottom right to middle left, create the impression that the entire scene is viewed through a window, scribbled on by the small girl who now scribbles on the wall behind the central figure. The picture employs perspective even more strategically than Match Seller. Fired with movement, the picture applies a fluid perspective which imitates the interpolative action of the human eye. The shifting gaze of the viewer is directed primarily towards the triple amputee by three implied orthogonals, each of which leads from this figure to beyond the picture space and also directs the eye from the left to the right-hand side of the image. The viewer is first located

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behind the veteran holding the cane, beneath whom a strong diagonal, formed by the dog and newspaper fragment, leads the eye towards the seated figure. The second diagonal is formed by the hands and cane of the veteran on the trolley, with the ‘exit’ diagonal created by the line that leads from the woman’s platform heel to the right leg of the seated figure. The prosthetics shop window (Figure 18b) contains additional commentary on the fate of war amputees. The collaged pictures of female bodily wholeness – a Classical female nude statue and a curvaceous woman wearing a ribbed corset – extrude the irony of the male mannequin, the reconfigured, emasculated masculinity born of modern technological warfare, who now must rely on a corset, a neck brace and a crutch to keep upright. Nothing, however, can be done for the mangled wound that creeps across the head. Next to the mannequin are examples of the more sophisticated leg and arm prosthetics, the latter featuring an articulated hand. But whatever benefits these physical aids could offer, they were only available to those who could afford to shop on the upmarket Prague Street; the real amputee slumped on the path outside clearly cannot afford them, pointing, as Match Seller did, to the limitations of the pension system for those with little or no other means of support. The shadowy reflections of a top-hatted bearded man, perhaps that of the figure with the cane or of the figure who tosses the stamp, and possibly the woman on the right, appear next to the corseted woman. Neither look at the amputee but Dix, in the collaged photograph next to these reflections, looks straight back at the viewer, as an observer of society and our reactions to the veteran, and a reflection on the artist’s better fortune as a soldier who survived the war and who could exhibit his work on the same street. The Skat Players depicts three amputees clustered around a café table playing the popular game of Skat (Figure 19a, b). Again, the picture is likely set in Dresden – three Dresden newspapers form part of the background. This picture, arguably even more than The Matchseller or Prague Street which are likewise combinations of paint and collage, loses much of its impact in reproduction. Standing before it, one quickly detects the devastatingly dark visual game at hand. The lumpy mixed media assemblage of differing textures and thicknesses, both concealed and emphasized by the paint, works to increase the sense of malformity and brokenness. Silver-coloured paint and foil mimic metal elements, and shabbily so: the card holder on the table; the tube of the hearing aid for the figure on the left; the bars that form the central figure’s neck support and the patch stitched to his head; and elements of the prosthetic hand and jaw on the right-hand figure, as well as his tattily rendered iron cross. The foil is also used to draw attention to one of the picture’s most unsettling details: the latter figure’s penis and scrotum,

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Figure 19a  Otto Dix, Die Skatspieler (The Skat Players), 1920. Oil and collage on canvas, 110 × 88 cm. Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. © Estate of Otto Dix, Bild-Kunst Bonn / IVARO Dublin, 2023.

all that he has left of his lower body. In cruel indignity, propped up on a black metal support, his private parts dangle at the centre, while the figure’s metal jaw contains a collaged photograph of Dix, with the messily written text to the left and around the photograph reading: ‘Lower jaw: Prosthesis Brand: Dix’ and ‘Only genuine with the picture of the inventor’. Excepting the shirt collar, the clothing of the latter’s body is made up of a single piece of hessian that has been

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Figure 19b  Otto Dix, The Skat Players, detail.

painted over with varying hues to suggest the form of the body and the texture of heavy suit fabric. Real playing cards are collaged, over which details of fingers, toes and teeth are painted. The gnarled flesh resembles raw meat. Further from the facture of his Renaissance-inspired self-portrait of the pre-war years Dix’s painting could not be; the picture’s pieced composition, coarse delineation of contours and incongruously laid patterns were deliberate; a sacrifice of painterly tradition to better describe the men's irreparable bodies and by extension express the fractured sociopolitical scape that had been smashed and reshaped by the war. Löffler has suggested the men are possibly officers because of their bearing, and that the picture is thus directed at those who have ‘learned nothing and forgotten nothing’ and go on playing the same game as before.44 Indeed, despite his sacrifices and the absurdity of military awards in the face of such outrageous physical suffering, the figure on the right still wears his iron cross. The central picture, Barricade (Figure 20), recalled Löffler, recorded an episode of the Revolution and was set on Marschallstrasse, home to many artists and through which Dix used to walk every day on the way to his studio.45 44 Löffler, Otto Dix. Life and Work, 38. 45 Marschallstrasse was destroyed during World War  II. It was located close to the current Roßbachstrasse.

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Figure 20  Otto Dix, Barrikade (Barricade), 1920. Oil on canvas with collaged elements, approx. 250 × 250 cm. Destroyed. Shown as reproduced in the catalogue, Ausstellung Otto Dix, Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf (Kunstarchiv, Berlin 1926), p. 21. © Estate of Otto Dix, Bild-Kunst Bonn / IVARO Dublin, 2023.

Among locally produced art, the theme had already appeared in the work of Erich Drechsler, who studied drawing under Richard Müller at the Dresden Academy and was an acquaintance of Dix’s and Griebel’s during the 1920s. Too young to enlist for war service, he witnessed the violence of the Kapp Putsch first-hand in Gera, also Dix’s hometown. Among Drechsler’s graphic work, which included satires of political figures, was Nach dem Kapp-Putsch (After the Kapp Putsch) (1920) which recorded the violence of the Freikorps, sent by the bourgeois-led government to Gera, resulting in the deaths of ordinary citizens.

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Figure 21  Erich Drechsler, Auf der Barrikade (On the Barricade), 1920. Oil on canvas, lost. Shown as reproduced in the catalogue, März 1920. Ein Künstler ergreift Partei (Staatliche Museen Greiz, 1982), p. 26.

His lost painting Auf der Barrikade (On the Barricade) (1920, Figure 21) was a powerful, atmospheric work that foregrounded the bloodshed of the Putsch, and its composition bears some affinity to Dix’s later Trench (1920–3)46 Barricade becomes part of a more articulate Zeitbild if Match Seller, directly commenting on the Kapp Putsch, and not Prague Street was displayed in the Arnold. Atop the barricade which consists of old furniture, a poker picture, a plaster bust, a broken crucifix, among other objects, lies a dead body behind which a sailor is crouching and firing at a target outside the picture, using the knee of the corpse to support his rifle. Below him, a helmeted civilian operates a machine gun while an elderly workman lies on a second body. Other details are known through Löffler’s description: the machine gun rests on a Bible and 46 Erich Drechsler, Nach dem Kapp-Putsch, 1920. Chalk and ink, 28.5 × 20.8. Staatliche Museen, Greiz. On the Barricade is reproduced in Erich Drechsler and Martin Kiefner, März 1920. Ein Künstler ergreift Partei (Greiz: Staatlichen Museen Greiz, 1982), 26. The originality of Drechsler’s works has been undermined by frequent references to Dix and Grosz as major influences on Drechsler, even though Drechsler’s works predate comparative work by either artist. See Werner Becker, ‘Zu den Zeichnungen Erich Drechslers’, in März 1920. Ein Künstler ergreift Partei, ed. Martin Kiefner et al. (Greiz: Staatlichen Museen Greiz, 1982), 13. Drechsler was well known in the region at the time for his images of destitute war amputees. For a detailed study of Drechsler’s World War I imagery, see Kirsten Fitzke, Hier ist der Tod der Würger. Die Arbeiten Erich Drechslers zum Ersten Weltkriegs (Marburg: Tectum, 2011). Drechsler was however possibly inspired by Dix’s Prague Street when he executed his Blinder Bettler (Blind Beggar, 1923, oil on canvas, 47.5 × 55 cm, Galerie Regensburg).

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hymnbook; a case of margarine beneath the elderly man; a volume called New Metaphysical Review, a pair of knickers with lace trimming as well as other items, some of which are affixed as collage.47 Paul Fechter described a sailor’s death wound as a large, black hole in the canvas’ where ‘the edges of the wound were covered with thick beads of colour as if from coagulated blood’.48 The detail that most directly connects Barricade to Match Seller and the Putsch is in the upper-right-hand corner on a shattered cart: a representation of Titian’s Tribute Money, one of the works in the Gemäldegalerie, referenced through Grosz and Heartfield’s Art Scab, and now fodder to protect humans. For Löffler, looking back many years later, Dix exposed ‘all the plunder of petty bourgeois civilization which lies shattered on the barricade’, in addition to which he ‘satirizes the philosophy, religion, and art of the bourgeois world in general’. Three local critics saw little to appreciate in Dix’s portrayals of the war’s aftermath. Richard Stiller, disappointed with the show overall, remained unconvinced of Dix’s abilities, and found his ‘horror plays’ to be ‘oddly backward’, with ‘no originality to be found’ in his ‘kitschy coloured postcards combined with collaged foreground areas, [skills which] have nothing to do with art’.49 ‘Mirroring Stiller was Ernst Meunier in the Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, who could not fully endorse Dix’s brand of positivism. Assessing the group as bringing nothing new to art but still a perfectly capable group of individual talents who ‘resonat[ed] with the spirits of the time’, he considered Dix to be ‘an artist of tremendous expansion of artistic expression’, but, clearly no fan of the works’ Dadaistic formal tendencies, added that Dix’s ‘painterly excesses could no longer be justified even with the guise of ‘abstract art’.50 The noted architect Marie Frommer (1890–1976), whose future work reflected the influence of Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit, mirrored Alexander’s opinion on Dadaism in her review of Dix’s three pictures: The deeply inartistic way in which Dix tries to exploit war and revolution cannot be protested vigorously enough. What has been painted here, cut up and stuck together as the expression of the greatest catastrophe known in world history, reveals an unsurpassable measure of cynicism. Anti-military attitudes are

47 Löffler, Otto Dix. Life and Work, 41–2. Löffler also tells us that Barricade survived World War II but was later destroyed by ‘a lunatic who wanted to boil the canvasses clean and put them to other uses’. 48 Paul Fechter, ‘Die Nachexpressionismus Situation’, Das Kunstblatt 7, no. 11 (30 November 1923): 323–34. 49 Richard Stiller, ‘Ausstellung der Dresdner Sezession Gruppe 1919’, Dresdner Anzeiger (Dresden), 23 October 1920, 2. 50 Ernst Meunier, ‘Ausstellung der Dresdner Sezesson II’, Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten (Dresden), 28 October 1920, 2.

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Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture blatantly attested to. [. . .] The painting of war victims is carried out with real lust, with an intellectual accumulation of effects that results in a mere panopticon effect. The human coldness, the inner indifference to the material is paralyzingly palpable. Added to this are the artistic flaws, the clumsily emphasized materiality, which again only has a material effect and stimulates the viewer to decipher the components, just like a cozy picture puzzle. The inner connection is completely lost. It is very regrettable that the 1919 group of which Dix is a member received too little internal criticism to reject this work.51 .

If all three of these reviewers were united in their view of Dix as a limited artist, in some measure because of their distaste for Dada, and in the case of the first two, offered little by way of visual analysis to back up their views, Frommer’s criticism is interesting for the fact that today, these and other war-related works by Dix are generally regarded as expressive of anti-war sentiment, not cruelly indifferent exploitation. Her criticism indicates that in the absence of any record of how the pictures were generally received by the public, at least some viewed them as unsympathetic representations of war victims rather than just technically poor compositions. The ‘lust’ Frommer describes seems to refer to the treatment of the veterans’ bodies, which are in all four pictures wildly distorted to the point of caricature. The heads are generally oversized and misshapen even where there are no wounds and the limbs are attached to the body like a poorly constructed marionette; the grotesqueness is thus taken beyond the rendering of gnarled flesh and missing limbs, solely for effect. Yet, looking at the works with a different eye, the fleeing passers-by, the focus on the amputees as victims of both the war and society and the purposeful positioning of the viewer in two works, invite a deeply cynical view of post-war society, which was not lost on Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, who praised the power of Dix’s submission as a clear expression of contemporary experience: ‘Otto Dix, with cruel Zeitbilder [represents] a very special and powerful variant of positivism: Barricade, Skat Players and Beggar [. . .] which bring in greatest sensual proximity all the hideousness from blood, misery, prosthesis existence with glaring immediacy, down to the glued-on details. One should be able to spread, more than the space here allows, word about this phenomenon, one of the most curious of our time and the strongest in the exhibition’.52 51 Marie Frommer, ‘Die Sezession in der Galerie Arnold’, Dresdner Volks-Zeitung (Dresden), 22 November 1920, 8. 52 Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, ‘Ausstellung der Dresdner Sezession (Oktober-November bei Arnold in Dresden)’, Der Cicerone 12, no. 22 (1920): 826.

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Dix’s pictures of war amputees continued to divide opinion when they were exhibited the following year (from around late March to June), as part of a show by the younger generation of Berliner Sezession artists, held at an exhibition hall on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm. A review by musicologist and artist Arno Nadel titled ‘The Sick Secession’ because he saw little to admire in the show generally, praised Dix’s ‘wonderful, screaming talent as expressed through The Skat Players and the Dadaist Barricade’, executed in (ironically, giving its Dadaism) ‘a great painting style’.53 Another review, by prominent art historian Curt Glaser, an early supporter of German Expressionism but no fan of Dadaism, reflected Frommer’s in seeing a cruel sensationalism at the cost of war victims: There is a popular speciality of new side-show-art, which George Grosz invented, which Rudolf Schlichter continued, and which now includes the Dresden artist Dix. In terms of cynicism, Dix rivals his predecessors ten times over. Even more directly, he speculates on the lowest instinct for cruelty of an audience that craves sensationalism. All that is missing is a mechanism that sets these halfglued, half-painted figures in motion and which triggers a few cannon shots at regular intervals. But the right place for these works of art would probably be in the Friedrichstraβe passage next to the Panopticon and the Anatomical Museum.54

‘Panopticon’ was becoming a term synonymous with Dix’s figurations of war memory, at least for those who saw in them crass, insensitive sensationalism. Others saw them as true expressions of their time in which the outmoded glamour of pre-war images of soldiery was necessarily shaken off. Whatever the case, Otto Dix’s art was, by the close of 1920, firmly embedded in the new, modernist visual language of war memorialization that refused to shirk from portraying the worse effects of war and, as its reception would prove, played a significant role in debates on how the war should be remembered.

53 Arno Nadel, ‘Die kranke Sezession. Zur Eröffnung der “Berliner Sezession”’, Der Kritiker 3 (1921): 5. 54 Curt Glaser, ‘Berliner Sezession’, Berliner Börsen Courier (Beilage Nr 149) (Berlin), 1 April 1921, 5. In a review the following year of the Jury-free show at the State Exhibition Hall, which included Dix’s scandalous Girl in a Mirror (1921), Glaser remarked that the side-show tone of his work could not be offset by Dix’s ‘obviously strong talent’ which was ‘exhausted in [his] addiction to sensationalism’. See Curt Glaser, ‘Juryfreie Kunstschau 1922’, Berliner Börsen Courier (Beilage Nr. 485) (Berlin), 15 October 1922, 5.

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3

Disenchanting Mars The Trench and The War

He belongs to that generation whose first step into the world was into the trenches. He does not present the ideal war that the little people, sitting by their cosy stoves, dream of, but the real, live war.1 By mid-January 1924, news of a major scandal in the German art world had travelled as far afield as New York: The acquisition of a canvas entitled ‘War’ by Otto Dix for the modern section of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum caused a great stir. With pitiless realism he depicts a battlefield, a rifle-pit shot to pieces, the bodies of the wounded soldiers decomposed and distorted.2

‘War’ was the picture now known as The Trench (Figure 22) and which went on public display for the first time at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne in November 1923, while Dix was living in Düsseldorf. From 11 January 1923 Düsseldorf, Cologne and the entire Ruhr were occupied by Belgian and French soldiers, due to Germany’s defaulting on the reparation payments set out in the Versailles Treaty. The Occupation had by late 1923 further wrecked an economy blighted by hyperinflation and due to passive resistance and civil disobedience, about 130 Germans were killed by the time the occupation ended. Photographs of those killed, such as that published by the Berliner Tageblatt of five men shot dead in Dortmund by French forces for being on the street after 9.00 pm, their faces destroyed by bullets, highlighted the conditions enforced by the occupation. The men, in addition to thousands more, according to the caption, were not aware of a roadblock imposed a few hours earlier, and 1 Paul Westheim, Helden und Abenteurer. Welt und Leben der Künstler (Berlin: Hermann Reckendorf, 1931), 228. 2 Anonymous, ‘Cologne’, The Art News, 19 January 1924.

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Figure 22  Otto Dix, Der Schützengraben (The Trench), 1920–3. Oil on hessian, 250 × 227 cm approx. Lost or destroyed. Photograph © Otto-Dix-Stiftung, Vaduz. © Otto Dix/IVARO, photograph © Estate of Otto Dix, Bild-Kunst Bonn / IVARO Dublin, 2023.

read, ‘Because the life of a German is not worth much’, and ‘[because of] the inhumanity of the French occupiers, a German is shot dead in one or the other city in the Ruhr area every week’.3 The occupation caused a surge of nationalist outrage throughout Germany and led to a drastic fall in support for the No More War movement’s annual rallies that took place throughout the country on 1 August, the anniversary of the outbreak of the war. Such was nationalistic feeling because of the reoccupation that the No More War gatherings had to move indoors.4 Indeed, the surge in nationalistic feeling – and tolerance for militarism – was reflected in the courtroom. Istvan Deak recalls research by Emil J. Gumbel, writing for the 3 Anonymous, ‘Die Ermordeten von Dortmund’, Berliner Tageblatt (Wochen Ausgabe für Ausland und Uebersee) (Berlin), 27 June 1923, 3. 4 Benjamin Ziemann, Violence and the German Soldier in the Great War. Killing, Dying, Surviving, trans. Andrew Evans, 1st English edn (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 181.

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left-wing intellectual pacifist journal Die Weltbühne, that in the first four years of the Republic, German courts convicted thirty-eight leftist offenders of twenty-two political murders, of which ten were executed. But in the same period, right-wing offenders committed 354 political murders – exposed in 1925 as the so-called Fememorde (Feme Murders) by the Black Reichswehr – but only twenty-four were convicted and none executed.5 And to cap it all, the Nazis’ attempted Putsch had occurred in Munich on 8–9 November 1923. In Cologne, the tension caused by the visibility of British soldiers on the streets that surrounded the WallrafRichardz promised The Trench a deeply sensitized audience.6 The artist first made contact with the Düsseldorf art scene in 1920 through Conrad Felixmüller, and by around mid-July 1920, Dix had sent etched versions of his pictures of amputees (with the possible exception of 45% Fit for Service) and The Butcher’s Shop, along with a number of other intaglios and woodcuts, to the Ey Gallery. Supported by the gallery’s proprietor, Johanna ‘Mutter’ Ey, along with Otto Pankok, Gert Wollheim, Janckel Adler and numerous others Dix became a member of the Young Rhineland, founded in 1919. Other artists, including Dix’s friend Otto Griebel, were invited to exhibit with the group. After intermittent visits, Dix finally moved to Düsseldorf in 1922. Renting a spacious studio across the Rhine in the district of Oberkassel and attending the Düsseldorf Academy of Art for a time, he learnt the aquatint technique, soon to be deployed in his suite of intaglios Der Krieg (The War), from Wilhelm Herberholz.7 Griebel wrote that in Autumn 1922, Dix was working on the first version of The Trench, ‘which was almost finished on the easel and promised to be an extraordinarily effective work’.8 He completed it with the uneasiness of the Occupation on his doorstep. Griebel recalled that during a stay with Dix, when he and art dealer Max John, returning to Dix’s studio late one evening, had begun crossing the Rhine bridge separating Oberkassel from the rest of the city. They were stopped by a sharp cry of 'Halte la, que vive?' (Stop there, who goes there?) and a bayonet tip waving in front of their noses, because they had begun walking on the forbidden right side of the bridge rather than the centre. Luckily, 5 Emil J. Gumbel, Vom Fememord zur Reichskanzlei, quoted in Istvan Deak, Weimar Germany’s LeftWing Intellectuals. A Political History of the Weltbühne and Its Circle (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 123. 6 Cologne was established as the headquarters of the British Army of the Rhine from March 1919. Though the situation was tense, it was noted, by Konrad Adenauer, for example, that the British treated the Germans better than the French did in the sectors of the Rhineland controlled by the latter. 7 Dix was introduced to etching in 1920 by Conrad Felixmüller. Aquatint is an etching technique that produces very fine tonal gradations not achievable with a burin. 8 Griebel, Ich war ein Mann, 160. Dix notes in a letter to his wife Martha that he began painting The Trench sometime in 1923, though this may refer to a second version.

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Figure 23 Otto Dix, Kriegsverletzter (War Wounded), 1922. Watercolour over graphite, 48.8 × 36.9 cm. Private Collection. © Estate of Otto Dix, Bild-Kunst Bonn / IVARO Dublin, 2023.

recalled Griebel, he was able to explain to the sentry in French that they were strangers to the city, saving them from a night in prison.9 Löffler notes that Dix began working on The Trench in 1920 but no definite preparatory work survives, which may also have provided additional insight to 9 Griebel, Ich war ein Mann, 161.

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the artist’s shift towards realism between 1920 and 1923.10 But some key warrelated works from this transitory period trace this stylistic shift. One of the two pictures titled Kriegsverletzter (War Wounded) and dated to 1922 lacks the montage but retains some of the physiognomic deformity of his Dadaist pictures,11 while Dead Soldier, possibly a study for The Trench, is unpolished but proportioned and realistic.12 The second War Wounded (Figure 23) lacks a specific date but Dix sold it to the Galerie Nierendorf on 24 July 1922. This picture is an intriguing antecedent to The Trench for its realistic portrayal of suffering, where Dix has even suggested the various stages of healing with scabbed and seeping, purulent tissue in hues of green and brown. It is possible that Dix worked directly from the model, in one of the many special hospitals for wounded veterans of World War I that were dotted across Germany. On close inspection, as German researcher Bernhard Maaz notes, all four edges of the sheet of paper are perforated, meaning that the paper was unlikely to have been manufactured for artistic purposes but was possibly from a pad or block of tearout sheets used for medical records.13 The sitter’s name is unknown, but it may have been known to Dix, who perhaps chose not to name him in order to protect his identity. Alternatively, Dix may have worked from a photograph as he did for the intaglio Transplantation (Skin Graft) (Portfolio 4, Sheet 10, The War, 1924). Another work, dated to 1923, sardonically titled Erinnerung an die Groβe Zeit (In Memory of the Glorious Times), continues this concern.14 These foregoing works marked a new interest in the realistic, confrontational portrayal of the war’s victims in Dix’s work and may represent studies of wounded flesh in preparation for the lost Trench, if a not-so-novel interest in describing scarred bodies and body parts. Dix obtained permission to begin making studies at the Anatomie Dresden-Friedrichstadt sometime during 1920, where he sketched organs and two female corpses. Notably, he seems to have developed sketches of these corpses into a small-scale oil study in 1922.15 10 Löffler, Otto Dix. Life and Work, 41. 11 Otto Dix, Kriegsverletzter (War Wounded), 1922. Watercolour, 39.6 × 38 cm. Location unknown. Illustrated in Suse Pfäffle, Otto Dix, Werkverzeichnis der Aquarelle und Gouachen (Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje, 1991), 165. 12 Otto Dix, Toter Soldat (Dead Soldier), 1922. Watercolour and tempera, 48 × 37 cm, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. On the verso is written ‘Studie zum Kriegsbild’ [Study for the war picture]. However, it is not clear if the description was written by Dix. 13 Bernhard Maaz, ‘Otto Dix’ “Kriegsverletzter”. Zu eine Neuerwerbung des Dresdner KupferstichKabinetts’, in Otto Dix. Der Krieg - Das Dresdner Triptychon, ed. Birgit Dalbajewa, Simone Fleischer and Olaf Peters (Dresden: Sandstein, 2014), 96. 14 Otto Dix, Erinnerung an die Groβe Zeit, 1923. Watercolour over ink, 38 × 30.5 cm. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Kupferstich-Kabinett, C 1969–83. 15 Dix made studies of human organs, including the intestines, liver and brain, in a number of watercolour and pencil studies in 1920. ‘One day I went to the Anatomy study and explained: I

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Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

Additionally, his several Lustmord (sex murder) pictures and scenes of suicide, while not war pictures, are notable for Dix’s dual preoccupation, it would seem, of portraying both darker aspects of post-war society and ripped bodies and spilled blood. The sex murder pictures were little seen at the time (there is no record of their exhibition) but they date from this transitional period and include the paintings Lustmörder (Selbstbildnis) (The Sex Murderer (Self-portrait)), 1920, Scene I/Scene II – Mörder (Murder) (1922), Lustmord (Sex Murder) (1922, missing) and the intaglio print Der Lustmörder (The Sex Murderer), 1920, and from the portfolio Tod und Auferstehung (Death and Resurrection), Lustmörder (Sex Murderer) (1922). The latter portrays a woman sprawled on a small unkempt bed, still clothed in her undergarments and boots. Her body violently ripped, thick pools of blood spill from the face, abdomen and genitalia, while her sexually motivated murder is brought into cold, cynical focus by the dogs fornicating in the foreground. The Death and Resurrection portfolio as a unit links the violence of the battlefield to Germany’s troubled post-war conditions, in that it also includes three prints that portray dead soldiers: Schwangerschaft (Pregnancy), which shows a pregnant woman standing over the decayed remains of a figure on a battlefield; Toter Soldat (Dead Soldier), which shows a soldier whose remains have become enmeshed with the earth, fertilizing the new flora which springs from it; and Die Barrikade (The Barricade), where a sailor uses the body of another fighter as a shield. Der Selbstmörder (The Suicide), the first print in the series, shows a man hanged in a cell-like room, reflecting the poverty and despair felt in the immediate post-war years. The violence of The Trench is somewhat less striking when considering this recent work, and despite inclinations to frame The Trench as an anti-war work, there is no direct evidence that Dix intended it as such. What did concern him, at least as he recalled during an interview in 1966, was that in the work of other artists, it was as if the war had never happened.16 Considering the critical attention he received because of his scandalous portrayals of prostitutes, and the careerbuilding drive clearly expressed in his letters during these years, The Trench – even more pornographic in its violence than the prostitute and sex murder pictures had been as expressions of deviance, immorality and physical decay, may have been must draw corpses! One guided me to two dissected female bodies [. . .]. I sat down and painted. I went again and requested intestines and brains. [. . .]. I painted with watercolour.’ See ‘Gesprächen bei verschiedenen Gelegenheiten, Selbstzeugnisse’, Otto Dix Archiv, p. 76, quoted in Pfäffle, Werkverzeichnis, 146–7. Weibliche Leichen (Female Corpses), 1922. Oil on canvas laid on board, 46.6 × 62.3 cm. London, Private Collection. 16 Otto Dix, quoted in an interview with Reinhard Schubert for the Thüringische Landeszeitung, Gera, November 1966, reproduced in Schmidt and Dix, Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis, 273.

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merely another attention-grabbing exercise. On the other hand, his association with Germany’s best-known revolutionary and pacifist artists had continued. In a rare move, he had publicly declared the aims of his art, alongside Grosz and others, as one of the signatories of the open letter in opposition to the Novembergruppe, set up as a radical organization that supported the aims of the Revolution, but which relinquished some of its aims to enable its members to exhibit as part of the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung (Great Berlin Art Exhibition) every year. The opposition declared their unwavering ideals, feeling ‘bound by the task laid on us by the world’s proletariat in their struggle for a new existence inspired by a new spirit. [. . .] We call on those members who grasp that today art means protest against the sleepwalking bourgeoisie, against continual exploitation’.17 Additionally, in a letter to Dix dated 9 June 1923, John Heartfield wrote on George Grosz’s behalf about contributing a work to be published in the satirical Die Pleite, edited by Heartfield and Grosz, which ruthlessly critiqued Weimar politics, society and the military and warned against right-wing extremism: George Grosz and I are republishing Die Pleite. [. . .] Grosz would like to ask you warmly through me to work on it [. . .] As a topic you can draw for us a satirical piece, the bourgeoisie today, the bourgeoisie and the revolution or, even better, the killing of striking workers by the Reichswehr and fascists or food riots and, in contrast, guzzling citizens. [. . .] But if you have something else suitable in stock, we’ll go with that. Possibly also an image of a prostitute, like the image of the prostitute (with a veil) which you exhibited at J. B. Neumann's. [. . .] Food riots would of course be the most current. [. . .] We hope that you will certainly support us.18

Dix duly responded with Ohne Titel (Prostituierte und Kriegsverletzter) (Untitled (Prostitute and War Wounded)) (Figure 24) which united two figures who paid with their health for the cost of the war: the woman as representative of the many women working as prostitutes to support their families in the dire postwar years (and who has possibly contracted syphilis, as the sores on her face suggest) and the grotesquely maimed veteran hidden from sight in a hospital (as his shirt suggests) for wounded veterans. Dix’s approach in The Trench may have also been inspired to some degree by Gert Wollheim, also a veteran of the war and with whom Dix shared his 17 Otto Dix et al., ‘Offene Brief an der Novembergruppe’, Der Gegner 2, no. 8–9 (1921): 300–1. 18 Der Malik-Verlag/Berlin-Halensee, 9 June 1923. Nachlass Otto Dix (I C 360), DKA, GNM. Also reproduced in Roland März and Rosemarie Radeke, Von der Dada-Messe zum Bildersturm. Dix und Berlin (Berlin: Pädagogischer Dienst der Staatlichen Museen, Preuβischer Kulturbesitz, 1992), 18–19.

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Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

Figure 24  Otto Dix, Ohne Titel (Prostituierte und Kriegsverletzter) (Untitled (Prostitute and War Wounded)), Die Pleite, No. 7, July 1923, p. 24. © Estate of Otto Dix, BildKunst Bonn / IVARO Dublin, 2023.

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studio for a time. Wollheim’s intense portrayals of wartime violence included Der Verwundete (The Wounded Man) (1919), a triptych of which only the central panel survives. It shows a self-portrait of the artist, who was severely wounded in the stomach by shrapnel on the Western Front in late summer 1917. Set in a wracked, lifeless landscape, he falls to his knees in agony, blood spurting from the open wound in his stomach. When Wollheim showed the picture in the Düsseldorf Ausstellung für kriegsgeschädigte Künstler (Exhibition for Artists Damaged by War) in 1920, it was sufficiently shocking to force its removal from the show after only a few days.19 Another work by him, the deeply emotive Der Verurteilte (The Condemned Man) (Figure 25), depicts a man about to be shot, with the prepared grave and those already shot dead in the background. Wollheim based the painting on his wartime drawings that recorded his witnessing of the murder of a Belgian farmer who was shot for calling the German soldiers ‘Boches’ after they had plundered his farm.20 Wollheim was later accused by one of The Trench’s strongest critics, Walther Schmits, as ‘tr[ying] to outdo the muchmentioned war picture by O. Dix which the Cologne museum may yet be spared from acquiring’, in Schmits’s review of the Groβe Düsseldorfer Kunstausstellung (Great Dusseldorf Art Exhibition) (19 July to the end of August 1924). Wollheim’s ‘pile of rotting corpse parts, in the midst of which a family of profiteers appears like a vision’, suggested mutual influence.21 The Trench was acquired by the director of the Wallraf-Richartz’s modern section, Hans F. Secker, who telegraphed Dix on 22 October 1923 confirming the sale. A surprised Dix wrote to his wife Martha the following day with the words: ‘The big shock has happened. The Wallraf-Richardz has bought the war painting.’22 Writing again to Dix on 31 October, Secker conceded that: It took no little amount of handwringing and haranguing to get the Wallraf to take the picture. I think congratulations are in order, and not only for you, but even more to myself. [. . .] The reopening of our gallery will probably take place on 1 December. Your painting will well-be the greatest of sensations.23

19 Gerda Henkel Stiftung, ed. Das Junge Rheinland - Gegründet, gescheitert, vergessen?. 2020, accessed 8 May 2022. doi​.org/​10​.23778​/GHS​.EDIT​.​2020​.2.  20 Wolfgang Holler, Gudrun Püschel and Gerda Wendermann, eds., Krieg der Geister. Weimar als Symbolort deutscher Kultur vor und nach 1914 (Dresden/Weimar: Sandstein/Klassik Stiftung Weimar, 2016), 214. 21 Walter Schmits, ‘Die Düsseldorfer Kunstausstellung in Köln’, Kölnische Zeitung (Cologne), 28 July 1924, Abend-Ausgabe, 2. 22 Otto Dix to Martha Dix, 23 October 1923, Otto-Dix-Stiftung, Vaduz. 23 Hans F. Secker, letter to Otto Dix, 31 October 1923, Nachlaβ Otto Dix, 1, B 12r, DKA, GNM; also quoted in Dix, Otto Dix. Letters 1904-1927, 1, 153.

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Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

Figure 25  Gert Wollheim, Der Verurteilte (The Condemned Man), 1921. Oil on canvas, 126 × 102 cm. Private Collection.

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Secker perhaps encouraged a sensational response by displaying the picture behind a curtain, though his expectation that the painting would be a sensation was not difficult to predict. As Luise Straus-Ernst recalled a few years later, Cologne was a ‘very conservative city, especially if it concerns new art. The affair with the war picture by Dix, which was initially provided with a curtain to protect delicate souls [. . .] is still fondly remembered’.24 If the city needed such protection, Secker’s actions seemed to strategize stirring even more excitement around a work by an artist who the previous April had the first of two charges of indecency opened against him and which were reported in numerous newspapers. The painting Mädchen am Spiegel (Girl in a Mirror) was removed on grounds of indecency from the Great Berlin Art Exhibition (from 30 October 1922), followed by the removal of Salon II at the Deutsche Kunst 1923 (German Art 1923) exhibition in Darmstadt (from 18 May 1923) for similar reasons. But the works drew praise from a clutch of prominent art historians and critics, including the liberal Carl Einstein, who in an essay published in Das Kunstblatt in April 1923 wrote that: Dix gives this whole era – which is only the caricature of one – a resolute and technically sound kick in its swollen belly, wrings confessions of vileness from it, and produces an upright depiction of its people. [. . .] A great old painter lives in Paris – [Georges] Rouault – who spits on the present in a similar fashion: bridal wreaths, shirtfronts, and medals. These painters are waging civil war; their repulsive subject matter draws opposition, whether opponents refuse and demolish it as adherents of objectlessness or as observers. Dix’s pictures are an assault. [He] paints what is current and thus knocks it down without the swollen solemnity of a prettifying dolt. Painting as a critical statement.25

By the time the Wallraf-Richardz unveiled The Trench in Cologne, the curtain literally signalled the controversy in which its artist was already shrouded, having just emerged from the first trial in October. Though he won, in a defence supported by several prominent figures in the art world, he was now known across Germany as a controversial painter of prostitutes, and his pacifist associations in the art world added to a possibly explosive reaction to the painting.26

24 Luise Straus-Ernst, ‘Die Sammlung Haubrich in Köln’, Das Kunstblatt 11, no. 1 (January 1927): 25. 25 Carl Einstein, ‘Otto Dix’, Das Kunstblatt 7, no. 4 (1923): 98–9. 26 T h ose who applied to support Dix as expert witnesses included the art historian Adolf Behne, art writer Carl Einstein, the artists George Grosz and Karl Hofer, the art dealer I. B. Neumann and the art critic Max Osborn. Nachlaβ Otto Dix, NI, Dix, Otto, I, C 191, 14 April 1923, DKA, GNM.

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Revoking the exaggerated forms of the war amputee pictures, the realistic, intricately detailed, almost two and a half square metres of trench,27 where the remains of smashed German soldiers’ bodies are absorbed in and by enemy territory (German territory was only minimally exposed to Allied invasion), was an explicit emplotment of sorts – a memory-image concentrating the worst effects of war on the body and planted in the now post-war occupied territory by an artist who had been a frontline soldier. There had never been a German war picture like it, or arguably one so contextually poised for sensation, and few other artists anywhere in Western art had even tried – or perhaps dared – to publicly show what the recent war was really like for its combatants. The atmosphere in the picture, permeated by mist or dust, or both, suggests the immediate aftermath of an early morning bombardment. Exposing the cruelty of modern war machinery, a decomposing soldier is offered up on what appear to be girders and/or rifles with bayonets attached, as if lain on an altar as Christian sacrifice. Other bodies are shown in various stages of putrefaction, recalling that land repeatedly pounded by mines caused the dead from previous battles to resurface and where bodily remains and soil eventually constituted the morbid admixture of trench walls. The Trench by no means exaggerated the war; for veterans, it was just a picture, no more than a recollection of what they had to endure, as one German soldier recalled: [A] heavy barrage started which pushed us from one crater to the next one; the wounded screamed and groaned with pain and perished in misery [. . .] – there is no way of carrying them back. Shellfire day and night – often there is a hail of 10 or 20 shells every second, one of them would bury us and the next would dig us out again. Our lieutenant was crying like a baby. Well, the men were lying there, here a foot missing, there the arms, completely shredded. God, it was terrible. You can’t possibly imagine this horror, nobody can who has not gone through this.28

The Trench was an objective representation of its subject; though contrived from memory and possibly other visual aids, forms are not exaggerated and the motifs and cues that determined the sociopolitical context of the war amputee pictures are absent. Though only preserved in black and white photographs, one can still appreciate its profusion of forms, tonal range, contrasting textures and attentiveness 27 T h e generally agreed dimensions, 250 × 227 cm, differ from those given in Paul Ferdinand Schmidt’s review of the painting’s exhibition in Berlin below. 28 German infantryman writing about the Battle of Verdun, 2 July 1916, quoted in Bernd Ulrich and Benjamin Ziemann, eds., German Soldiers in the Great War. Letters and Eyewitness Accounts (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2010), 80–1.

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to detail, all of which unite to give the picture’s disturbing content a disconcerting sensuousness. High-quality reproductions reveal that Dix used a combination of smooth, layered transparent oil glazes and thick impasto in the fore and middle ground; as he recalled, he used a coarse hessian canvas in order to give the painting a strong ground.29 Layered transparent glazes, where colour is built gradually and modifies the hues beneath, build luminosity, and here they possibly enlivened the reds and earth tones of the wounds and mud, making them more seductive and lifelike. A bas-relief of sorts was created by strategically superimposing areas of thick impasto, throwing into sharp focus the haemorrhaging mass of gelatinous innards, viscous blood and bones. When a photograph of The Trench is viewed at the same scale as the painting, the trench and its bodies are almost life-size, positioning the viewer as about to step into the trench, the body parts in the foreground at one’s feet. On the viewer’s path, at the centre, a soldier’s brains spew from his smashed skull. To the right of this figure lies the skull of another, rendered anonymous by the fattened worms that bulge through his eye sockets. In the bottom right corner lies a head, tongue lolling from its open mouth that could, based on other pieces, pass for a self-portrait – perhaps a visual signature of sorts. Just above these figures, two arms stretch towards the viewer from the mass, inviting one again into the composition. Beneath them all are the fleshless bones of those killed months or even years beforehand. Art historian Alfred Salmony, a veteran of the war, provided insight to how the picture could be received by veterans and was prescient in how the picture would be received by the public. He also usefully described its colouration: [One descends] a small staircase, enters the courtyard and after a small turn to the right stands in front of a grey curtain [and] then, disregarding [the municipal council’s] caution, one enters the Dix gallery. [. . .] The people stand in silence, art historians say Grünewald and then look very satisfied, the outraged claim Musée Wiertz and look away. [. . .] The first impression is simply outrageous colours. Slowly one comprehends in horror. A trench is completely shot, torn material mixes with tattered bodies, wooden supports splintered, iron bars bent, wire. The gas mask and wristwatch remain intact. The puddle of phosphor forms the colour centre-point. Intestines, flesh and blood are strewn about. Some of the corpses are decomposing, white worms creep out, some seem fresh. Soldiers with torn faces remain in a strange standing position, one impaled on supports. In the mountains in the background dawn breaks in glorious colours. That is how it was on autumn days in the trenches south of Soissons. The picture knows

29 Schmidt and Dix, Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis, 268.

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Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture no tendency, only meticulously accurate factual portrayal: this is war. [. . .] Dix paints without nightmare, without a thrill [. . .]. One does not understand these steel nerves. No one else would have been able to represent these heaped-up horrors in detail, to build a picture with them. [. . .]. The city of Cologne and its museum director will be attacked and praised for this acquisition [. . .]. Dix paints with a mature mastery of his means [. . .], as he must, with uninhibited creative power, from the abundance of seen experiences.30

Another review describes a dull sky ‘beckoning a pale ironic rainbow, the biblical document of peace’, brain matter ‘swell[ing] out of open skulls like thick red fruit jelly’ and ‘strong, slimy, glittering colours [. . .] that one might take for the representation of a saltwater aquarium full of adventurous creatures, half animal, half plant’.31 The comparison to Grünewald, known for his harrowing portrayal of the Crucifixion in the Isenheim Altar, was unsurprising, as was the reference to Antoine Wiertz (1806–65), the romantic Belgian painter controversial in his time for his large-scale compositions of excessive drama, focusing on dread or death. As Salmony delineates, however, The Trench was not excess, not the workings of the imagination, only the recollection of a monstrous reality. Dix’s naturalistic portrayal of trench warfare in late 1923 was clearly at odds with the generally sanitized imagery presented to the public in popular print media, which was designed to comfort, not confront. For example, the collectable, large-format Hindenburg-Denkmal für das deutsche Volk (Hindenburg Memorial to the German People) (1923), published to mark the general’s seventy-fifth birthday, was replete with photographs and reproductions of art that portrayed a wide range of events and activities on and off the battlefield, but avoided stressful imagery of bloodshed (Figure 26).32 More complexly, however, The Trench’s depiction of violence correlated with ideologically and politically competing narratives by fellow veterans, who were as unflinching in their written accounts as Dix had been with paint. The popularity of these works indicated a thirst for ‘authentic’ accounts of the war among the German public and included, for example, Henri Barbusse’s pacifist novel Under Fire, which had been published in German in Die Weissen Blätter in 1917 in advance of a full German translation appearing in 1918, while 30 Alfred Salmony, ‘Die neue Galerie des 17. bis 20. Jahrhunderts im Museum Wallraf-Richartz in Köln’, Der Cicerone (Leipzig), 10 January 1924, 8. Salmony was assistant curator of the Cologne City Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne. 31 Walter Schmits, ‘Ein Bild des Krieges’, Kölnische Zeitung (Cologne), 7 December 1923, Erste Morgen-Ausgabe, 2. 32 Paul Lindenberg, ed., Hindenburg Denkmal für das deutsche Volk. Eine Ehrengabe zum 75. Geburtstage des Generalfeldmarschalls (Berlin: Vaterländischer Verlag, 1923).

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Figure 26 Karl Wagner, Aus den Kämpfen in der Champagne 1914: Abwehr eines französischen Überfalls auf eine unserer Sappen nördlich Beauséjour (From the battles in Champagne 1914: repelling a French attack on one of our saps north of Beauséjour). After a sketch by frontline soldier Wilhelm Buddenberg, in Hindenberg-Denkmal für das deutsche Volk, plate after p. 80.

conservative revolutionary writer Ernst Jünger’s pro-militant In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel) (1920) gained immediate widespread acclaim.33 What separated pacifist and conservative accounts, and worth considering in relation to the reception of The Trench, was the conservatives’ post-war preservation of the model of heroic masculinity shaped before and during the war and which, much like that of all the belligerent nations, forwarded the notion that self-sacrifice in defence of the nation was the noblest of acts. In fact, Jünger heralded an ostensibly more potent ‘new warriorhood’ born through survival of industrialized warfare in a heavily rewritten version of Storm of Steel in 1924. 33 Other equally graphic German literary accounts had appeared earlier, such as Charlot Strasser’s In Völker zerrissen (To Torn Nations) (1916) and Andreas Latzko’s Menschen im Krieg (People at War) (1917) which were first published by the pacifist Rascher Verlag in Zurich. Strasser’s work gained little traction and Latzko’s was supressed in the warring countries and consequently largely forgotten. See Albert M. Debrunner, ‘Bücher gegen den Krieg : René Schickeles “Europäische Bibliothek”’, Librarium: Zeitschrift der Schweizerischen BibliophilenGesellschaft 44, no. 2 (2001): 100–1. http://doi​.org​/10​.5169​/seals​-388704.

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Unlike the self-published original, which appealed to some pacifists due to its unblinkered description of the harshest aspects of warfare, this new version was bathed anew in a fiercely nationalist narrative, explicit in its presentation of the German soldier as bloodthirsty in his defence of his homeland and who was reborn through his survival. Such a narrative was fortifying and soothing and found fertile ground in the ideology of the numerous Freikorps regiments, whose members’ popular novels and memoirs, of which no fewer than 250 were published during the Weimar era and beyond, expanded upon Jünger’s new warrior narrative and indicated its attractiveness to the public in the wake of the nation’s shattered ego. Klaus Theweleit’s memorable analysis of the Freikorps literature reveals just how seductively the freebooters, in blackly super-heroic passages, promulgated a mythical image of the war experience: These men were living guns, with melinite muscles and tripod legs; their eyes narrowed to slits, thin blue horizons looking out toward men swarming forward between branches and tree trunks; drunk, red wine in their bellies, like tanked-up motors turned loose with no brakes to hold them. If was as if I myself could feel every jolt that shook the metal parts of the gun as a bullet slicing into warm, living human bodies. A wicked pleasure, was I now perhaps one with the weapon? Was I not machine – cold metal? A thousand rounds tore outward, with never an inhibition to hold them; Pahlen’s gun glowed hot, and his fingers blistered. But he kept on shooting; he felt nothing, only deathblow raining outward from a small beast raging bloodthirsty in his hands . . . The Bolshevists were caught unaware; their corpses were banked high.34

As such, The Trench’s relationship to more ardently pacifist or reactionary material was complex. Some Freikorps at least seemed to relish the mire and blood of the battlefield in all its pain and grotesqueness. As Hungarian art critic Ernő (Ernst) Kállai observed in 1927:

34 Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol. 2. Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, trans. Erica Carter and Chris Turner, 2 vols (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1989), 179–80. These passages are (top down) from Ernst von Salomon, Die Kadetten (The Cadets, 1933), 66–7; von Salomon, Die Geächteten (translated as The Outlaws), 1930, 100, a fictionalized account of von Salomon's exploits as a Freikorps fighter; and Edwin Erich Dwinger, Die letzten Reiter (The Last Riders), 1935, 109. According to Jessica Benjamin and Anson Rabinbach’s foreword to Male Fantasies, the Freikorps literature was so popular that editions sold in hundreds of thousands. See Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol. 2, x. It should be noted that Germany was no exception in postwar military mobilization, which was a feature across the former belligerent nations of the war. See Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, eds, War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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The painter’s obsession with the ideas of the horrors of war shifts them to a realm of monumentality in which it is completely unimportant whether one protests the monstrous event or merely, with shuddering, rapt devotion, allows it to wash over one. Dix’s Schutzengraben could just as easily be the object of supreme adoration of a fanatic worshipper of the god of war as it could be pacifist propaganda.35

Yet, with its entire focus on shattered dead German soldiers’ bodies, and absence of a framing narrative, The Trench arguably resonated better with – or even bolstered – pacifist narratives amid the reawakened nationalistic feeling in late 1923 and 1924, even if Dix intended nothing more than an objective representation of trench warfare. Expressionist writer Max Hermann-Neiβe, famously portrayed by his friend Georg Grosz during the 1920s, summarized pacifist criticism of nationalistic rhetoric when in September 1924, in reviewing Dix’s suite of etchings The War, he wrote that, Instead of passing over in repentant silence the day when ten years ago all hellish spirits were let go, instead of not making the whole world aware of the sorrows and hardships it was cast into [. . .], instead of not reminding the widows, the orphans, the war amputees again what agony and what misery was inflicted upon them, the ten-year return of this unfortunate date was celebrated with all the official pomp and all the pretentious club-life enthusiasm, with which the stupid are offered a mood-setting show of glorious or joyful memorial festivities.36

As it turned out, and as the controversy stirred by the picture indicated, the German public and critics alike had never been so aroused – or more conflicted – by an image of war. In the tense atmosphere of occupied Cologne, where foreign soldiers were a regular feature of the city streets, it was little wonder that such a viscerally expressive picture of death on the battlefield by a German artist could prove unsettling. One of the earliest surviving reproductions of the painting was in the November 1923 edition of Das Kunstblatt, accompanying a discussion on the ‘post-Expressionist situation’ by established art historian Paul Fechter, an early supporter of German Expressionism, who was unimpressed by Dix’s (and others’) growing tendency towards a naturalistic or veristic style:

35 Ernst Kállai, ‘The Daemonic Power of Satire’, originally published in the March 1927 issue of Das Kunstblatt, reproduced and translated in Otto Dix, ed. Olaf Peters (New York: Prestel, 2010), 109. (108–11) 36 Max Hermann-Neiße, ‘Ein wichtiges Kriegsgedenkbuch’, Die Aktion XIV, no. 17/18 (End September 1924): 532.

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Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture It was Ludwig Meidner who [. . .] first raised the principle of a new naturalism: ‘What matters tomorrow, what I and others need,’ he wrote [. . .], ‘is a fanatic, fervent naturalism [. . .] and unwavering truthfulness. We must create the big visions – how can we do that differently than with the forms of the visible world!’ [. . .] That was five years ago: today this new naturalism is more than clearly visible not only in painting, but also in young literature. Otto Dix's pictures describe it in exactly the same way as the dramas by Hans Henny Jahnn, as [Arnolt] Bronnen’s ‘Parricide’ or Bert Brecht's ‘Drums in the Night’. And only for the sake of the representational, for the sake of bare, so-called nature, which has nothing to do with art. [. . .] Here the new intention, the bias-free naturalism, which has not entirely wrongly been called verism, became even more clearly visible.37

Fechter, as he had already written in 1916, believed that the war’s uniqueness ‘ultimately scoff[ed] at any kind of representation’. He had praised Ludwig Dettmann’s representational work in which were recorded ‘the flames of the destroyed houses [. . .], the dead l[ying] bloody and torn in the ditches’ as the strongest of the war to 1916.38 But, he continued, the ‘immense complex of emotions encompassed by the word war, meanwhile, begs for further expression. Pure representation is out of the question; it is limited to the "That's how it is". Instead, a world of new possibilities suddenly opens up for the efforts of the younger generation. [. . .] Here, war becomes the strongest promoter of what is truly modern; where one art form finds its limits, it sets the greatest task for the other, the developing one.39

Fechter saw in Dix (and his literary counterparts) little more than an unsophisticated, overwrought naturalism that unnecessarily emphasized the unsettling. Cultural critic Walther Schmits dug much deeper, praising Dix’s great skill but condemning the work as pacifist propaganda that was harmful in its evident power as dystopian war memorialization. Schmit’s negative view of pacifism was common, and as Richard Bessel recalls, Pacifism found no appreciable echo in Weimar Germany and generally remained a term of political abuse, not a badge of honour. Even where the First World War was presented to the German public in all its gruesome horror – this was the first major European war in the age of amateur photography, and consequently, the wretched conditions created by the conflict were recorded as no war had ever 37 Fechter, ‘Die Nachexpressionismus Situation’, 323–4. 38 Paul Fechter, ‘Wege zur Kriegskunst’, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 37, March (1916): 476. 39 Fechter, ‘Wege zur Kriegskunst’, 476.

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been recorded before – the contribution of those who fought in it was described almost ritualistically as an example of ‘unparalleled immortal German heroism.40

Schmits’ exceptionally long review, which contrasted the work with Grünewald’s ‘embarrassingly naturalistic’ tortured sinner at Karlsruhe (in reference to the Tauberischofsheim Altarpiece), ‘which at least did not produce purely physical disgust’, marked the beginning of a very public debate on The Trench, which even in negative reviews betrayed the work’s perceived incisiveness as war memorialization and its ability to gnaw at Germany’s deeply troubled comingto-terms with the loss of the war: It has been praised as a moral act. This can only be understood here as pacifist propaganda. That war is a testament to human imperfection is now more than ever a truism. [. . .] Anyone who has to be taught by Dix that the warrior does not always fall in heroic battle with the beautiful pose of all war pictures and a hurray [. . .] and then is buried by grieving comrades to the muffled beat of drums, but that suffering and dying very often takes place in the most disgusting forms, either has an extraordinarily lethargic imagination or [. . .] has avoided forming from oral and written reports a picture of the war as it is. There is therefore precious little to be said about the opinion of the people who were first converted to pacifism by Dix's painting; they are feeble-minded, superficial aestheticians. Every reasonable person is a pacifist in the sense that he sees war as a terrible calamity. [. . .] To a far greater degree than before the unfortunate year of 1914, war is once again appearing as a natural political tool. [. . .] We must still regard war as a possibly unavoidable last resort, even as we hope that later, brighter times will eradicate this plague of the peoples. For this reason, a pacifism such as Dix's picture proclaims does not seem harmless from the national point of view. He appeals to the nerves in a matter that requires the coolest consideration and weakens the temporarily indispensable inner warlike power of the people by describing war as nothing but pointless, devoid of any higher thought and full of unspeakably repellent horror.41

Schmits’s views were quickly contested in a letter received by and printed in the socialist Rheinische Zeitung, which argued that If war really does appear again today as a natural means of politics, then even the dull minded should know what is actually demanded of every fighter. It is unworthy, to say the least, to leave the masses, especially the youth, in any way ignorant of the nature of this means. [. . .] The picture does not want to edify; it 40 Richard Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 262–3. 41 Schmits, ‘Ein Bild des Krieges’, 2.

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Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture wants to shake up. There are times when art should above all be a guide and not a playmate.42

In response, Schmits reaffirmed his views, adding that he and his newspaper had no objection to enlightening the people as to the nature of war but that Dix’s one-sidedly horrifying ‘panopticon’ represses all such considerations by directing our attention exclusively to certain horrible consequences of war confused with war as such – all of this with a force that only observers with firm, independent judgment can withstand. Accordingly, it does not at all clarify opinions about the war but confuses them in a way that can become dangerous for the self-assertion of our people. [. . .] A painting with Dixian ruthlessness that provided a glimpse into a clinic and portrayed those with sexual diseases gnawed by hideous ulcers, would do an excellent job of discouraging frivolous intercourse. [Dix’s picture] is a degradation of art; it becomes the servant in the house where it should rule.

Its focus on horror, he argued, obfuscated public perception of it as a work of art, whose job it was (as he had said in the earlier article), ‘to elevate and purify’. Schmits admitted in the second article to receiving a letter signed by several soldiers, who criticized his statements against Dix's picture as an attempt to ‘erase the memory of the deeds of our army’. In his defence, Schmits responded that ‘far too little is thought of today about our brave army due to pacifist ideology. [A] heap of mutilated corpses speaks as little of the exploits of war as a heap of corpses washed up on the seashore speak of the deeds of bold seafarers’.43 The latter was true but it was also true that concealing the uglier, more difficult truths worked to play down the hardships of modern soldiery. In contrast to Fechter and Schmits, liberal art historian and editor of Das Kunstblatt Paul Westheim lauded The Trench for ‘swapp[ing] garden arbour lighting for a sharply focused image of war of a generation that had bleeding and murdering and destruction before its eyes [and] portrayed with the inexorable fanaticism’ that Stephan Lochner conceived in his ‘Last Judgment’. This war image was ‘not a cheerful attack, but a glimpse into a trench over which the barrages are raging, the bath of blood and steel in the truest sense’ and was a ‘fine example of the new verism practised by the younger artists, which beyond the aesthetic effect, is still looking for further and stronger possibilities of impact in the ethical and social’.44 42 Letter to the Rheinische Zeitung, quoted in Walter Schmits, ‘Nochmals das Kriegsbild von Dix’, Kölnische Zeitung (Cologne), 14 December 1923, Abend-Ausgabe, 2. 43 Schmits, ‘Nochmals das Kriegsbild von Dix’, 2. 44 Paul Westheim, ‘Eine moderne Galerie im Kölner Wallraf-Richardz Museum’, Frankfurter Zeitung (Frankfurt), 11 January 1924, Zweites Morgenblatt, 1.

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It was clear from those early reviews that the picture’s engagement with questions of ethics regarding war memorialization was what stirred critics and the public alike in Cologne. It became such a draw that the Frankfurter Zeitung could report by the end of January 1924 that the picture that had so divided public opinion had become the central focus of the modern section of the Wallraf-Richardz and attracted visitors to the museum who otherwise may not have bothered to visit.45 Its big draw in Cologne perhaps, and Prussian Academy of Arts president Max Liebermann’s interest in it, led to The Trench being shown in the annual Frühjahrsausstellung (Spring Exhibition) at the Prussian Academy of Arts which opened on 10 May 1924. It was one of the few works chosen for illustration in the accompanying catalogue.46 Though removed from the more troubled context of occupied Cologne, its reception was equally mixed for much the same reasons. The earliest batch of reviews appeared on opening day, among them Max Osborn’s for the liberal Vossische Zeitung, which only briefly mentioned the ‘Grünewald-infused, fanatically denunciatory war picture by Dix from the Cologne museum’, while the writer for the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger noted Dix’s ‘eminent’ ability but considered it less exciting than the ‘street battle’ picture shown at the earlier Sezession show, despite the accumulation of dead bodies.47 But Fritz Stahl, art writer and editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, wrote eloquently of the painting’s power to thwart the seductiveness of pro-militant rhetoric and its absolute sobriety in face of the outmoded, patriotic, romantic war narratives: The exhibition contains a sensation [. . .], which the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne was audacious enough to acquire. By the way, so that there is no misunderstanding, the artist did not paint sensation. On the contrary. Here, too, he possesses the almost dry objectivity, which is his style. There are still millions who want war, who believe in the romantic lie that is cast over the unthinkably gruesome truth of modern war. Dix pulls the curtain back with a calm gesture: See for yourself! And one sees. A small excerpt. A stretch of trench after the battle. Not the few dead people who even war-loving draftsmen could not completely deny. But no people at all. [. . .] There are only bloody or rotting rags of human bodies. No eloquence in the world can speak more powerfully than 45 G Bayer, ‘Kölnerbrief ’, Frankfurter Zeitung (Frankfurt), 29 January 1924. (page number unknown by archive) 46 A full-page detail of the central area of the painting is shown. Akademie der Künste. Frühjahrsausstellung Mai/Juni 1924, ed. Akademie der Künste zu Berlin, 2nd edn (Berlin: Verlag der Akademie der Künste zu Berlin, 1924), 41. 47 W. G., ‘Die Akademie der Künste. Zur Eröffnung der Frühjahrsausstellung’, Berliner LokalAnzeiger (Abendausgabe) (Berlin), 10 May 1924, 2–3. The reviewer refers to Barricade (1920); Max Osborn, ‘Frühjahrs-Akademie’, Vossische Zeitung (Berlin), 10 May 1924.

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Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture the silent image. One should be able to force the enthusiastic home warriors to confront their rhetoric with this sight, in front of the unsuspecting youth who they seduce with antiquated war poetry. The form and type of painting are not to be considered here. The whole effect is based on the almost still life-like objectivity. It took steely will and steely nerve to paint it like that, and in the sole manner it could be painted.48

Fechter’s review of the picture’s Berlin instalment continued his criticism of the picture’s aesthetic qualities and saw the picture’s inclusion in Berlin as no more than a superfluous point of interest, adding that Dix is a painter who as a painter is only in part beyond the Richard-Müller bilge of his beginnings. [I]n order to be of interest as painting and not just as a (past) expression of time, the picture would have to be much better painted: the love of hate would have to trap the details – and the horror, because it arouses not horror but only curiosity [. . .]. This is lost, like post-war literature – and rightly so.49

Fechter saw, with some justification, the influence of Dix’s later adversary and NSDAP member Richard Müller, a professor of drawing at the Dresden Academy when Dix studied there, and known for his extremely precise and highly detailed drawings and paintings – and taste for the unsettling (e.g. his Verhungerte Katze (Starved Cat, 1905)). It is contested whether Müller actually taught Dix or not, though in 1928, Erich Knauf recalled that ‘a group of artists emerged from the environment of the Dresden Academy professor Richard Müller, which became of enormous importance for the visual arts of the present. This group includes Otto Dix [. . .]. And was it with this teacher that Dix and [Kurt] Günther started? Yes, they learned how to draw from him’.50 Even if not taught by Müller, Dix likely saw the interior of Müller’s drawing studio and was influenced by the great 48 Fritz Stahl, ‘Frühjahrausstellung der Akademie’, Berliner Tageblatt (Berlin), 10 May 1924, AbendAusgabe, 3. Stahl, real name Siegfried Lilianthal, wrote and edited under pseudonyms. 49 Paul Fechter, ‘Die Ausstellung der Akademie. Zur heutigen Eröffnung’, Deutsche allgemeine Zeitung (Berlin), 10 May 1924, Abendblatt, 2. 50 Erich Knauf, Empörung und Gestaltung: Künstlerprofile von Daumier bis Kollwitz (Berlin: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1928), 185. Knauf continued that both artists later broke free of Müller’s style. Knauf (1895–1944) was murdered by the Nazis on 2 May 1944, after being sentenced to death for ‘undermining military morale’. Günther (1893–1955) worked closely with Dix and attended Müller’s classes. The archives at the Dresden Academy of Art, at the time of writing, contain nothing that confirms Dix as Müller’s student. Dix is named as Müller’s student in Corinna Wodarz, ‘Müller, Richard’, Neue Deutsche Biographie 18 (1997), https://www.deutsche-biographie. de/pnd119189100.html#ndbcontent (accessed 5 August 2023). According to Löffler, Dix had intended to join Müller’s class in 1919 but this, it seems, did not materialize: ‘Dix was sufficiently modest to wish to return to the exercises in Richard Müller's drawing class, but [Robert] Sterl realized that his talent was too considerable for that and directed him to the painting class under Max Feldbauer, where Dix then studied for the following semester’. Löffler, Otto Dix. Life and Work, 16–17.

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accuracy and extremely fine detail in his drawing technique.51 In facture, however, The Trench was completely at odds with Müller’s polished contours and smooth tonal transitions, and Müller never described such aspects of warfare in his art. Glaser remained as unimpressed by the ‘much-discussed’ Trench as he had been by Dix’s Dadaist pictures, and like Fechter found it formally lacking, seeing only a deliberately sensational ‘gigantic still life of horror’ resembling ‘a garden full of cheerfully exotic plants’ that smelled of perfume rather than decay. While it showcased the artist’s talent, it was also ‘an act of artistic violence, a hermaphrodite that [was] neither captivating nor able to please the viewer’.52 In a similar vein, Paul Friedrich thought that this ‘symphony in blood’ was ‘painted in such a way that one thinks one is looking at deep-sea fauna rather than shredded entrails and bodies’.53 Senior art historian Julius Meier-Graefe went much further in his criticism, questioning the Academy’s credibility of late and The Trench’s inclusion as symptomatic of the museum’s poor choices. Meier-Graefe’s review is one of the most frequently referenced, notable for its insults towards the picture and Dix personally, but also because it sparked a public spat between Meier-Graefe and Prussian Academy president and celebrated painter Max Liebermann, which centred on the picture’s confrontational war memorialization. Meier-Graefe, if vexed by the ‘badly-painted’ representation of the German war dead, which made him long for ‘[the painter] Anton von Werner's waxed boots’ (and betrayed Meier-Graefe’s oldfashioned preferences in representing war), he was embarrassed by its damaging ‘pacifist’ message in Cologne where the British and French occupiers could view it: There was something special about this exhibition that eluded the usual idioms, a picture that stung the hardened sceptic in the backbone: The Trench by Dix. [. . .] I saw the picture a few months ago in an even more sacred place, in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. [. . .] I couldn't resist conveying to the director of this art institute that the acquisition of this picture exceeded the limits of permissible nonsense and even the brutality of this manifestation no longer has anything to do with the ifs and buts of art gossip but is a public nuisance. [. . .] The President once said in his pre-office time that a well-painted cabbage stalk is better than a mediocrely painted Madonna. [. . .] The problem

51 Dietrich Schubert suggests that Dix may have been influenced by Müller’s extreme naturalism, though did not share Müller’s interest in morbid subject matter. Dietrich Schubert, Otto Dix, 8th edn (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2014), 46, 50. 52 Curt Glaser, ‘Die Frühjahrausstellung der Akademie’, Berliner Börsen-Courier (Beilage Nr. 221) (Berlin), 11 May 1924, 5. 53 Paul Friedrich, ‘Der Frühjahrausstellung der Akademie’, Berliner Börsen-Zeitung (Berlin), 11 May 1924, 4.

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Westheim wrote to the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung defending the painting, stating that Meier-Graefe’s review went beyond the scope of a critique, in which he called for censorship of a museum and the suppression of a work of art.55 Fechter responded, as one might expect, on Meier-Graefe’s side but this time adding his thoughts on the problematic exhibition of the picture in Cologne: The fact that Meier-Graefe tried and is still trying to remove this picture from the museum in Cologne deserves thanks and not the foolish accusation of denunciation. Because Cologne is occupied territory – and something like this is to be officially presented to the British and their French and Belgian guests in the museum as a document of today's German convictions – that is, to arouse ideas on the mentality of the Germans, which only drive the gentlemen over there to ever new contempt and arrogance. And if Liebermann had to bring this eyesore to his academy exhibition – although he will certainly find it hideous too – then he should have kept it here [in Berlin] at least for the time being. After all, it does 54 Julius Meier-Graefe, ‘Die Austellung in die Akademie’, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. Ausgabe für Groβ-Berlin (Berlin), 2 July 1924, 23–4. The ‘second anatomy of Rembrandt’ that Meier-Graefe refers to is likely The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deijman (1656), painted after the somewhat more famous Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632). 55 Paul Westheim, quoted in Paul Fechter, ‘Der kölner Dix’, Deutsche Allegeime Zeitung (Berlin), 8 July 1924, 2.

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less damage here than in Cologne. Here, it affects only the circles of art, and they are quite irrelevant: there it affects life. And there one should intervene – even if one has to mobilize the city fathers oneself. No offense, Mr. Westheim.56

Because the picture was such a big draw, both Meier-Graefe’s and Fechter’s real concern was that such a work was both defeating and embarrassing as an example of contemporary German culture, and especially demeaning for the people in the Rhineland, whose lives had been heavily impacted by the Occupation. The negative criticism, though much milder, continued in a review by leading art journal Kunst und Künstler’s editor Karl Scheffler. Focusing on its formal qualities, he repeated Schmit’s description of an unconvincing, aquarium-like, panopticon: It shows how big the gap is between Dix and George Grosz. Dix wants to be a Vereshchagin but hesitates to be called a realist. He does not represent a trench with mutilated, decaying human carcasses plainly, but rather as Strathmann painted: preciously ornamental. His picture looks like a piece of deep sea, like an aquarium. This blatantly relentless art is perfumed, the cruelty is sentimental. It is reported that the Cologne Museum hides this picture behind a curtain and only shows it on request. A panopticon joke. The picture is bad. It is neither realistic nor spiritual, it does not know how to appeal with respect to subject matter or form.57

Rounding up the batch of negative reviews was art historian Hans Rosenhagen, whose review summarized the others in calling it a ‘panopticon’ of ‘painted propaganda against the war which does not betray a trace of an aesthetic conscience’ and that perhaps the Society for the Fight against Venereal Diseases would one day commission Dix and ‘anticipate the most surprising painterly charms from the most disgusting symptoms of illness’.58 Scheffler’s comparison with the Symbolist Karl Strathmann is hardly tenable and Dix was not a German Vasily Vereshchagin. The latter’s justly celebrated 56 Fechter, ‘Der Kölner Dix’, 2. Fechter’s article was reproduced in the autumn edition of Alfred Flechtheim’s Der Querschnitt. See Paul Fechter, ‘Dix, Meier-Graefe, Stinnes und Westheim. (Stinnes auf Seiten Meier-Graefes.)’, Der Querschnitt, 1924, 261–2. On p. 176 of the same issue of Der Querschnitt, an anonymous author wrote that ‘Saxony is trump in Germany. [. . .] Otto Dix [. . .] knows how to mix Saxon literature with Rhenish humour: The War, in the Wallraf-Richardz Museum comes from Gera [Dix’s birthplace]’. 57 Karl Scheffler, ‘Kritik der Ausstellung’, Kunst und Künstler 22, no. 10 (July 1924): 288–9. Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin (German: Wereschtschagin, 1842–1904) was one of Russia’s most famous war artists and one of the country’s first to gain international attention. His realistic depictions of war meant that many of them were not publicly shown. 58 H. (Hans) R. (Rosenhagen), ‘Frühjahrsausstellung der Berliner Akademie’, Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst 58, no. 2/3 (August 1924): 32.

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war pictures, ironic in their strikingly lyrical representations, have, unlike Dix’s, a clearly delineated anti-war message that pointed most of all to the indulgent cruelty of conquerors. Scheffler’s negative criticism may have been fired in part by his ongoing ‘Berlin Museum War’ against Ludwig Justi, the director of the Berlin National Gallery and founder of the world’s first public collection of contemporary art, which opened in the Kronprinzenpalais in 1919. Scheffler, poorly disposed towards avant-garde German art, was fiercely opposed to Justi’s use of the palace for exhibiting it and Justi, then an admirer of Dix’s work, was planning a solo exhibition of Dix’s watercolours to take place at the Kronprinzenpalais in November that year.59 Beyond these reviews in newspapers and popular magazines appeared in August 1924 an article in Die Weltbühne by Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, who was abruptly dismissed from his post as director of the Dresden City Gallery in January 1924, ostensibly because his acquisition choices, which included Dix’s War Cripples in 1920, were opposed by reactionary circles.60 He praised the picture’s veracity as a satire of those who failed to accept the realities of the war – which seemed to have Meier-Graefe’s response in mind – but added that it was an affirmation of peace in the eyes of those who truly understood the work: If you really want to see a piece from our great times: you can find it in the first room of the Academy exhibition on Pariser Platz. The only picture that is worth visiting is by Otto Dix, and Max Liebermann himself asked for it from the Cologne Museum for this summer. This picture is called and represents: the ‘trenches.’ We know how it was in such a comfortable little trench. But the brave home fighters, the sweet prolongers of war [. . .] – they scream: Unheard of! Our steel bath, it never looked like this! Well, this steel bath, as it presented itself after a hundred hours of barrage over the cosy home of our front-line soldiers: Dix has documented it, with steel nerves, for all time; every square centimetre of this giant canvas (2.5 by 2.5 meters) is filled with horror, stench, and the feasting of teeming maggots. Nothing is exaggerated in this picture – it is just compressed. What was left of the deceased in ten places in the shattered trench, Dix has piled up in one spot. If one thinks of the reality that was painted in 1917, one’s heart freezes with hopeless horror. One man, one soldier among many, lay in the trenches for four years and experienced the ineffable horror of what the word war means. Five years after graduating, he sat down and painted what was bothering him. And it was created as a great work of art: a commitment to 59 T h e exhibition of Dix’s watercolours, held during November and December 1924, ran concurrent with exhibitions of work by Lesser Ury (1861–1931) and Lovis Corinth (1858–1925). 60 Gisbert Porstmann, ‘Paul Ferdinand Schmidt un sein Engagement für die Moderne in den Städtischen Sammlungen’, Dresdner Hefte 22, no. 77 (9 January 2004): 15–16.

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life in the cruellest depiction of death that has probably ever been painted (with the only exception of Grünewald's crucifixion). With this image, this vision of accomplished satire, he redeems himself and he redeems us. We recognize the horror of reality and, with a liberated gaze, look beyond the picture to a human future where there is no more injustice and oppression. The perfect statement of what purifies the mind and gives birth to hope, on which alone we still live. This is the whole point of Otto Dix's art, which seems so cool and assertive. He sees what there is of the horrors of existence (not just war: he relentlessly holds on to all misery), and he paints it with fanatical coldness. And by painting it, it is done. With it we recognize the finiteness and surmountability of the present state of affairs and rise to the truth: that all this is only appearance, and that the spirit alone is capable of living and giving strength.61

Liebermann followed by lauding Secker’s acquisition in an open letter to the latter published in the Kölner Tageblatt and the Mannheimer Tagesblatt on 9 and 10 October respectively: In sixty years of practice, it has become an axiom to me that time and again the oldest aesthetic stupidities are spread about every new work of art, and that the size of the stupidity is in quadratic relation to the importance of the work. So what wonder if a critic now calls Dix's trench picture ‘a tendentious work of the worst kind’ and ‘without any artistic meaning’. As far as tendency is concerned, I believe that there is or cannot be a work of art that is not tendentious if one understands by tendency according to the true meaning of the word the intention to give life to the idea in the picture. Dix wanted to portray the gruesome and terrible things he had experienced in the forefront of the trenches for four years, to roll them off his soul; a tendency that even the reporter of that newspaper will recognize as legitimate. Dix’s picture is, so to speak, the personification of war. Not an episode of the drama such as has existed for centuries up to Horace Vernet and his epigone A[nton] V[on] Werner [. . .] The artist wanted to illustrate war as the most terrible thing in itself in the trench picture, without pathos and without Bengali fireworks. [. . .] Dix says: ‘Look at my picture, this is what it looks like in the trenches.’ And he not only has the right, but the duty to tell us [. . .]. To argue with someone who has a different way of thinking is useless [. . .]. I consider Dix's picture to be one of the most important works of the post-war period. It is a special achievement of yours to have acquired [it] for the Wallraf-Richartz Museum; although I cannot suppress my regret that it has not found its proper place in the Berlin National Gallery.62

61 Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, ‘Der Schützengraben’, Die Weltbühne 20, no. 32 (7 August 1924): 235–6. 62 Max Liebermann, ‘Brief an Hans F. Secker’, Kölner Tageblatt (Cologne), 9 October 1924, 2.

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Liebermann clearly underlined his belief in the picture as not only a key work but an essential work of German war memorialization, and saw in it, as Schmidt had, a meaningful memorialization that reaffirmed one’s survival in the act of creating it, and reflected in Dix’s words only years later, when he recalled that ‘you don't notice, as a young person you don't notice at all, that you were burdened inside. Because for years, for at least ten years I always had these dreams, in which I had to crawl through ruined houses, through passages which I could hardly get through. The ruins were constantly in my dreams’.63 In October 1924 several Rhineland-based artists rose to Dix’s defence against Meier-Graefe’s review in a letter published in Westheim’s Kunstblatt: We will only try to clear up a few errors that could result from [Meier-Graefe’s] essay. First of all, we who know Dix know that he was not interested in having a pacifist effect when he made the trench picture, he only did what Meier-Graefe demanded of the artists in 1914 and even threatened them with: ‘Woe to the artist, who does not experience today!’ Dix has experienced! The fact that the war was not like a spa for him and that his statement related to the steel bath is different from that of the war bards in his own home is a different matter and may displease war correspondent Meier-Graefe. The war gave us ‘gifts’: But Dix seems to have experienced this gift as poisoned. You write about the sanctuaries of Stephan Lochner, but what have you done to prevent the actual trench rather than the painted one from sweeping across those sanctuaries? Were you not an avid war correspondent? [. . .] Meier-Graefe, the war correspondent, and the officers from over here and over there are the real experts on a real trench. We artists living in the Rhineland stand by Dix and are pleased that Dr. Secker had the courage to take him into the municipal gallery. May Meier-Graefe continue to kiss the open stomach of Rembrandt's anatomy and feel at home with Anton von Werner's well-polished boots. F. W. Seiwert, (Heinrich) Hoerle, Anton Rüderppidt, Gerd Arntz, A. Kaufmann, Jankel Adler, Peter Abelen.64

In quoting Meier-Graefe, Dix’s supporters played on the latter’s words in an article published in the very first issue of the illustrated artists’ broadsheet Kriegszeit, which began ‘Der Krieg beschert uns. Wir sind andere seit gestern‘, and in the second paragraph began ‘Wehe dem Künstler der heute nicht erlebt!‘ (The war gave us ‘gifts’. We are different than yesterday [. . .] Woe to the artist who does not experience today!).65 63 Otto Dix (1965) quoted in Schmidt and Dix, Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis, 269. 64 Franz W. Seiwert, ‘Zu dem Artikel von Meier-Graefe: “Die Ausstellung in der Akademie”’, Das Kunstblatt 10, no. 10 (1924): 318. 65 Julius Meier-Graefe, ‘Siegesnachrichten’, Kriegszeit, no. 1 (31 August 1914).

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The assertion of Dix’s objectivity against any pacifist tendency was reaffirmed years later by the artist in a discussion with friends where he recalled that he had to experience the war, the hell of the barrages, and how someone might suddenly fall next to him, shot in the stomach, and because of that he was ‘not a pacifist at all’.66 Eventually, however, Meier-Graefe and his supporters had their way, bolstered by the head of the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Richard von Schnitzler, who sent Meier-Graefe’s article in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung to the Mayor of Cologne, Dr Konrad Adenauer.67 In January 1925 the painting was removed from the museum and returned to Karl Nierendorf. The director of the Schloßmuseum in Berlin, Hermann Schmitz, wrote to Adenauer in February 1925, expressing his satisfaction with the removal of the picture and outlining the imminent danger of the ‘decomposition’ of Rhenish culture.68 In the fallout, Paul Westheim had his responsibility for the Berliner Referat (Berlin (art) department) at the Frankfurter Zeitung withdrawn from him after the Trench dispute by the newspaper's editorin-chief in November 1924. Instead, it would be run by Meier-Graefe.69 Beyond German borders, the unnamed reviewer for the 14 June 1924 issue of New York’s Art News concluded, strangely enough all considered, that ‘the picture by Dix [. . .] is shown here for the first time. And Berlin approves Cologne’s choice! The picture is cruel in displaying the atrocities of war. But it is full of deep feeling and compassion for mankind and is masterful in technique’. The review suggests, though it is unclear, that at least at that moment, the picture was well received by some visitors in Berlin. And Dix’s newfound fame internationally was signalled by the Art News’ appraisal of the show as ‘awe-inspiring [. . .], a manifestation of the high standard of German art ranging from Franz von Stuck to Kokoschka and Dix’.70 The heated, disparate reception of The Trench, the most controversial German work of art of 1924 if not the decade, reached far beyond questions of aesthetics and delineated the troubled nature of German war memorialization. More broadly, perhaps, negative responses to the picture projected a residual longing for the pre-war image of an indestructible Germany, manifested in the freebooting regiments of the Freikorps and Stahlhelm, reflecting what Bessel 66 Schmidt and Dix, Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis, 255. 67 Dietrich Schubert, ‘Die Verfolgung des Gemäldes Schützengraben (1923) von Otto Dix’, in Kritik und Geschichte der Intoleranz, ed. Burckhard Dücker and Rolf Kloepfer (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2000), 358. 68 Schubert, ‘Die Verfolgung des Gemäldes Schützengraben’. 69 Schubert, ‘Die Verfolgung des Gemäldes Schützengraben’, 358–9. Schubert also notes that the Verband Deutscher Kunstkritiker (Association of German art critics), led by Max Osborn, and a group of artists, including Carl Einstein, Otto Dix, George Grosz, E. L. Kirchner, among others, protested against this. 70 Anonymous, ‘Berlin’, The Art News, 14 June 1924.

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describes as the country’s incomplete transition from a Kriegsgesellschaft (war society) to a Friedensgesellschaft (society of peace), instead remaining a post-war society.71 In a country in need of some reprieve from the memory of the lost war and its attendant consequences, it could come as no surprise that the soothing balm of heroic narratives such as Jünger’s Storm of Steel could find wider critical acceptance than dystopian works like The Trench. In line with the activities of numerous figures working in and beyond the arts in Germany and internationally, to mark the tenth anniversary of the outbreak of war on 1 August 1924 in activities that would see the year become tagged as ‘the anti-war year’, Dix produced the series of intaglio prints The War, dedicated to recording various facets of the war experience. Even if his intentions were not voiced as expressly pacifistic, his dystopian depiction of wartime violence and the use of reproducible media that could be disseminated more widely and economically, characterized the efforts of a number of the prominent pacifist figures of the time. These included the opening of Germany’s first anti-war museum by the remarkable Ernst Friedrich, who displayed there numerous images of horrifically injured soldiers, as well as those of illegal murders and post-war suffering, and published many of these photographs in the hugely successful multilingual book Krieg dem Kriege! (War against War!), which was intended to expose in greater measure the worst aspects of modern warfare.72 In art, Käthe Kollwitz, the renowned Berlin-based artist who had lost a son in the earliest weeks of the war and was deeply immersed in the anti-war movement, produced her series of seven woodcuts, War, which she produced as a highquality portfolio of the originals and a cheap print edition. Dix’s intaglios were exhibited strategically in a number of locations, to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the war.73 In a tactic similar to Kollwitz’s, The War was produced in a high quality edition of five portfolios in an edition of seventy, but also reproduced as a cheap book edition (at 1.20 Marks, later raised 71 Bessel, Germany after the First World War, 283. 72 Ernst Friedrich, Krieg dem Kriege! (Berlin: Freie Jugend, 1924). 73 It has been claimed that Dix exhibited some of the War portfolio, alongside Käthe Kollwitz’s War woodcuts, in Ernst Friedrich’s Anti-War Museum in Berlin, possibly in August 1924. Tommy Spree, Friedrich’s grandson, cites the Berliner Tageblatt around the time of the opening: ‘when one enters the hall, which for the time being serves the purpose of the museum, [. . .] the first thing that strikes you are the bloodcurdling domestic wartime etchings by Käthe Kollwitz and engravings by Otto Dix [. . .]. Pictures of horror! You turn away, shaking your head’. See Tommy Spree, Ich kenne keine ‘Feinde’ (Berlin: Anti-Kriegs Museum, 2000), 61. The citation has not been referenced, nor found in surviving issues of the newspaper for the corresponding dates. Yet, considering that Friedrich, the Moscow exhibition discussed below and the publication of the book Nie wieder Krieg [No More War] (1924/5), were all connected to the International Workers Aid in some way and Dix involved in a related book and exhibition, the exhibition of The War in Friedrich’s Museum may have occurred.

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to 2.40 Marks) of twenty-four offset prints with a foreword by the French pacifist writer Henri Barbusse, available from Nierendorf.74 This cheap edition had a print run of 10,000 with an express purpose, as Nierendorf wrote to Dix: 1,500 copies have been ordered for the big Anti-War Day by the unions, over 500 reviewer’s copies have been distributed. I sent a copy to all the important writers, also to all the left-wing papers and over 200 to the most well-known right-wing publications. Copies were also sent to 135 local groups of the peace association, the civil rights league, educational institutions, etc.75

The date of the prints’ exhibition and publication, planned as such, could not have been more fitting – 1 August was the tenth anniversary of the outbreak of the war, and in Henri Barbusse, Nierendorf had sourced arguably the most apt personality to write a foreword to the prints. The Berliner Tageblatt announced on 6 August 1924 that the prints were on exhibition at the Graphisches Kabinett I. B. Neumann at 232 Kurfürstendamm 232 in Berlin, which had been under the management of Karl Nierendorf since 1922.76 This show coincided with another in Berlin, Zehn Jahre Krieg (Ten Years of War), featuring war-themed works by Dix, George Grosz and Rudolf Schlichter, at Wieland Herzfelde’s Malik Bookshop on Köthener Strasse near Potsdamer Platz.77 The War was also shown in Frankfurt, opening in August at Zinglers Kabinett and probably the result of a collaboration with Nierendorf, while among other locations were the Trewendt & Granier publishing house in Breslau and the Neues Museum in Wiesbaden (as part of a show organized by the Nassauischer Kunstverein. There was also an international dimension: the intaglios were displayed at the art dealership Würthle & Sohn Nach[folger]), a branch of the Alfred Flechtheim Gallery on Vienna’s Weihburggasse and a result of Flechtheim’s affiliation with Dix and collaboration among the art dealers; Nierendorf ’s low-priced edition was also sold at the Würthle dealership (Figure 27).78 The War was Dix’s sixth series of intaglio prints and by far his most extensive. As has been widely noted, then and ever since, with The War Dix seemed to have made 74 Otto Dix, Der Krieg. 24 Offsetdrucke nach Originalen aus dem Radierwerk von Otto Dix (Berlin: Verlag Karl Nierendorf, 1924). 75 Karl Nierendorf (1924), quoted in Ulrike Lorenz, ‘Weltuntergang im Rückblick. 50 Radierungen von Otto Dix zum Antikriegsjahr 1924’, in Otto Dix. Der Krieg, ed. Franka Meritxell Henneke et al. (Berlin: Kunsthandel Jörg Maaß, 2015), 11. 76 Yvonne Groβ, Zwischen Dix und Mueller. Der Berliner Kunsthändler Florian Karsch und die Galerie Nierendorf (Berlin: Edition Andreae, 2014), 433–4. 77 Anonymous, ‘Berliner Kunstausstellungen’, Berliner Tageblatt (Berlin), 6 August 1924, 3. It is unknown which war-themed works were shown at the Malik exhibition. 78 Würthle & Sohn Nachf., ‘Der Krieg von Otto Dix’, Anzeiger für den Buch-, Kunst- und Musikalienhandel (Vienna), 19 September 1924, 440.

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Figure 27 Full-page advertisement announcing Verlag Karl Nierendorf ’s book of twenty-four offset prints from Der Krieg (The War), in Anzeiger für den Buch-, Kunstund Musikalienhandel, Vienna, 19 September 1924, and Verlag Karl Nierendorf, Der Krieg, 1924, front cover.

a deliberate attempt to emulate Goya’s Disasters of War (1810–20). Thematically similar though stylistically bearing little relationship to his many wartime pictures, the etchings emulated the stinging realism of The Trench. In addition to numerous, uncompromising images of broken and decaying corpses, they include victims of shell shock, the suffering of civilians, the mundanities of the mess-hall, mingling with the people of occupied areas, brothel visits and destroyed towns and landscapes. Drawing upon his memories of the battlefield, the titles of some of the prints delineate Dix’s witnessing of events in a specific place, for example: Gesehen am Stellung von Cléry-sur-Somme (Seen on the Escarpment at Cléry-sur-Somme) (print 28); Verwundungstransport im Houthulster Wald (Transporting the Wounded in Houthulst Forest) (print 47) and Tote vor der Stellung bei Tahure (Dead Men before the Position at Tahure) (print 50). Like a number of works in the series, Dead Men before the Position pitilessly laid bare for German civilians what happened to the bodies of unclaimed soldiers, showing two decaying heads, one identified as ‘Unteroffizier Müller, born on 3 May 1894, Cologne’, recalling that these corrupted remains once belonged to a fresh-faced young soldier. Others record events that may or may not have been part of Dix’s direct experience, such as Lens wird mit

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Bomben belegt (Lens being Bombed) (print 33), which shows a corpse-littered street in the destroyed town where civilians flee in terror from what may be a British Royal Flying Corps bomber (possibly a Nieuport 17, used during the attack on Lens, 21–25 August, as part of the so-called Battle of Hill 70, 15–25 August 1917).79 Whether or not Lens was based on imagination or source material such as photographs, the artist is recorded as using supporting material for some of the portfolio. Print 40 of a facially maimed soldier in hospital, titled Skin Graft, is based on a reproduction photograph by Hugo Erfurth, while the artist may also have supported his work through reference to Ernst Friedrich’s Krieg dem Kriege!.80 As was the case with earlier prints based on drawings, such as the etched version of War Cripples, Dix made a direct copy of the photograph on the intaglio plate without making a reverse drawing, because the printed version is a mirror image of the photograph. He may also have referenced sketches he made of the mummies in Palermo’s catacombs, when the artist visited Sicily with his family in 1924. There is one possible selfportrait, that of the figure that leads a machine gun squad in print 41. Viewed without glass, more perceivable is the range of techniques used that created the variations in line quality, tone and texture, and the characteristic embossing of the surface through the intaglio printing process that emphasizes those qualities further. In print 26, Sterbender Soldat (Dying Soldier) (Figure 28), print 38, Zerschossene (Shot to Pieces), and print 39, Durch Fliegerbomben zerstörtes Haus (Tournai) (House destroyed by Aerial Bombs (Tournai)), as in others in the series, for example, the tonal and textural variety achieved through successive stages of stopping out the acid in the aquatint process, combined with drypoint, convincingly depicts corrupted human flesh and bone, gaping wounds and seeping blood. Though many of the prints were confrontational, one print worried Nierendorf more than others, Soldat und Nonne (Vergewaltigung) (Soldier and Nun (Rape)). In a letter to Dix, he noted that ‘various people’ suggested that the print risked confiscation of the entire portfolio, particularly because it was ‘a slap in the face for everyone involved’ in the week of commemorations that celebrated the country’s ‘heroes’ and was overflowing with fighting spirit and bravado. In such a context, continued Nierendorf, such a work would raise a 79 Dix took part in the Summer Battle of Flanders 22 July–17 September 1917, and therefore it is unlikely that he witnessed the bombing of Lens in August 1917. The battle engaged German and Canadian forces and about half of the population of Lens perished. Dix was involved in fighting near Lens from 23 August to 23 October 1916. 80 In the case of the Erfurth photograph, it is described as a reproduction by Erfurth of the original that Dix kept in his Dresden studio as source material. The source of the original photograph is unknown. See Kirsten Fitzke, ‘Helden sehen doch anders aus . . . Eine Begegnung zwischen Krüppeln auf der Leinwand und Invaliden von der Straße’, in Otto Dix Retrospektiv. Zum 120. Geburtstag, ed. Kunstsammlung-Gera (Gera: Kunstsammlung Gera, 2011), 89.

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Figure 28  Print 26, ‘Sterbender Soldat’ (‘Dying Soldier’), Der Krieg (The War), 1924. Aquatint and drypoint, plate size 19.3 × 14.3 cm. Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, A 1948/601. © Otto Dix/IVARO.

great storm. Another print in the portfolio, Besuch bei Madame Germaine in Méricourt (Visit to Madame Germaine in Méricourt), was already ‘a slap in the face for everyone who has a bourgeois idea of the front-line soldier’.81 Dix 81 Karl Nierendorf to Otto Dix, 7 July 1924, Nachlaβ Otto Dix [ICN], DKA, GNM.

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relented and withdrew Soldier and Nun from the portfolio. Nierendorf promoted The War in leading art journals as ‘a document of our times of enduring value’.82 Barbusse’s emotive foreword guided the reader towards a pacifistic reading of the prints, which for him were the clearest visual testimony of the war experience: [He] who tore these images of horror from his mind and heart and spread them before us, stepped into the worst depths of the war. A truly great German artist, our brotherly friend Otto Dix, created here in violent flashes the apocalyptic hell of reality! Just do not say he is exaggerating. That is the eternal excuse of the fearful who feel that they are unable to bear the force of a work or the comfortable, whose comfort is already disturbed when hearing the word ‘war’. The war cannot be overdone. Its full horror can no longer be grasped, even if it were felt in one’s own body. Our reason fails in the face of the size and the force of this experience. [. . .] War is like as we are with astronomical terms: one might recite to oneself a thousand times that a star needs light centuries to rush through space . . . Open one’s eyes wide to the swarm of zeros behind the digits, which mean distances or quantities of stars. [. . .] These formulas remain blunt and do not arouse any imagination. This is exactly how, almost abstractly, war will forever affect our senses and our imagination. For what should I think of the fact that fifteen million men were killed in the last war? The weak human mind breaks before such a reality. And above all the horror of the agony of death, of the terrible wounds! What shape did death assume, gruesome, full of incomprehensible barbarism, when it was let loose on the men who ‘were there’ and who now writhed like worms in the earth and stormed the ditches like madmen! There is no longer fighting with arrows and swords. Misshapen chunks of jagged iron, gas, fire, poison . . . these are the weapons today. Advances in science and technology, infernal inventions, wicked discoveries played with the bodies of the poor who were crushed, buried, torn by bombs, crushed by tanks, showered with flames. [. . .] This is not a fearful dream, but the truth. If a person had wandered without perishing from exhaustion through all the wild trenches, in which the armies lay buried opposite one another for more than four years . . . had he worked his way step by step through this sea of putrefaction . . . under the corpses, more corpses and deeper again only [more] corpses: his experience would be a thousand times more gruesome, even more inexpressible than this series of images that Otto Dix unfurls before us. [. . .] When Andreas Latzko's book ‘Menschen im Kriege’ was published, it was also said that fever and horror burst the boundaries of reality and that the work of this brilliant poet was the literature of a mentally ill person. But Latzko himself gave the correct answer in his book: In the face of the ravages of modern war, the madmen seem 82 Quoted in the half-page advertisement in Der Cicerone 16, 15, inserted between pp. 726 and 727.

102 Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture reasonable. Yes, it is a [. . .] good deed, [. . .] when a talented and honest person paints the horror as it was before everyone's eyes. Whatever way you twist and turn the problem of war, one thing is certain and there is no argument against this fact: if people only knew . . . they would never start again! Stupidity, and what amounts to the same thing, forgetfulness, are sin and crime here. This constant denial and evasion is also a crime [. . .] “Oh, let's not talk about these atrocities anymore!’’ This silence would do nothing but repeat events [. . .] if it were still possible to stop talking about them, today when the peoples’ attention has been awakened and sharpened. And therefore all credit is due to this artist who shaped the abominations of desolation into a terrible vision that we can never forget.83

The intaglios’ divisiveness was evident from the start. Karl Nierendorf communicated art dealer Hermann Abels’ words to Dix that ‘if the new series of etchings is to be regarded as a German memorial “for the unknown soldier”, then [it is] an impudence that must deeply infuriate every frontline fighter’. In a side-note to the artist, Nierendorf remarked that ‘almost all bookstores refuse to display the book for fear of “breaking the windows”’ because the German book trade had become very ‘Hakenkreuzelt’ (writing in Swastikas).84 Still, one of the earliest critical reviews was also one of the most positive and sustained, and came from Curt Glaser, who had been unmoved by Dix’s Dadaist pictures and The Trench. He lauded The War as a powerful and timely indictment of warfare, unlike that by war artists who ‘were plagued by vague general ideas of heroism and the beauty of battle’, and who ‘at a time when everyone wants to live on beautiful lies and be deceived by the horrors of reality, [did not] dare, intentionally or not, to show what they saw’. Such art was now half forgotten, continued Glaser, their planned preservation in a war museum not realized and the survivors no longer wanted to remember a side that seemed incomprehensible now, ‘since the end of the war ha[d] so thoroughly disappointed the happy expectations that were tied to its beginning’. Thus, Dix’s intaglios would prove divisive because they were the epitome of the horror that some at least sought to forget: ‘Dix soberly shows what was. [. . .] Along with the book by Barbusse, these etchings by Dix are the only document of the war, an objective description and the most terrible accusation at the same time. They are an indictment of the madness of war in the same sense as Goya's “Desastres de la Guerra” and those who have made “No More War” their slogan should spread these images that once and for all can put an end to

83 Henri Barbusse, ‘Der Krieg von Otto Dix’, Nachlaβ Otto Dix, I B 9a, DKA, GNM. 84 Karl Nierendorf to Otto Dix, 29 July 1924. Nachlaß Otto Dix, IC13, DKA, GNM.

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the legend of the fresh, joyful war’. Glaser was also impressed by Dix’s technical ability, which for him this time round found the balance between content and form that was missing in The Trench, where ‘every sheet was given the technique it need[ed]’ to forcefully describe its content.85 In a similar vein, a review of the Breslau showing described them as a ‘Gigantomachy’ that was not an exercise in the grotesque but rather the terrible captured truthfully and without distance.86 At Wiesbaden the series was praised, emotively, as the only work thus far that managed to describe the war in artistic form, where ‘[Dix’s] etching needle plough[ed] open fresh wounds’, a ‘speech of blood and tears’ [that] should be felt’ because ‘there is no bias here, just the pain of a shattered heart’.87 Westheim’s more sophisticated response picked up on Paul Ferdinand Schmidt’s review of The Trench, which noted the evident satire in Dix’s work, where the prints’ ‘warts and all’ depictions ironically abandoned traditional aesthetic values to more effectively expose the decorous, sanitized traditional war images celebrated by established but evidently out of touch critics such as Meier-Graefe: [Dix] captured [the war] without sentimentality, as clearly, as naturalistically true as Bosch depicted his hellish vermin, as Grünewald depicted leprosy and syphilis in the old picture in the Isenheim hospital. This unretouched war is no aesthetic pleasure. [. . .] It is not as it was before, when the Academy exhibited the [Ludwig] Dettmann Munchausenisms’s “cozy war”, and people will feel very excited and will declare again: How nice, how beautiful, how interesting! If Dettmann was aesthetic, Dix's etchings are not aesthetic, any more than mass human slaughter is an aesthetic occurrence. [. . .] What is special here, what is exciting and nerve-wracking, is the obsession with wanting to show nothing other than what one really and physically saw, what this war without phrase, without humbug, without euphemism and swindle [really] was. The crass verism that is peculiar to the young painters, who spent their early years in not always bomb-proof shelters instead of academic master's studios, is the attempt to win a new style of objectivity for painting. The painter [. . .] portrays what is happening, [he] reports. Even at the risk of occasionally slipping into the panopticon. The fiction here is to run the painting business as if that interesting self, the artist, didn't even exist. A typically modern position. It goes without saying that the lesson given by the 'steel bath' [. . .] functions reasonably succinctly, and that it,

85 Curt Glaser, ‘Der Krieg. Ein Radierwerk von Otto Dix’, Berliner Börsen-Courier (Beilage Nr. 361) (Berlin), 3 August 1924, 5. 86 R. C. M., ‘Ausstellungen (Breslau)’, Der Cicerone 16, no. 18 (1924): 877. 87 ch., ‘Ausstellungen (Wiesbaden)’, Der Cicerone 16, no. 19 (1924): 938–9.

104 Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture so to speak, terrifies those who want no more war to the bone and even much more those who want more war as soon as possible.88

Westheim’s review was echoed in that of Expressionist poet Max HermannNeiβe, who considered that The War thoroughly annihilate[d] the contemptible cult of lies with which artists otherwise turn a beastly event into a glorious one [and shows] how the war really looks, revealing more overwhelmingly and vividly than any written depiction what the bath of steel means in reality and what a return to the years of slaughter would again bring us. [. . .] These are no witty, deliberately fantastical daydreams on the theme of ‘War’, laid out in the studio at leisure according to a specific intention, but to a certain extent are drawn notes of personal experiences, as though recorded on the spot, never lost from memory. And it is precisely in their gruesome factuality, in their barbaric reality, that these sheets appear more fantastic, more demonic [. . .]. There one sees the wounded but not the slightly wounded behind the front lines, where the wound as such was regarded as some kind of ornament of honour but rather those horribly mutilated [men], tortured, torn and battered in an unthinkable way, whose piercing screams one believably hears.89

The unflinching objectivity described by these reviewers, in a body of work that merely made the reality of the war visible, was, as Dix recalled in 1966, what he had aimed to do, ‘because one has to portray it realistically so that it is understood. [. . .] Above all, I depicted the terrible consequences of the war. [. . .] I chose the true reportage of the war, I wanted to show the devastated earth, the corpses, the wounds’.90 The review by Scheffler, much more alone in his negative criticism than he had been in the case of The Trench, was hardly a review at all, where he wrote dismissively that ‘There is much horror [. . .] but they don’t work. The subject alone does not make it Goya or George Grosz.’91 Several moderate, left-leaning Austrian newspapers covered the exhibition of The War at the Würthle, all of which received the intaglios as profoundly pacifist works. In Der Tag (Vienna) the prints were described as powerful anti-

88 Paul Westheim, ‘Bücher’, Das Kunstblatt 9, no. 9 (September 1924): 286. Westheim was likely refererencing the exhibition of Army and Marine art that Dettmann (1865–1944) organized at the Prussian Academy in 1915, to which he contributed portraits of Generals Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg. 89 Hermann-Neiße, ‘Ein wichtiges Kriegsgedenkbuch’, 533. 90 Otto Dix (1966) quoted in Schmidt and Dix, Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis, 273. 91 Karl Scheffler, ‘Ausstellungen’, Kunst und Künstler 23, no. 1 (October 1924): 34.

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war works.92 The two most prominent Social Democratic newspapers in Austria, the Arbeiter-Zeitung (Vienna) and the Arbeiterwille (Graz) included a large-scale reproduction of one of the prints, Ruhende Kompanie (II/4) in their 7 August and 9 August issues respectively.93 Recalling the furore surrounding The Trench, the Arbeiter-Zeitung offered a lengthy review on 24 August, which closely followed the tone of Barbusse’s foreword, adding that the prints’ timeless, eternal quality that recorded the suffering on all sides, was ‘stormier than a thousand “No More War!” manifestos’.94 The Neues 8 Uhr Blatt captioned a reproduction with ‘Nie wieder Krieg’ and compared the etchings to Goya’s Disasters of War.95 The government-managed Wiener Morgenzeitung called the portfolio a ‘Krieg dem Kriege’, which, while offering a one-sided, bitter reality, conceded that the works were the result of the real, horrifying experiences of a revolutionary artist.96 A selection of Dix’s war etchings, according to surviving correspondence probably the six unnamed etchings listed in the catalogue, along with the controversial Girl in a Mirror and thirteen other works, were exhibited at the ground-breaking First General Exhibition of German Art, which opened in the Moscow State Historical Museum on 18 October 1924, and which later travelled to Saratov (December 1924 to March 1925) and Leningrad (May to July 1925).97 Comprising over five hundred works, and organized by the Russian branch of International Workers Aid (Internationale Arbeiter-Hilfe (IAH) and the Foreign Aid Commission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, it was the 92 M. E., ‘Antikriegskunst. Ausstellung Otto Dix in Salon Würthle’, Der Tag (Vienna), 4 September 1924, 5. 93 Anonymous, ‘Der Krieg’, Arbeiter-Zeitung (Vienna), 7 August 1924, 7. Anonymous, Ruhende Kompanie (illustration), Arbeiterwille (Graz), 9 August 1924, 5. 94 Anonymous, ‘Kunst und Wissen. Der Krieg. Das Radierwerk von Otto Dix’, Arbeiter-Zeitung (Vienna), 24 August 1924, 8. 95 Anonymous, ‘Nie wieder Krieg’, Neue 8 Uhr Blatt (Vienna), 8 August 1924, 3. 96 O. R., ‘Otto Dix – “Der Krieg”. Ausstellung bei Würthle’, Wiener Morgenzeitung (Vienna), 7 September 1924, 13. This review mentions the inclusion of a booklet in the exhibition, written by Paul Ferdinand Schmidt and with ten reproductions of Dix’s work. 97 T h e exhibition title is translated into German as ‘Erste Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstausstellung’ and into Russian as ‘1-я Всеобщая германская художественная выставка. Москва-Ленинград: Межрабпом’. Dix’s works were listed as: No. 137 Portrait; 138 Moon; 139 Girl in a Mirror; 140 Salon 1921; 142 Toilette; 143 Old Man; 144 Street Scene; 145 Portrait; 146–8 Drawings; 149 Girl in Profile; 150–5 Etchings; 156 Lithograph. No dates or dimensions are listed. The first of two letters, dated 25 August 1924, from the Buch- und Kunsthandlung der Künstlerhilfe and signed by [Eric?] Johannsson, describe Dix’s works as three oil paintings, a number of watercolours and the ‘Krieg’ [War] etchings, which were sent via Nierendorf. NL Dix, Otto I, B-12f, DKA, GNM. The works are listed in the catalogue, Mezhrabpom, Adolf Behne, Eric Johansson and Richard Oehring, 1-я Всеобщая германская художественная выставка. Москва-Ленинград: Межрабпом [First General Exhibition of German Art], trans. Boris Miller (Moscow: Mezhrabpom Moskau-Berlin, 1924), 27. This exhibition was the result of the cultural exchanges generated by the First Russian Art Exhibition (German: Erste Russische Kunstausstellung Berlin), which was the first exhibition of Russian art held in Berlin following the Russian Revolution. It opened at the Gallery van Diemen, 21 Unter den Linden, on Sunday, 15 October 1922.

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first exhibition of so-called revolutionary German art in Russia.98 With essays by Dresden artist Eric Johansson, Adolf Behne and former economist Richard Oehring (Ehring) (1891–1940), a political activist and writer, the accompanying catalogue included a reproduction of Girl in a Mirror. Bizarrely, the catalogue describes Dix as a member of the Red Group (Rote Gruppe), to which, as far as is known and accounting for his aversion to politics, he never belonged; he may have been temporarily included with the group for organizational purposes, given the connections between his work and the Red Group.99 Little direct insight to how Dix’s work was received in Russia survives, however. In the most comprehensive surviving review of the show in German, renowned Russian art collector and art historian Paul Ettinger, lamenting the absence of work by many leading names in German contemporary art, remarks that ‘it should also be noted immediately that in the graphic section, Käthe Kollwitz made the strongest impression with the woodcut series “War”’. All that is noted on Dix is that his work was among that most in focus because of the comparatively greater number of his works on display. If Ettinger was disappointed by the range of work on show, he was however able to report that the exhibitors could in no way complain of a lack of interest and courtesy on the part of the Russian public. The ceremonial opening of the show, chaired by People's Commissar A.V. Lunacharsky, several lectures and discussion evenings in the Russian Academy of Fine Arts and massive visits during the entire duration of the exhibition, which is also to be transferred to Leningrad and perhaps even to some provincial towns, are sufficient evidence of this.100

Dix also supported the IAH’s efforts to raise more funds for artists and children’s homes by contributing to the portfolios Hunger. 7 Originallithographien, and Krieg. 7 Originallithographien, released to mark the tenth anniversary of the war and which also included, among others, work by Kollwitz, Grosz, Willibald Krain, Rudolf Schlichter and Heinrich Zille.101 98 T h e Russian Branch of the IAH is Международная рабочая помощь (Mezhdunarodny Rabochy Komitet Pomoshchi Golodayushchim Rossii (abbreviated as ‘Mezhrabpom’). 99 Mezhrabpom, Behne, Johansson and Oehring, 1-Я Всеобщая Германская Художественная Выставка, 16. The Art Library of the Berlin State Museums hold a translation of the catalogue by Boris Miller (Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Oskar Schlemmer Archive, 1973). 100 Paul Ettinger, ‘Moskau: die Allgemeine deutsche Kunstausstellung’, Das Kunstblatt IX, no. 1 (January 1925): 29. One of the organizers, the painter Otto Nagel, recalled that the queue circled the building four times, from early morning to late evening, while both Nagel and Johansson reported lively discussion among visitors. Nagel and Johansson, referenced in Sinaida Pyschnowskaja, ‘Deutsche Kunstausstellungen in Moskau und ihre Organisatoren’, in Berlin Moscow 1900-1950, ed. Irina Antonowa and Jörn Merkert (Munich and New York: Prestel, 1995), 187–8. 101 Krieg. 7 Originallithographien, Gesamterlös für die Künstlerhilfe und die Kinderheime der Internationale Arbeiterhilfe, zum 10. Jahrestage des Kriegsbeginnes (Berlin: Neuer Deutscher

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The impact of Dix’s unique war memorialization in 1924 was reflected in the fact that several essays – in Germany and beyond – pivoted on the role of The Trench and The War as key works of German war memory.102 Willi Wolfradt published the first monograph on Dix in 1924 as part of Klinkhardt und Biermann’s Junge Kunst series, where he argued, as Stahl, Westheim, Schmidt and others had done, for the pictures’ centrality as important counterpoints to the idealized visual culture of the war. Recalling the indignation directed at The Trench by Meier-Graefe and others, he wrote that: J[ulius] Meier-Graefe for one, has called it perfectly ‘infamous’; it is certainly possible to paint corpses beautiful enough ‘to kiss,’ but this [simply] makes you want ‘to vomit’. Be my guest! [. . .] A certain ‘indiscretion’ of means cannot be denied it. But that is presumably said of war as well – in this very painting. Look at how a Frontschwein paints, gentlemen; it’s altogether unesthetic! [Dix] never shrinks from the brutality of expression or from bloodthirstiness, and does so only to be seen, to have an effect, to pack a punch, to break through the awful forgetfulness of the people. Is there any evidence more clear of this malevolent forgetfulness than that overly refined artistic sensibility that feels itself scandalized by Dix and believes that now is the time to experience the dead meat of the battlefields as a painterly delicacy? Dix is a singular obstruction against the subtle little painting that acts like nothing had happened. [. . .] What a wall decoration for the schools! What a memento! [. . .] Dix is doubtless among those who are shaping history today, and to suggest parallels with his ancestors in art history can only obscure the earthiness of the phenomenon that he is. [. . .] Dix, with a prostitute in one arm and a war cripple in the other, calls their century before the court of an annihilating judgement.103

The Trench continued to draw attention before finding a home in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden in November 1928. It was exhibited for the first and only time beyond German borders at the well-attended Internationale Kunstausstellung (International Art Exhibition) in Zurich, 7 August to 23 September 1925, among almost five hundred works by about forty artists, as part of a sizeable German contingency headed by the weighty figure of Max

Verlag, 1924); Hunger. 7 Originallithographien. gesamterlös für die Hungerhilfe. Künstlerhilfe für die Internationale Arbeiterhilfe (Berlin: Neuer Deutscher Verlag, 1924). 102 In addition to Barr’s and Barbusse’s essays was André de Ridder, ‘Otto Dix’, Sélection 4, no. 1 (October 1924): 14–20. The essays, as well as some reviews of Dix’s work up to 1926, are collected in Gustav Eugen Diehl, ed., Ausstellung Otto Dix, vol. 2/3, Veröffentlichungen des Kunstarchivs (Berlin: Das Kunstarchiv Verlag GMBH, 1926). 103 Willi Wolfradt, Otto Dix (Leipzig: Klinkhardt und Biermann, 1924). Translated into English in Willi Wolfradt, ‘Otto Dix’, in Otto Dix, ed. Olaf Peters (New York: Prestel, 1924), 116–17.

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Liebermann and including numerous artists of Dix’s generation.104 It was one of Dix’s six contributions, which were grouped in a room with those by George Grosz and Conrad Felixmüller.105 It is not clear why such well-known works were exhibited in the remotest room, as leading Swiss art and architectural historian Sigfried Giedion reported, and given that neutral Switzerland, removed from the sociocultural vicissitudes in Germany, provided a much less tendentious context.106 Dix’s submissions made for an arguably rather disconcerting display. Alongside Im Café (At the Café) (oil on canvas version), 1922, Bildnis Adolf Uszarski (Portrait of Adolf Uszarski), 1922, Mutter und Kind (Mother and Child), 1924 (now in the Hamburger Kunsthalle), with its panicked looking infant contained in the mother’s gorilla-like hands, the conventionally charming Tochter des Künstlers (Daughter of the Artist, now called Nelly in Blumen (Nelly among Flowers)), 1924, and Maler und Modell (Painter and Model), 1925, were the eerie Stilleben mit Witwenschleier (Still-Life with Widow’s Veil)107 of 1925 and The Trench. The Still-Life extended, discomfortingly, the impact of the war. An ensemble of a hatstand with a spinal column and broken ribcage clinging to its stem and topped with a widow’s veil becomes a macabre symbol of wartime death, with a sort of life-mask hanging on the wall (apparently a cast that Dix made of his sister Hedwig’s face) in the background and a jug containing two black irises in the foreground, often used in Christian nativity pictures as symbolic of the Virgin Mary’s future grief. The veil obviously alludes to the many women who were made widows by the war, while the spine was likely a discomforting reminder of the war dead, particularly for veterans for whom the spine recalled the skeletal fragments on the battlefields. The widow’s veil, which as Ludwig Kirchner’s Potsdamer Platz (1914) had shown, was worn not just by widows as indicative of loss but by women, widows or not, who from the first year of the war wore the veil while looking for clients, possibly as titillation for them.108 In a lengthy review for the Neue Zürcher Nachrichten, a certain L. B. remarked on the ‘boundless bitterness and macabre gallows humour’ of Dix, Grosz and 104 It was reported that since it opened on 7 August, by 27 August the exhibition had attracted 7063 visitors, ‘arousing the liveliest interest, especially from art lovers abroad’. Anonymous, ‘Kunstchronik’, Neue Zürcher Nachrichten (Zurich), 29 August 1925, 3. 105 Kunsthaus-Zurich, Kunsthaus Zürich. Internationale Kunstausstellung 8. August - 23. September 1925 (Zurich: Buchdruckerei Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 1925), 11–13. The other works by Dix were: Im Kaffee, 1922; Bildnis Uszarski, 1922; Mutter und Kind, 1924; Tochter des Künstlers, 1924; Stilleben, 1925; and Maler und Modell, 1925. Tochter des Kunstlers, the well-known portrait of his daughter Nelly among flowers, was illustrated as plate XIII and the only work not offered for sale. 106 Sigfried Giedion, ‘Die Internationale Ausstellung in Zürich’, Der Cicerone 17, no. 17 (1925): 866. 107 Stilleben mit Witwenschleier, 1925, oil and tempera on wood, 120 × 61 cm, Albertinum, Dresden. 108 Frank Whitford et al., Otto Dix 1891-1969 (London: Tate Gallery, 1992), 136.

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Beckmann as ‘documents of the times’, where ‘the horror of Barbusse’s Le Feu, the mockery of Sternheim and Meidner’s sense of form haunt the art of Otto Dix’.109 Giedion’s review likened the response in Switzerland to that in Germany when he reported that Dix’s work, shown with Grosz’s and Felixmüller’s, though placed in the remotest room, was first in terms of impact: ‘Dix’s War can grab viewers from the most varied of camps here also’ and ‘his laconic, ghostly still life [. . .] appears even more intense [here]’.110 But Giedion’s words were not reflected in other reviews. The prominent Swiss architect and art historian Peter Meyer questioned the purpose of Dix’s ‘wall-filling trench fantasy’: The picture is certainly well-intentioned, pacifist à la Barbusse and Latzko, but it is too badly painted to believe its creator’s sentiment. [. . .] Without inner vision or artistic force, he looks for atrocity effects, which he thinks are effective for illustrating his manifesto, and he then arranges these effects for composition according to decorative aspects. [O]ne regards this painting with an unmoved heart, like a tasteless wallpaper with grotesque chinoiseries. Artistic tact is not at all the strong point of this painter. [Callot’s and Goya’s] small prints [are] more shocking and weigh heavier than Dix's giant painting. [H]ere we see dull and banal nihilism celebrate orgies, [meaning that] Dix's mockery does not even stop at the relationship between mother and child, which lies outside the politically poisoned atmosphere.111

Arguably, Meyer’s review reflected the limitations by which he could assess how an artist who had served as a frontline soldier might approach an image of war, and to what extent he could understand Dix’s work as Salmony, also a former soldier, did. In the same article, Max Billeter, not an art historian but a Doctor of Laws based in Zurich, remarked on the tastelessness of young German art, picking out Dix’s Still Life as an oddity born out of desperation to go beyond its characteristic grotesquerie: At least one was thankfully aware of Liebermann's wonderful sophistication when gazing into the galleries of young German art. Dix, Grosz, Kokoschka, as much as they have tried, they have not yet tried this: to show taste. The lust for the ghastly, which has already found its embodiment here and there in German art, has in recent years been expressed to an extent that is frightening. The 109 L. B. remarked that ‘next to [The Trench] he paints a touching portrait of a child that may be reminiscent of [Phillip Otto] Runge. [Carl] Sternheim (1878-1942) was a German Expressionist writer of short stories and plays. L. B., ‘Feuilleton. Internationale Kunstausstellung im zürcher Kunsthaus’, Neue Zürcher Nachrichten (Zurich), 28 September 1925, 1. 110 Giedion, ‘Die Internationale Ausstellung in Zürich’, 866. 111 Peter Meyer et al., ‘Anmerkungen: zur internationalen Kunstausstellungen in Zürich’, Wissen und Leben 27, no. 16 (1925): 1026–7.

110 Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture subject of the insane, the sick, the whore, is no longer missing in any exhibition of German art. Since these main themes were soon naturalized, the struggle now revolves even more around the launch of ‘distinctive’ specialities. This is how, for example, Dix's still life with the spine, the lilies and the widow's veil is created. The fever that generated this art is like a kind of moralistic frenzy.

Beyond his own opinions, he remarked on the ‘many laughs [in the rooms containing] Dix, Nolde and Grosz’.112 Meyer’s and Billeter’s slating of Dix, however negative, also indicated in some measure Dix’s irresistible lure; he was one of the handful of artists they chose to discuss most in their reviews, remarkable for two reviewers who considered the works hardly worth exhibiting. In late 1924 or early 1925, The Trench and three of Dix’s prints, namely Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor (Stormtroopers Advancing) and Toter Sappenposten (Dead Sentry) (from The War) and Toter Soldat (Dead Soldier) (from Tod und Auferstehung (Death and Resurrection)) featured in the book Nie wieder Krieg (No More War) produced by the Sozialistischen Arbeiterjugend West Sachsens, which again placed Dix’s war pictures in an explicitly pacifist context of war memorialization, alongside works by Käthe Kollwitz, George Grosz, Georg Kretzschmar, Georg Scholz, and the Belgian artist Frans Masereel, and well known anti-war works of the past by Jacques Callot, Honoré Daumier and Francisco de Goya. The art was shown alongside essays and poetry by figures from the anti-war movement across Europe.113 Reviewing Nie wieder Krieg, the young Dora Heinemann emphasized the importance of Dix’s and other creatives’ voices in the anti-war campaign: Under this title the Socialist Workers’ Youth, West Saxony District, publishes an excellent small publication. It is so important and so valuable to us pacifists because it expresses the determination, the unconditionality and the will to act of those who are most important, the masses of youths who would be the army in the next war. [. . .] This colourful muddle of visual arts, poetry, politics and science, which stand side by side here, becomes the most wonderful coexistence of various forms of expression for equal paths, for equal will. In addition to pictures by Käthe Kollwitz, Dix, George Grosz, Masereel, there are words by

112 Meyer et al, ‘Anmerkungen: zur internationalen Kunstausstellungen in Zürich,’ 1030–1.The works are listed in the exhibition catalogue, see Kunsthaus-Zurich, Kunsthaus Zürich. Internationale Kunstausstellung 8 August–23 September 1925, 11–13. Max Billeter’s profession is given in the list of contributors for the issue of Wissen und Leben in question, 1040. 113 Fritz Kühn, ed., Nie wieder Krieg (Leipzig: Roter Türmer Verlag, 1924/25). The book was produced in tandem with the travelling exhibition No More War!, but to date there is no direct evidence that The Trench was included.

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Toller, Eisner, Engelke. [. . .] This manifesto should be read by all those who want to learn from a truly young, antimilitarist fighting spirit.114

Dix remained characteristically quiet on any political connotations that his participation in Russia and the No More War movement’s activities might have. But while he was part of no political group, he did exhibit with the Red Group’s members again, including in 1926 with the clearly politically titled Venus of Capitalism (1923–5) in the Arbeiter Ausstellung der Roten Gruppe (Worker Exhibition of the Red Group).115 Whatever the case, as can be observed from most reviews of his war imagery, it was considered to be profoundly antimilitarist in spirit. The art historians and critics of the avant-garde, if not always the public, lauded its explicit exposure of the impact of war on the body and mind. Westheim, reflecting on Dix’s output in 1926, saw it as the embodiment of all the unease of the post-war era, and unflinchingly redolent of sour realities. Comparing the large solo show of Dix’s work at the Galerie NeumannNierendorf with that of the commemorative exhibition of Lovis Corinth’s at the Nationalgalerie, his words perhaps most powerfully described the works’ formative impact on German war memorialization: [According to some, Dix] is more cynical, more aggressive, ruthless in his trench picture to the point of disgust and horror. [. . .] Certainly, a world gapes between Dix and Corinth – not only in painterly attitude. Corinth reveals the opulently satiated, happily indulgent, self-satisfied world of the pre-war period. And when the horrors of war burst forth over them, the ageing Corinth, who had suffered from a stroke, found his refuge in the spiritual, in a spiritualization of the profession. In the case of Dix, the pandemonium of all sub-humanities unleashed by war and post-war hardships unravels. He is the Saxon who has become furious, for whom when in the trenches, in bloody mud and clouds of gas – the cosiness stopped. [. . .] At 35, coming from the industrial proletariat, having grown up between barbed wire and placed in a world of inflation spurred on by the most naked craving and greed, he belongs to that new generation which – not exactly respectfully – demands an answer to the question of whether it all has to be like this. They have also learned that since 1914, it no longer makes 114 Dora Heinemann, ‘Untitled’, Die Friedens-Warte 24, no. 8/9 (1924): 246–7. Heinemann may have seen Nie wieder Krieg pre-publication or a rare first printing. Available copies are dated 1925. Much of the content of the book was based on a special edition of the Leipziger Volkszeitung newspaper on Saturday, 2 August 1924, published the day before the Nie wieder Krieg! (No More War!) rally on the Augustusplatz in Leipzig, organized as part of the Central German Youth Day of Socialist Youth Workers [Der Mitteldeutsche Jugendtag der Sozialistischen Arbeiterjugend], and which featured the figure from Käthe Kollwitz’s famous No More War poster (1924). Unlike the other artists published in the book, Dix’s work did not appear in the newspaper. 115 T h e exhibition took place at the Warenhaus Stein, Berlin-Wedding, February/March 1926.

112 Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture sense to speak in parables. The large trench picture [. . .], the etched war cycle – fifty plates, recorded as it were in slow motion – are devoid of all romanticism, designed with that intransigent ‘realism’, which is probably not just meant to be understood here as a mere trend in painting. Under the mask, if one may say so, of the most unvarnished and most relentless truthfulness there is evidently an ethos that is all the stronger and more provocative as Dix does not preach again with a raised finger, but apparently uninterested, apparently without drawing any conclusions from it, factually establishes what and how it was.116

Bolstering Westheim’s assessment – unintentionally – a few years later was perhaps the strongest endorsement of the pictures as expressive of an antimilitarist spirit, in an article by career soldier and writer Oberst (Colonel) Wolfgang Muff (1880–1947), who acknowledged the power of Dix’s work but lamented, in his longing for the experience of the war as recorded by Ernst Jünger, its expression of pacifist ideas: Today, that part of humanity affected by the last war – a thoroughly ideological term, by the way – is dominated by pacifism, and artists bow to such a spirit of the age, too. [. . .] The poison of pacifist as well as revolutionary ideas is instilled in the public through the channel of artistic sensibility [. . .]. Everyone, guided by art criticism [. . .] praises the trench picture by Otto Dix, one of the most impressive but also the most one-sided war picture of all time, as the strongest and truest visual expression of the front-line soldier experience.117

As Mela Escherich would say of the prints in 1926, ‘the problem of Dix is not an exclusively artistic one, it is the problem of time. One day the reflexes of war, revolution and inflation will fade and the big mirror will throw back other images. We know that from a purely artistic point of view, Dix is an important artist even where he drops Eulenspiegel's scourge’.118 Escherich’s words were reflected in two further reviews that year. One considered Dix’s work to be in the same vein as the Symbolist and Expressionist graphic work of Alfred Kubin (1877–1959), but that Dix was ‘more material, more satanic [and] socially accusatory’ in his ‘reproduction of the horror of the last war’:

116 Paul Westheim, ‘Dix’, Das Kunstblatt 10, no. 4 (April 1926): 142–4. 117 Wolfgang Muff, ‘Kriegswissenschaft und Kriegserlebnis’, Allgemeine schweizerische Militärzeitung 75, no. 9 (1929): 425. https://doi​.org​/10​.5169​/seals​-8308. Though published in Switzerland, according to the article Muff was based in Weimar at the time of writing. 118 Mela Escherich, ‘Otto Dix’, Die Kunst für Alle 41, no. 4 (January 1926): 111. ‘Eulenspiegel’s Scourge’ refers to the character Til Eulenspiegel, the protagonist of a German chapbook published in 1515. The ‘scourge’ is the character’s use of practical jokes to expose vices. Escherich (1877–1956) was one of the few women working as art historians at the time and was closely affiliated with the Wiesbaden artists, particularly Alexej Jawlensky.

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These pictures are true, that’s for sure, whoever says otherwise was not in the front line of defence [. . .]. But the fact that someone has the power to shape this truth in all its terribleness speaks for him and his work, because it was not the effect but human necessity that formed these horrific visions into documentary works of art that everyone should have in mind when today or in the future one pronounces the word war.119

The second discussed The Trench and the now ‘famous war portfolio’, when they were both exhibited, alongside other important works by the artist, at the Kunsthaus Herbert Tannenbaum in Mannheim in September: Otto Dix is not only one of the most striking phenomena in contemporary art, he also represents a primal force, something elemental that breaks over us like a gruesome hurricane. Aesthetics will find him a hard nut to crack and general taste will have to come to terms with him one way or another. This is not a matter of rejection or acceptance; other things are at stake here, insights, confessions. Still, one thing must be emphasized: Dix is a painter. In the very best sense. [. . .] Dix’s effect is in terms of content, substance. And as works of art [the paintings] are great, very great, because the temporal has found a timeless design here. The strongest work is the great war picture, which had to be exhibited behind a curtain in Cologne. Certainly, the viewer feels a need to cover this picture, which is infinitely more than a picture. Horror and abomination live in it. But also the triumph of colour in the pool of this grandiose, fantastical trench. Here the war is smouldering in a single hue crafted with unprecedented skill.120

The huge attention focused on Dix’s war pictures bolstered Dix’s position as an important artist and as a key figure of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Sobriety) formally announced in 1925 when Gustav Hartlaub used the term for the title of an exhibition that he organized, as director, at the Städtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim.121 Neue Sachlichkeit was composed of two wings, verism and magic realism, and Dix was considered to be a leader of verism, known for emphasizing the realities, even the most sordid, of contemporary society. Yet, despite the artist’s fame and the praise heaped on his war pieces by prominent figures in the art world, the city of Gera, Dix’s birthplace, refused to buy the prints twice 119 Hanns Martin Elster, ‘Bücherschau (Holzschnitt, Radierung, Zeichnung)’, Die Horen 2, no. 4 (1926): 438. 120 K., ‘Mannheimer Kunstausstellungen. Otto Dix’, Neue Mannheimer Zeitung (Mannheim), 21 September 1926, 2. 121 Gustav Hartlaub, Neue Sachlichkeit – deutsche Malerei seit dem Expressionismus, 14 Juni - 13 September (Mannheim: Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim, 1925). A translation of Hartlaub’s introduction to the exhibition is reproduced in Kaes, Jay and Dimendberg, The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 491–3.

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– in 1925 and 1926. Speaking out against their acquisition, Gera’s mayor, Kurt Herrfurth, unconvincingly questioned their suitability and usefulness for exhibition.122 As time would prove, nonetheless, the great and truly lasting achievement of The Trench and The War was their incisive contribution to the reshaping of the visual language of war memorialization urged forth by a new brand of brutally inhuman industrialized warfare, and in their reception, reflective of a society that continued to struggle in making a definitive transition to peace. The works’ divisiveness reflected the disunity in plans for an official memorial to the fallen and what form it should take. On the front page of the Berliner Tageblatt on 3 August 1924, the president, Friedrich Ebert, urged the public to collect funds to build a national memorial.123 There would be no such memorial until after World War II.124

122 Kurt Herrfurth to the City Museum, Gera, 26 March 1925, in Akten des Stadtrats, Bl. 26, reproduced in Fitzke, ‘Helden sehen doch anders aus . . . Eine Begegnung zwischen Krüppeln auf der Leinwand und Invaliden von der Straße’, 89. 123 Friedrich Ebert, ‘Den Toten des Weltkrieges. Ein Ehrenmal für die Gefallenen. Ein Aufruf des Reichspräsidenten’, Berliner Tageblatt (Berlin), 3 August 1924, Morgen-Ausgabe, 1. 124 T h e biggest World War I commemorative site was the Tannenberg Memorial, dedicated to the German soldiers who died in the Battle of Tannenberg in 1914 and which opened in 1927. Twenty unidentified soldiers who had died in the battle were interred there. It became a national shrine when President Paul von Hindenburg was buried there in 1934.

4

Metropolis as war memorialization

According to the Saxon State Archives, by 1 October 1926, Otto Dix was formally offered the position of Professor of Painting at the Dresden Academy of Arts for a period of seven years, which finally provided him with a stable income.1 Dix’s appointment was publicly announced in the Dresdner Anzeiger on 4 October, which described him as a worthy successor to the deceased Otto Guβmann (whose position he would fill), because of his undisputed position as a leading German artist and doubtless talent, despite his youth.2 No doubt, when Gustav Hartlaub’s travelling Neue Sachlichkeit show reached Dresden in October 1925, it helped establish Dix’s name further in that city prior to its hosting of the biggest international art exhibition in Germany since World War I, the Internationale Kunstausstellung Dresden (International Art Exhibition, Dresden) (June to September 1926), in which he exhibited six works.3 In addition to further exhibitions, Dix also featured in Hans Cürlis’s innovative, insightful series of short films on artists collectively titled Schaffende Hände (Creative Hands) in 1926, which showed him working on several pictures, including Drei Weiber (Three Women) (1926).4 As Dix settled into his professorial role, the German government, headed by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) continued to grapple with the rise of militant politics. Interest in the memory of the war was again harnessed by the 1 Sächsisches Staatsarchiv – Hauptstadtarchiv Dresden, 11125 Ministry of Culture and Public Education, 14644 (1929–35). 2 Anonymous, ‘Otto Dix Nachfolger Guβmanns. Bevorstehende Berufung des Künstlers an die Dresdner Akademie’, Dresdner Anzeiger (Dresden), 4 October 1926. (unpaginated cutting, Archiv der Hochschule für bildende Künste, Dresden) 3 Sächsischer-Kunstverein-Dresden, Die neue Sachlichkeit. Ausschnitt aus der deutschen Malerei seit dem Expressionismus, 18. Oktober bis 22. November 1925 (Dresden: Sächsischer-Kunstverein, 1925). 4 Hans Cürlis, ‘Schaffende Hände. 1. Die Maler’, in Schaffende Hände, ed. Hans Cürlis (Germany, 1926), Film. A copy of the section on Otto Dix is held at the Agentur Karl Höffkes, ‘Material Nr 2354, Schaffende Hände, Otto Dix’, Agentur Karl Höffkes, 2022. https://archiv​-akh​.de​/filme​/2354#1 (accessed 1 May 2022). For the accompanying booklet, see Hans Cürlis, Schaffende Hände. Die Maler, 3 vols., vol. 1, Schaffende Hände (Berlin: Werkkunst Verlag, 1926).

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tenth-anniversary commemorations of the armistice. The still deeply divided responses to the outcome of the war were registered by the content of the SPD’s widely read satirical magazine, Der Wahre Jacob, for example, which worked to guide Germans away from extremist elements and towards moderate politics,

Figure 29  Karl Holz, Kurze Geschichte der deutschen Revolution (Short History of the German Revolution), Der Wahre Jacob, 29 October 1927, p. 3.

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and regularly pointed to the devastation caused by the war, as recalled in an illustration marking the ninth anniversary of the Kaiser’s abdication (and flight) and the proclamation of a republic (Figure 29). The caption reads: ‘According to his announcement, the last Hohenzoller had led the German people towards glorious days. But nothing can be more difficult for a people to endure than such a series of good days.’ The voices of anti-extremist, pro-democracy, republican groups were heard, as in, for example, the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, a mass organization formed in February 1924 against left-wing and right-wing extremism and consisting in good part of democrats and veterans.5 The Reichsbanner’s presence in organized public gatherings helped counter those of militarist elements such as the Stahlhelm. Though somewhat less accessible than publications like Der Wahre Jacob because of its intellectual leanings, Die Weltbühne, continuing its work as a left-wing, explicitly anti-militarist forum, now counted the remarkable Carl von Ossietzky and Kurt Tucholsky, and many more, in frequently and forcefully decrying positive attitudes to war. The journal caused a sensation internationally when from 1925 a number of articles, written by ex-Black (Schwarze) Reichswehr member Carl Mertens, leaked information on the kangaroo courts and summary executions – the Fememorde (Feme Murders) – carried out by extreme right-wing factions including the secret Black Reichswehr, who were promoted by the regular Reichswehr to perform paramilitary operations between 1919 and 1923.6 Though the Black Reichswehr was dissolved in 1923, the continuing and growing presence of militarist activity through the revanchist, nationalistic Stahlhelm, for example, urged Weltbühne writer, Berthold Jacob, to plead for the protection of the people from the march towards dictatorship and war.7 But that there was little effective action against militarist activities reflected an exceptional tolerance for militarism. In visual culture, the memorialization of the war was as contested as before, if not more so. Overtly heroic, sanitized imagery of the German soldier still prevailed in various commemorative publications; in rejecting the dystopian 5 For a detailed study of the activities of the republican war veterans’ activities, see Benjamin Ziemann, Contested Commemorations. Republican War Veterans and Weimar Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 6 T h e first of these articles was Anonymous [Carl Mertens], ‘Die Vaterländischen Verbände von *** [asterisks represent the author]. Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen’, Die Weltbühne 21, no. 33 (18 August 1925): 239. A dissolusioned Carl Mertens presented himself to the Weltbühne’s editor, Siegfried Jacobsohn, with information on the Feme murders. Mertens published numerous articles on Black Reichswehr activities in Die Weltbühne. For detailed insight to the activities of Die Weltbühne, see Deak, Left-Wing Intellectuals. 7 Berthold Jacob, ‘Plaidoyer für Schulz’, Die Weltbühne 23, no. 12 (1927): 446–50. The title translates as ’Plea for Schulz‘, referring to Paul Schulz, the leader of the Black Reichswehr.

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image of war in modernist art and in the spirit of German academic battlefield painting of the previous century, the German army was depicted as unbreakable, averting direct references to the destructive force of war machinery on the body. For example, the official history of the war in the popular Reichsarchiv series ranged from neutral to subjective texts and images while deeply limiting the extent of reports that risked damaging the army’s reputation (such as the murder of civilians).8 The lavish Ehrendenkmal der Deutschen Armee und Marine (Memorial to the German Army and Navy) memorialized the war through exciting, dynamic works of art and photography and with some imagery so bloodless that the Third Battle of Champagne is reduced to little more than an atmospheric nightscape (Figures 30–31).9 Countering such imagery were works such as Erwin Piscator’s play based on Jaroslav Hašek’s novel The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schwejk, with sets designed by George Grosz. Set in World War I, it recalls the misadventures of the naïve Schwejk, who attempts to adapt to a patriotism that is shown to be absurd. Premiering in Berlin on 23 January

Figure 30  Anton Hoffmann, Die Grosse Schlacht an der Somme Juli bis August 1916 (The Great Battle of the Somme, July to October 1916), in Ehrendenkmal der Deutschen Armee und Marine 1871–1918, Deutscher National Verlag, 1928, inserted after p. 400. 8 Reichsarchiv, ed., Der Weltkrieg 1914-1918, 15 vols (Berlin, Mittler und Sohn, 1925–44). 9 Ehrendenkmal der Deutschen Armee und Marine 1871-1918, ed. by General d. Inf. a. D. von Eisenhart Rothe (Berlin and Munich: Deutscher National-Verlag, 1928).

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Figure 31 Hans Werner Schmidt, Die 3 Champagneschlacht (The Third Battle of Champagne), in Ehrendenkmal der Deutschen Armee und Marine 1871–1918, Deutscher National Verlag, 1928, inserted after p. 436.

1928, it was highly successful throughout Germany.10 The impact of images was particularly crucial to war memory in Germany as the end of the war itself grew more distant: German territory was barely touched during World War I, meaning that unlike Belgium and France, for example, there was little disfigured land or few destroyed dwellings to rebuild, no war cemeteries nor constantly resurfacing bodies on former battlefields. Dresden had a dynamic art scene, where numerous prominent artists’ groups had formed during the first decades of the twentieth century. However, some of these groups reflected how politicized art had become in Germany by the late 1920s, where art was used to drive political interests and reflected the extreme Left and extreme Right’s growing power. Dresden was an extreme Left stronghold and the capital of ‘Red Saxony’, where one might expect to find the vibrant communist artists’ community already formed by 1928 and which included a number of prominent modernist artists including Otto Griebel, Hans and Lea Grundig and Eva Schulze-Knabe; these artists formed the core of what became the Dresden branch of the Assoziation revolutionärer bildender 10 Erwin Piscator, Das Politische Theater (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1963 [1929]). Piscator used material written by Brecht alongside Grosz’s animated satirical cartoons and life-sized puppets.

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Künstler Deutschlands (ARBKD, or Asso) (Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists of Germany) in 1929. A much less acknowledged fact, however, is that from 1920, the city was also home to the first expressly extreme nationalist, Völkisch artists group, the Deutsche Kunstgesellschaft Dresden (German Art Society, Dresden, DKD), formed by art writer Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder, and which counted among its earliest members, Richard Müller, Dix’s colleague at the Dresden Academy of Arts. Though not influential, the group’s views on art were aligned with those of the Nazis, with whom they maintained close links. They saw art as a powerful didactic tool with which to instil political and social correctness – and a strong warrior spirit. Engineering an image of a physically and mentally perfect, united and indestructible Volk was central to the purpose of Völkisch art, in which the image of German warriorhood pivoted on the mental and physical resilience of the German army. The meaning of Volk is far more complex than its simple translation into English as ‘folk’ or ‘people’. The meaning of Volk for German thinkers since the emergence of German romanticism in the late eighteenth century was the ‘union of a group of people with a transcendental “essence”’, which could also be called ‘nature’, ‘cosmos’ or ‘mythos’. A Völkisch Geist was considered to be embedded in one’s innermost nature: it dictated the source of one’s creativity, depth of feeling, individuality and crucially, unity with other members of the Volk.11 Völkisch ideology had long been part of the educational establishment and was therefore always tied in some form to youth; Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852) professor at the University of Berlin and a key figure in Völkisch thought, founded the fraternity movement (Burschenschaft) as a means to promote Germanic culture and ‘build up [students’] bodies so that they could fight for their country’s unity’. In 1817, the students under Jahn’s influence organized a book burning in order to destroy books that they considered poisoned the ‘true Germanic culture’ of the Volk.12 It is unsurprising that stylistically regressive Völkisch art has been largely ignored in art-historical studies (though the Städel museum (Frankfurt) held a major retrospective of Völkisch artist Hans Thoma’s work in 2013, which intended to foster a new perspective on Thoma as a pioneer of modernism).13 Yet, it prevailed in Weimar Germany. The fact that it did is indicative, at least to some extent, of public taste, if not that of modernist art critics. Thoma was one of Germany’s

11 George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology. Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, 1st edn (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), 4. My emphasis. 12 Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology. Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, 5. 13 ‘Hans Thoma. Lieblingsmaler des deutschen Volkes’, Städel Museum, 2013. http://www​ .staedelmuseum​.de​/de​/ausstellungen​/hans​-thoma (accessed 22 August 2016).

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most widely known and beloved artists with a reach into the ordinary German household way beyond the art of the avant-garde. For example, his World War I  postcards carried news to and from the battlefield, with illustrations that borrowed from stock German motifs. That Thoma’s pictures were used was possibly because they were romantic, sentimental and comforting, blending with the many traditional, even cheesy pictures that adorned German war postcards; modernist illustrations, on the other hand, were comparatively few.14 Thoma produced a postcard design depicting the dragon-slaying hero Siegfried of the Nibelungenlied, the famous medieval epic poem re-popularized by Wagner’s work and a constant motif in wartime popular print media. Thoma’s design, based on older works by Thoma, shows Siegfried just having slain the dragon, smiling hopefully towards the sun now that the enemy is defeated (Figure 32). Thoma’s Sower (1897), reused on another postcard, has been widely interpreted within the context of war as symbolic of regrowth (Figure 33).

Figure 32  Hans Thoma, War Postcard No. 4, for the benefit of the National Foundation and the Red Cross, 1914. Published by Galerie Moos, Karlsruhe.

14 T h ere are many examples, though by no means all postcards can be so described. Among numerous websites, see for example the Library of Congress, ‘Library of Congress - Collection of French and German postcards of the First World War, 1914-1918’, Library of Congress, 2017. https://www​.loc​ .gov​/item​/2005686266/ (accessed 30 August 2017).

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Figure 33  Hans Thoma’s Sower (1897) reused on a postcard for the Red Cross, c. 1915, Frankfurt am Main.

The strong linear style, reminiscent of children’s fairy-tale illustrations, is by no means representative of Thoma’s work but in all his imagery of the Nibelungen, he adhered to an idealized treatment of the body taken from medieval manuscripts (and which possibly owes something to the work of the pre-Raphaelites). The image of the young, bodily perfect and heroic Siegfried with his Nordic features and flowing hair was regularly invoked during the war and after as symbolic of heroic German soldiery. Siegfried’s murder by one of his own became a powerful symbol of the stab-in-the-back theory put forward by the German High Command, as evocative of the German army betrayed by certain elements in its own government (for the Nazis, these were usually communists and Jewish politicians).15 Such imagery played a prominent role in consolidating Nazi ideology (where visual language was always important), projecting the political and cultural dogma of a new Germany in a manner that seemed to lift battered German morale and offer a unified and powerful vision of the German Volk.

15 T he Dolchstoβlegende is heavily documented. Those targeted ranged from ethnic minorities, for example, Jews, to pacifists, to soldiers who had mentally broken down during the war and who were considered weak or cowardly.

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The DKD’s fervent promotion of what was for them truly ‘German’ art, as in that by the celebrated German artists of the Renaissance and Romantic periods, as well as the glorious depictions of German militarism in the work of Anton von Werner, for example, was equalled by their hatred for modernism and its generally dystopian pictures of warfare. When Dresden hosted the International Art Exhibition in 1926, an important coup for the region, which showcased much modernist art, it revealed how much the grip of traditionalist art had been lost and led to the reinvigoration of the DKD’s agenda, as underlined by the group’s founder, who referred to the show as ‘a peak in international mendacity and shamelessness which aroused outrage in Völkisch art circles’.16 The show also sparked the formation of the equally nationalistic Deutscher Künstlerverband Dresden (German Artists Association Dresden) by Willy Waldapfel and Walther Gasch in 1927, who later became prominent arts officials in Dresden under the Nazis.17 In future exhibitions organized by the DKD, as reviewed in the DKD’s bulletins, the Deutscher Künstlerverband showed militant, fascist works. The DKD’s fears that Dresden was being overrun with ‘art Bolshevism’ at the cost of ‘true’ German art was confirmed by the inclusion in the 1926 show of modernist artists half a generation or so younger than Dix, some of whom were taught by him at the Academy. These included Hans Grundig, who remarked with pride that ‘one can imagine how proud we were that we students could exhibit our work next to the greatest masters. Lachnit, Skade, Griebel and I next to the Master Dix’.18 Grundig’s comments reflected the esteem in which Dix was held by the younger artists, something which Feistel-Rohmeder would later liken to a poisoning of the city’s artistic future. The modernists’ new dominance was also heralded by the competition for the teaching post that Dix eventually won,19 where among others Karl Hofer, Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde were considered, choosing Dix because he was a well-known forerunner of modern currents and also a Dresden-trained artist.20 16 Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder, Im Terror des Kunstbolschewismus. Urkundensammlung des ‘Deutschen Kunstberichtes’ aus den Jahren 1927-33 (Karlsruhe: C. F. Müler Verlag, 1938), 213–14. 17 Feistel-Rohmeder, Im Terror des Kunstbolschewismus, 3. 18 Hans Grundig, Zwischen Karneval und Aschermittwoch. Erinnerungen eines Malers (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1975), 155. 19 Separate documents in the Nuremburg archives state that he was offered the position in September 1926, which coincides with the contract, and began working at the academy in 1927. A letter dated 4 November 1926 from the directors of the permanent exhibition, Baden-Baden refers to him as ‘Professor Dix’, indicating that it was already public knowledge. Nachlaß Otto Dix, DKA, GNM. 20 Christa Bächler, ‘Die Akademie für bildende Künste zwischen Novemberrevolution und faschistischer Machtübernahme, 1918-1933’, in Dresden. Von der Königlichen Kunstakademie zur

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Disappointingly little insight remains on Dix’s relationship with DKD member and new colleague Müller, and the quality and reliability of such insights are in some cases questionable. They both exhibited in the big Dresden show of 1926, where the only non-portrait among Dix’s six works was Still Life with Widow’s Veil, discussed earlier (named in the exhibition as Still Life with Mask). Müller contributed four paintings, including Meine Hunde (My Dogs), a work that suggests Müller’s influence on younger artists in its level of exacting detail and painterly application, and Liegende mit grünem Sonnenschirm (Reclining Nude with Green Parasol, 1925), a work that strongly indicates the influence of the younger artists on Müller.21 Fritz Löffler would later remark how odd it was that the painstakingly detailed technique long practised by Dix and closely allied to the Nazis’ idea of a ‘German’ manner of painting (which marked Müller’s bestknown works) demanded suppression after 1933.22 In 1927, prior to completing Metropolis, the most important surviving work of the late 1920s, Dix completed the now-lost Straβenkampf (Streetbattle), which was exhibited several times between 1927 and 1930, including a probable showing in Dresden in 1928; however, the public reception of the work was poorly recorded within Germany (Figure 34).23 The work is mentioned in a review by local critic Georg Paech of the Dix exhibition at the Neue Kunst Fides, which opened on 14 September 1928, where he notes ‘the horror of some details’ in Dix’s pictures, such as ‘the dead child and other details in “Streetbattle”’.24 The picture borrowed from Goya’s composition for The Third of May, 1808 (1814) and directly referenced Barricade (1920, lost), and commented on the catastrophic civil unrest that grew out of the war. As Löffler noted, the picture made no attempt at realism; it did not point to a specific event, and the closeness of the belligerents is unrealistic. No colour reproduction survives but the fact that Fritz Löffler described a confrontation Hochschule für bildende Künste, 1764-1989, ed. Manfred Altner (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1990), 268. 21 For the reference to Müller’s works exhibited in the 1926 show, see Rolf Günther, ‘Der Fall Richard Müller’, in Richard Müller (1874-1954), ed. Städtische-Kunstsammlung-Freital (Freital: StädtischeKunstsammlung-Freital, 1993), 12. 22 Löffler, Otto Dix. Life and Work, 95. 23 For insights to some of Streetbattle’s exhibition history, see James A. van Dyke, ‘Otto Dix’s Streetbattle and the Limits of Satire in Dusseldorf, 1928’, Oxford Art Journal 32, no. 1 (2009): 37, 39–65. The picture’s scale is not known but given that when both pictures were exhibited together in Zurich in 1929, Metropolis was priced at 25,000 Francs, and Streetbattle at 13,000 Francs, Streetbattle may have been similar in scale to the central panel of Metropolis. 24 Georg Paech, ‘Otto Dix. Eine Ausstellung neuer Werke’, Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten (Dresden), 14 September 1928, 3. Will Grohmann only briefly reviews the show at the Fides, making no reference to Streetbattle. See Will Grohmann, ‘Dresdner Ausstellungen. Otto Dix in der Fides u. a.’, Der Cicerone 20, no. 18 (1928): 603.

Figure 34  Otto Dix, Straβenkampf (Streetbattle), 1927. Oil on canvas (?), dimensions unknown. Lost or destroyed. © Estate of Otto Dix, Bild-Kunst Bonn / IVARO Dublin, 2023.

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Figure 35  Otto Dix, Groβstadt (Metropolis), 1928. Mixed media on wood, 181 × 402 cm. Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart. © Estate of Otto Dix, Bild-Kunst Bonn / IVARO Dublin, 2023. Photograph: Uwe H. Seyl, Stuttgart.

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128 Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

between demonstrators and police, and Rudolf Probst, in the catalogue for the exhibition of Dix’s work in Zurich in 1929 described the armed unit as wearing ‘monotonous green uniforms’ are important clues, as they suggest that the armed unit is possibly the SIPO – Sicherheitspolizei (security police), set up in 1919 to control political and social unrest, and referred to as the ‘green police’.25 As in Goya’s work, the uniformed men are faceless and machinic, and their green uniforms are emphasized by being set against the complementary hue of the redbricked houses in the background described by Löffler.26 As they take aim they direct the viewer’s attention to the demonstrators, some of whom fight back but who are shown to have suffered far more casualties, including a baby. Streetbattle was for Probst, given the attention he afforded it in the slim catalogue for Dix’s showing of sixty-eight works at the Kunstsalon Wolfsberg in Zurich in 1929, an impressive work, where ‘the rifle butt of a shooting soldier [. . .] makes the terrible irresistibility of organized violence so appallingly stunningly present that one thinks of the piercing reality of the scourge-rope on Grunewald’s [. . .] “Mockery of Christ”, the religious image so akin in the drastically unsentimental drama’.27 It is one of Dix’s few pictures (alongside some of the intaglios) that depicts the enactment of violence (an element that is much more prevalent in Goya’s Disasters of War and Willy Jaeckel’s Memento 1914/15 than Dix’s War portfolio) rather than its after-effects. The painting portrayed one of the contexts, along with the activities of the various militant factions such as the Freikorps and Nazis, in which German citizens had most recently experienced violence. It extended Dix’s language of war memorialization because it was generic rather than specific in its expression of socially or politically spurred violence, meaning that its subject was more universally descriptive of the unrest that blighted life across German towns and cities and thus commented more broadly on Germany’s failure to transition to peace. Dix’s next major work, Metropolis, like Streetbattle, typified New Sobriety in its rejection of romantic idealism (Figure 35). The triptych’s central theme is life in the big city during the Weimar Republic, depicting the widened social and moral divisions of late 1920s Germany. Yet, it is also a highly articulate commentary on the lingering impact of the war, not merely by the inclusion of destitute veterans, but which unfolds through careful analysis of 25 Löffler, Otto Dix. Life and Work, 92. Rudolf Probst, ‘Otto Dix’, in Sonderausstellung Otto Dix, Dresden. Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, Graphik, ed. Kunstsalon-Wolfsberg (Zurich: KunstsalonWolfsberg, 1929), 7. The helmets, however, do not match those generally worn by the SIPO, but by the Freikorps and Stahlhelm. 26 Probst, ‘Otto Dix’, 7. 27 Probst, ‘Otto Dix’, 6–7.

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the artist’s address to the technical and formal elements of German painting traditions. Metropolis’s central panel contains the popular image of the big city German nightclub interior: garish, glitzily dressed revellers, some of whom dance the popular Charleston to the accompaniment of an American jazz band. The common German Renaissance practice of adding gold leaf to describe brocaded fabrics is here used to embellish the dresses of two of the women, which together with the luminous oil glazes of heightened colour, noticeably brighter than the wing panels, brings the panel into somewhat sharper focus. These figures are set against those in the wing panels: prostitutes and impoverished, ragged and worn war veterans, two of whom are amputees, inhabiting what are possibly the front and rear of the club shown in the centre. The Classical façades on the right and the narrow, dimly lit alleyway on the left demarcate the space of the outcasts – they are physically and socially sidelined. The wing panels reinforce the message of earlier works, such as Prostitute and War Wounded (1923, Figure 24), which pointed to the relationship forged by the war between some veterans and women, and who in different ways, were both casualties of the war. The snaking arteries and isolation of the side streets represent the trenches of peacetime, where those worst affected by the war still struggle for survival. The right panel points to the meagre state support provided for veterans who could not be reintegrated into the working population. A begging double amputee, whose lumpy, gnarled stumps are juxtaposed with the sandaled legs of the woman in the foreground, stares into nothing, perhaps indicating blindness. He is possibly saluting the women filing past – pointing to the respect he once commanded as a German soldier at war, or he may be attempting to conceal his face, which is horribly mashed into an ill-stitched, lop-sided grimace, with a black covering tied over what is left of his nose. Such men were shamed into social seclusion in many cases, while others stoically made themselves visible. Contrasted with the bodily wholeness of the women, his destroyed masculinity as much as his poverty is brought to bear on the viewer. Similarly, the women, – the first of whose clothing reduces her to female genitalia – reflect the statistic of many women forced onto the streets because of the unavailability of work or because male breadwinners were killed or disabled by the war. Compared to the women in the left panel, they seem less wasted, indicating, perhaps, their newness to prostitution. Inasmuch as the women’s presence symbolizes the toll of dead and injured men, the sexual virility of the popular image of German soldiery is countered by this figure of destroyed masculinity.

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The left panel increases this idea further. The less sympathetically depicted prostitutes in this back alley of brothels are approached by a double amputee, propped up on wooden legs, who partly conceals another ex-soldier lying on the ground; the latter appears drunk and has the same glazed-over, lost expression as the amputee in the right panel. It is through the double amputee in the left panel that Metropolis becomes a picture about war memory. Somewhat removed from the action, this figure establishes a connection between external viewer and internal actors; he is the vehicle through which the viewer engages with the picture, a figuration of the beholder.28 Dix could draw upon the countless uses of intermediary figures in Christian art as well as the familiar compositional device of the Rückenfigur – presenting the amputee in this panel with his back turned to us – so that we assume his guise or path. The Rückenfigur has a long history in art and was employed many times by German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, whose work was hugely popular in the 1920s. In Friedrich’s examples, the viewer is encouraged to assume the position of the Rückenfigur in order to experience the sublime potential of nature, most famously perhaps in Wanderer above the Sea of Mist (1818). Metropolis instead appropriates the device to emphasize a deeply unromantic image of the German city. According to Löffler, this figure is Dix as observer of the glitter and misery of the metropolis; thus, he is no longer simply an actor as in an earlier, related work, To Beauty (1922) where Dix is the central figure in a dance hall scene similar to Metropolis’s central panel.29 The fact that Dix as Rückenfigur is a disabled veteran of the war complicates the picture’s social and political message: if we accept that the Rückenfigur is a selfportrait, Metropolis is also imbued with Dix’s working-class soldier’s perspective. Dix had attained financial security by 1927 through his professorship and marriage into an upper-middle-class family. Indeed, the central panel depicts a favourite pastime of Dix and his wife Martha, who were both avid dancers, and Martha gave Dix the nickname ‘Jim’, the frequently used moniker of the African American shimmy figure in jazz lyrics and in jazz opera. But here the artist memorialized his tenure as a Frontschwein – a frontline soldier – who was usually among the poorest economically. Thus, while the central panel reflects Dix’s present lifestyle, he symbolically re-aligns himself with these men who as frontline soldiers endured the worst injuries. Viewed as such, the Rückenfigur prompts a memorialization of World War I through the perspective of Germany’s 28 See for example the section on forms of address in Kemp, ‘The Work of Art and Its Beholder. The Methodology of the Aesthetic of Reception’, 187–8. 29 Löffler, Otto Dix. Life and Work, 93.

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many mentally and physically debilitated men, whose bodies, the antithesis of the popular heroic ideal, have become undesirable, unwanted reminders of the lost war. That the viewer might access the painting through the Rückenfigur in the left panel and not through the central panel suggests that the central narrative has been deliberately relegated to the place of the sub-narrative, signifying a purposeful memorialization of World War I  soldierhood: those with power and influence are shown to recruit and waste soldiers’ and women’s bodies in return for little reward, in turn questioning the morality of the more fortunate who do not, it seems, wish to be reminded of the lost war by its greatest casualties. If the grotesqueness of the four pictures of war amputees in 1920 used ruptured contours and broken surfaces to express their bitter message, Metropolis gave way to more naturalistic representation, bringing the triptych closer to the sensory immediacy of German High Gothic and Renaissance painting, with its meticulously painted contours and textures. Hans Baldung’s many figurations of decaying bodies are recalled in Dix’s physically wasted men and women, where the same oil glazes, gold leaf on the clothing and the pathos indicated by a format traditionally used for solemn biblical subjects is refocused on ‘low’ subjects. If vision is culturally constructed, where one brings to visual material an eye that is conditioned to read it according to one’s cultural environment, Metropolis’s relationship to the work of Baldung and Friedrich, among others, clearly signals Dix’s emulation of German artistic tradition, but where he has turned Friedrich’s romanticism into a confrontation with hard facts. Additionally, while Dix positioned the viewer as a passer-by, looking down on hapless amputees in two of the 1920 pictures, The Match Seller and Prague Street and in the latter where he gazes questioningly at the viewer from the shop window, Metropolis now encourages the viewer through the eyes of the veteran to look back at society – represented in the central panel – which seems as indifferent now as in 1920 to the predicament of disabled or impoverished veterans. In the Dresden exhibition Sächsische Kunst unserer Zeit (Saxon Art of our Time), 21 July to 3 October 1928, Metropolis occupied a central position and drew significant attention (Figure 36). Liberal art critic Will Grohmann, lauding the work of Dix (and George Grosz) as the birth of a new artistic culture, wrote:

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Figure 36  View of the Exhibition, Sächsischer Kunst unserer Zeit, II. Jubiläumsausstellung des Sächsischen Kunstverein, Brühlsche Terrasse, Dresden, 1928. [The] propertied in a jazz club in the centre, the disinherited in both wing panels. It is still the same evil world, in which the contrasts are exaggerated to the grimace, beauty and ugliness threaten to turn into their respective opposite, painted with tremendous meticulousness, and in places luminous as painted glass.30

In the liberal Kunstwanderer, Metropolis stole most of former Dresden Gemäldegalerie curator Erna von Watzdorf ’s attention: Otto Dix with his ‘Metropolis-triptych’ is again at the centre and yet at the same time completely outside the whole! In terms of technical refinement, revealing whispers of shimmering brilliant colour, in biting irony, grotesque juxtaposition of the selected aestheticization of decadent motifs (in which the discord is still particularly perceptible), he is unsurpassed.31

Dix’s painterly ability and clashing of societal opposites in the triptych’s purpose were clear to Grohmann and von Watzdorf. But if the reviews were positive, 30 Will Grohmann, ‘Kunst in Sachsen 1880-1928: zweite Jubilaumsausstellung des Sachsischen Kunstvereins in Dresden’, Der Cicerone 20 (1928): 666–7. 31 Erna von Watzdorf, ‘Kunstausstellungen in Dresden’, Der Kunstwanderer 10 (1928): 551.

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their brevity provided little insight. Paech, in the Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, offered more substance, but was little impressed with Dix’s latest offering, which, he stated, showed a couple dancing the Charleston as it was never danced, with spectators who look like lunatics or half idiots, and with prostitutes and architecture of the worst art nouveau in the wing panels. The war amputees, he remarked, could only represent World War I soldiers, but had wooden legs, of a type common after 1818 perhaps, not 1918, making Dix a romantic, not a realist. ‘If the image on the right were a good depiction of the misery of small-scale pensioners’, he continued, ‘drawn with Dixian realism, then the triptych might be considered legitimate in terms of content’. But for Paech, Dix did not set himself the task of finding a visible form for jazz music. He just needs a different name for his old motives; whores and cripples, which five years ago he was able to portray much better than now, when he begins to learn from the old masters. But I must not forget to say: the title of the picture is: Groß-stadt [Big-City]. The joke of the picture lies in the graphic detail. It’s not coloured, it’s muddled. As a painting there appears to be little worth appreciating.32

Variations of the simple wooden leg – the Stelzbein – had in fact continued to be worn by poor veterans who could not afford the sophisticated prostheses developed in Weimar Germany. But were Paech’s other, more pressing criticisms unfounded? Dix was not the only living artist negatively reviewed by Paech, but only Dix was criticized at length and appeared first in the section of the review that dealt with living artists. If ‘living art had the floor’, as the Kunstverein so wanted, asked Paech, was the best it could offer really contained in Metropolis? Paech pointed to the fact that the triptych was given pride of place among works by living artists, in one of the best rooms and hanging directly opposite the revered Max Klinger’s Pieta; this ‘mixing of [artistic] worlds’ was also controversial for another reviewer, who remarked that its placement opposite Klinger’s work would not go unchallenged by the audience.33 It appears that for Paech, Dix had lost the stingingly relevant realism of the earlier pictures of amputees and prostitutes, indicated by what was for Paech regression in the shape of renewed interest in the art of the distant past. He confirmed this thought in the review of Dix’s show at the Fides several weeks later, reflecting that ‘the stark contrasts between him and his time are softened’.34 This was not 32 Georg Paech, ‘Sächsische Kunst unsrer Tage’, Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten (Dresden), 22 July 1928, 2. 33 Max Klinger, Pieta. Mary and Joseph Mourning over the Body of Christ, 1889. Oil on canvas, 150 × 205 cm. Destroyed. K. H., ‘Eröffnung der Kunstvereins-Ausstellung’, Dresdner Nachrichten (Dresden), 22 July 1928, 5. 34 Paech, ‘Otto Dix’, 3.

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rootless criticism by Paech; later in the same article, where he lauds the work of Fritz Skade, he notes that ‘one senses the harsh realism that emanated from Dix and contained the beginnings of an independent German art’.35 This is strong endorsement. For Paech, perhaps the raw representation of the contemporary world in the earlier pictures that he detects in Skade was missing in the far more traditional – and less distinct – painting style and subtler representations of prostitutes and war amputees in Metropolis. For sure, the smooth, glowing layers of oil paint and technical prowess in the painting of surface textures make the triptych a very different assault on the senses to The Skat Players: if surface quality functions in either work to engage the viewer, the grotesqueness of The Skat Players works to curdle one’s senses towards an understanding of harsh societal realities. Metropolis is closer to a flashy exhibition of painterly prowess. In this sense, perhaps Dix had lost the exquisitely chafing quality that made the earlier works such remarkable Zeitbilder. The gradual slump in interest in Dix’s art among critics from 1928, whose silence if not criticism reflected this, was heralded to some extent by Paech’s review. In fact, cultural critic Felix Zimmermann completely overlooked Metropolis in two reviews of the show that dwelt on submissions by several of Dix’s lesser-known contemporaries.36 It is not known if Dix was aware of Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder’s stinging review in the October 1928 edition of the DKD’s bulletin; and why might he care, given the DKD’s marginal influence, and the fact that in content it hardly amounted to an art review at all. Most of it is an attack on Dix’s person, in which he is marked out as a danger to German culture and youth. Yet, it is useful in registering the voice of the extreme right-wing artistic community in Dresden, and to reveal how as early as 1928, Dix was already publicly marked as a ‘degenerate’ artist. The fact that she ignored the other many contemporary exhibitors entirely and focused only on Dix, using his name as the title of the article, signalled her especial hatred for him. She begins with the ‘problem’ created by the exhibition of the triptych, in which she also denounces Nicholas Pevsner’s review of such ‘degenerate’ art for the Dresdner Anzeiger: [The exhibition] gives pride of place to a large three-piece picture by this Dresden Academy professor. It is titled ‘Metropolis’ and depicts a dance scene in a pleasure house, in the side panels streets of prostitutes. At the same time 35 Fritz (Friedrich) Skade (1898–1971) had studied under Richard Dreher (1875–1932) at the Dresden Academy and had won the Saxon State Prize for Painting in 1927. 36 Felix Zimmermann, ‘Kunstausstellung Dresden 1928, I’, Dresdner Nachrichten (Dresden), 27 July 1928, 4. Felix Zimmermann, ‘Kunstaussteluung Dresden 1928, II’, Dresdner Nachrichten (Dresden), 28 July 1928, 4.

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one could admire in the gallery Neue Kunst Fides [. . .] a large exhibition of Dixian works, which without exception demonstrate the joy of this youth painter [. . .] in unsparing revelation of the ugliest and lowest that one could bear [. . .] and this in a style, which through the apparently cool ‘neue Sachlichkeit’ is even more provocative. [. . .] But where does the press stand on such faux pas? That the socialist publications acclaim them is understandable; with the help of this veritable ‘master’, the systematic demoralisation of the German people progresses, a few years enjoyed in the atmosphere of such a ‘master studio’ are enough to poison an entire generation of artists. That the leading bourgeois newspapers are committed to such fake art cannot be tolerated at all! Nevertheless [. . .] the art reporter for the Dresdner Anzeiger, Dr Pevsner, has to admit that in Dix’s art, a “strange, in many respects abhorrent and unhealthy but in other respects a gripping, rousing phenomenon is present. [. . .] Let us in any case rejoice that we will witness this development in Dresden and that the art academy in Dix has won one of the strongest personalities – both repulsive and attractive – among the younger artists.” (Nr. 447 of the Dresdner Anzeiger of 22.9. [1928]). We have nothing to add to this joyful outburst.37

Arguably, she offers more insight than her liberal peers to Metropolis’s oppositional memorialization – in as much as what she said as what she did not say. Dix’s fame – or infamy – as a painter of irreverently modernist depictions of prostitutes and disfigured soldiers – the anti-icons of militarized society who for her were the 'ugliest and the lowest’ – was clearly brought to bear on FeistelRohmeder’s reception. That the picture extracted such a choleric response from an enemy of modernism pointed to the threat to German cultural freedom that she and her associates represented. Metropolis’s realistic commemoration of the consequences of the pre-World War I  nationalistic, militaristic culture that she so cherished, and bathed in the techniques of German painting of the 1500s, were anathema to her. As one who saw art as didactic – as a means to educate and influence the public politically and culturally towards ‘healthy’ German nationalism – Metropolis was for her and her only among reviews of the picture, demoralizing. Her spat is telling of the effect Dix’s work had on extreme right-wing sensibilities, which was released with particular spite and hatred in 1933 and focused on his pictures of soldiers. The image of the maimed veteran had no part in Völkisch, nationalist iconography because it hampered the will of the people as a strong warrior nation. Such a champion of ‘true’ German art could clearly observe that Dix’s brand of Sachlichkeit had called out the absurdity of German militarism and attendant visual culture in the aftermath 37 Feistel-Rohmeder, Im Terror des Kunstbolschewismus, 39–40.

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of a devastating war. Dix’s memorialization for her was defeatist – it made the Volk look destructible. It worked against the will to battle that was central to the German image of war throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, railing against a time-honoured military tradition which was a central aspect of German society. Dix instead portrayed the ordinary soldier as victim, or dupe, even, time and again, of a society that begot war. Her attack on Pevsner is also interesting for the fact that Pevsner’s observations on Dix’s art lay close to her own, and were reflected in his report in the Dresdner Anzeiger: Here speaks an artist who couldn’t do without the gruesome and the decadent. [. . .] He is not interested in nakedness itself, only in old, emaciated or inordinately fat bodies, or pus, or wounds. Only after he has succeeded in inspiring a thorough horror of sexuality does one realise that he takes sensual pleasure in these deviations.38

As Susie Harries points out, Pevsner viewed Dix’s art as ‘ethically damaging’. However, Pevsner recognized what was fundamental – and distinctly German – in Dix’s art that Feistel-Rohmeder did not or did not want to acknowledge: its socially critical sharpness.39 Dix, for his part, was little involved in politics. But the appearance of his work in recent exhibitions and a publication organized by the German Left in Germany and Russia and the reception of his work by liberal art critics as predominantly anti-war in spirit, identified his work with anti-war activism and the revolutionary Left. The memory of the war in Metropolis was thus shrouded, to some degree, in a liberal, anti-military, and to some extent pro-communist context by one of Germany’s best-known artists who had also fought in the war. To add insult to injury for the DKD, The Trench was bought for the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden in November 1928 for 10,000 Deutschmarks. It joined War Cripples, which had been acquired by the Dresden Stadtmuseum (through its director, Paul Ferdinand Schmidt) in December 1920, after its exhibition at the International Dada Fair in Berlin, 30 June–25 August that year.40 In the first issue of the Kunstkorrespondenz in January 1929, she published the letter that the DKD and six other groups signed and sent to President Paul von Hindenburg, which Joan Clinefelter notes, was written in late 1928.41 The fact that there were six far 38 Nikolaus Pevsner, quoted in Susie Harries, Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life (London: Random House, 2011), 76. 39 Harries, Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life, 77. 40 War Cripples had, however, been resigned to the Stadtmuseum’s repository by 1924. The repository was referred to – forebodingly as it turned out – as the ‘Chamber of Horrors’ because of its store of controversial works, and indicative of War Cripples’ uneasy reception. 41 Clinefelter, Artists for the Reich, 45.

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Right leaning groups in addition to the DKD named in this letter reflects their growing prominence. Though figures are difficult to prove, the DKD claimed that these groups represented the views of 10,000 people.42 The signatories and groups were as follows: Heinrich Blume (DKD); Eugen Friedrich Hopf (Friends of German Art Dresden); Max Robert Gerstenhauer (Germany League); Paul Schultze-Naumburg (the architecture group, the Block; he was the author of the infamous Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race), 1928); Guida Diehl (German Women’s Combat League and the Newland Movement) and Professor Malguth (League of Völkisch Teachers).43 All protested against Hindenburg’s role as patron of two art exhibitions, the International Art Exhibition in Dresden in 1926 and Deutsche Kunst Düsseldorf (German Art Düsseldorf) in 1928, which had opened in late April/early May that year. On looking at the work exhibited at either show, there seemed to be little to offend these Völkisch groups. If modernist and living art was significant in extent, the Düsseldorf show, like the Dresden one, exhibited much traditionalist art, including a work by Richard Müller, which was even illustrated in the prominent and fashionable art periodical Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration.44 Even the two works shown by Dix in Düsseldorf and illustrated in the same periodical – portraits of his infant son and his family – were favourite Völkisch themes.45 But for these groups, the offending works’ removal from such prominent shows was the only solution, because by selecting the depiction of figures from institutions that are supposed to hide the degenerate from human view (homes for cripples, psychiatric institutions, etc.), [they] shatter the beauty-ideal of the German people in favour of strange and substandard types in distorted, raw realism; a phenomenon whose terrible perniciousness Professor Dr. Schultze-Naumburg castigated in his work. [. . .] By emphasizing the lower sexual instinctual life and its aberrations in whorehouses, [. . .], etc., [it] promotes the decomposition of the feeling of modesty, family life and German morality, [and] drag[s] German women’s honour and German men’s values into the mud. 46

She next repeats part of Pevsner’s review of Dix in the Dresdner Anzeiger of 22 September 1928 as an apt description of such work (‘a strange, in many respects 42 Feistel-Rohmeder, Im Terror des Kunstbolschewismus, 48. 43 I have used Clinefelter’s translations for the names of these groups. 44 Oskar Schürer, ‘Deutsche Kunst Düsseldorf 1928’, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 31, no. 62 (1928): 208. The work by Müller illustrated is Auf dem Heuboden (In the Hayloft), showing a boy lying stomach-down on the hay looking away from his books and towards the viewer and accompanied by a cat. 45 T h e works by Dix were Family Picture (Familienbild) (1927) and Seated Child (Sitzendes Kind) (1928). 46 Feistel-Rohmeder, Im Terror des Kunstbolschewismus, 47.

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abhorrent and unhealthy but in other respects a gripping, rousing phenomenon is present’). Jankel Adler’s painting Soldiers was described as a punch in the face of Germany, the heroic German army and their leader. Adler’s modernist but very mild picture of German soldiers was hardly offensive, but that Adler was a Polish Jew, a modernist and winner of a gold medal at Düsseldorf, was. That German soldiers could look poor, disabled and worn out, as in Metropolis, was by comparison much worse. Later, in the wake of one of the earliest entartete Kunst (degenerate art) exhibitions in Dresden in 1933, where Dix’s imagery of soldiers was picked out for particular condemnation, she would call Dix ‘the whore painter who created the obscenest defamation of the German soldier’. Notably, in what remains of the DKD’s papers, Feistel-Rohmeder never refers to the fact that Dix was a frontline soldier. Feistel-Rohmeder is disgusted that the ‘middle-class’ newspapers have allowed reviews of Metropolis, reflective of her ridiculous conflation of modern art as ‘working-class’, or ‘communist’. But her spat is telling of the effect Dix’s work had on extreme right-wing artistic sensibilities. She and other Völkisch adherents could only accept the nineteenth-century imagery of the bodily intact, heroic German soldiers, who appeared perpetually victorious. The nineteenth-century German artistic model cherished by Völkisch groups and the German military, and the re-use of this model in illustrated commemorative volumes and other printed matter, would never allow such defeatist imagery of veterans, let alone those with their faces and bodies maimed. In such volumes, the aftermath of lost battles is remarkably absent. Yet, Metropolis in another sense should have contented FeistelRohmeder because it expressed the fact, at least indirectly, that under the SPD, some working-class veterans lived in dire poverty. But the picture also clearly exposed precisely what Völkisch groups evidently sought to undermine, for their brand of war culture glamourized militarism and soldierly experience to the extent that it had little to do with working-class German veterans’ experiences. Ultimately, Metropolis indicted society in general for forgetting – or attempting to forget, as the revellers in the central panel of Metropolis imply – the suffering caused to those who lost most because of the war and allowing the war’s real history to be glossed over. That Metropolis had any deeper social or political significance in 1928 was arguably dependent on the centrality of the lost war in German consciousness. As such, the reviews for the major solo exhibition of Dix’s work at the commercial Kunstsalon Wolfsberg in Zurich in February/March 1929, held at the same time as a

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major exhibition of works by fellow German artist Karl Hofer at the city’s Kunsthaus, enable an alternative reception of some of his war-related pictures. Among the sixty-eight pieces on show, which represented a cross-section of his output since 1922, were the portfolios of etchings Death and Resurrection (1922) and The War (1924), the aforementioned Streetbattle (1927), Matchseller (1927) and Metropolis. In his review of the exhibition, Sigfried Giedeon asked ‘what effect Dix’s works could have beyond the border in a neutral milieu, which only had to participate to a much lesser extent in the struggles that may have driven Dix to production’: ‘His effect [outside Germany] even reproduced a million times – is only an indirect one’. Although the show was the most important event held at the Wolfsberg for some time, Giedeon, referring directly to Dix’s most brutal imagery, continued that Ever since Gavarni and Daumier [. . .], the ephemeral, temporal, socially critical has demanded the ephemeral mass form of the newspaper, the rotary press. And today: film! [. . .] When, in the ‘Ten Days that Shook the World’, the long hair of a wounded girl slowly slides off the high Neva Bridge before the body sinks into the river, it is more gripping than female genitalia that has been portrayed with painterly meticulousness and shattered by a grenade. The camera makes icy statements more comprehensively and with cooler protocol.47

Giedion made a convincing case against the effectiveness of painting in face of the possibilities of mass media. Certainly, gallery-bound media could not compete with the reach of film and its images of real, rather than painted, war imagery. But if the Swiss response did not have to be filtered through the real psychological effects of war, Giedion’s review was not shared by other critics, who remarked on the power of the major works in the exhibition, however removed from the headier context of German galleries. Within its limited reach, painting retained the power to move and provoke, at least for some. The unidentified reviewer for the Frankfurter Zeitung considered the show to be a ‘provocative special exhibition in the calm and “healthy” atmosphere of Switzerland’, which [would] move minds: After the noble, somewhat melancholy colouration of Hofer’s compositions, the most beautiful of which resonate like a song, the most striking paintings by the much more vital and brutal Otto Dix at first had to look like shrieking trumpets. Not directly affected by war and revolution, the public and critics alike 47 Sigfried Giedion, ‘Otto Dix-Ausstellung, Kunstsalon Wolfsberg, Zürich’, Der Cicerone 21, no. 7 (1929): 204–5. Giedion refers to a scene at the Neva Bridge, Saint Petersburg in the Russian silent film October (or internationally, October: Ten Days that Shook the World (1927), a dramatization of the October Revolution (1917) by Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov. The international title references the popular book by John Reed (1919).

140 Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture hardly seem to bear blatant images such as the ‘street battle’. However, already with the triptych ‘Metropolis’, no one can overlook the frenzy of the colours and the thoroughness of the technique through blatant details. Despite the nonbourgeois nature of the fabrics, his technique is bourgeois in its artisanal OldMaster painting style and thus studied and admired not least by the painters in Switzerland.48

The Frankfurter Zeitung’s review is particularly interesting for its rare insight to the public reception as well as critical reception of Streetbattle, which in fact forwarded a response diametrically opposite to that described by Giedion. Giedion’s view was further refuted by a reviewer in the provincial Swiss newspaper, the Glarner Nachrichten, who in a quite searching commentary, wrote that Anyone who has seen these pictures will not easily shake free of them; because Dix hurls his ideas at us with such relentless force, even brutality, that no indifference can be tolerated. What Dix wants to convey is truth; he castigates the rotten state of our society and uncovers the whole cesspool of human filth. He mercilessly tears off all masks, presents the vices of our time naked and sober, without any sentimentality. Even the ugliest is not veiled but reproduced with a clear objectivity of all forms down to the last detail and worked out even more vividly through the use of colour. Dix first became known through his picture ‘The War’. Impaled bodies, torn limbs, bones, intestines and corpses in all stages of decomposition are shown drastically. The ‘street battle’ of the current exhibition is almost as horrific. Self-portraits by the artist, but above all the portrait of the parents, prove that self-love and love for parents must take a back seat to fanaticism of the truth. But is it the truth that Dix gives us? It is reality, but as it is seen by the post-war generation, which is still under the spell of the terrible experiences. The literature also shows parallel phenomena. Perhaps Dix will succeed in reaching beyond the socially critical attitude to new ways of life and shaping them artistically. Then his work will belong to the great, immortal artistic creations, because Dix is not only able to solve aesthetic problems, but above all he has something to say to humanity.49

For this reviewer, the artist’s voice spoke loudest, where the reality of the pictures was that reality framed by traumatic experience, lucid and with no address to flattery, either in subject or with regard to the sensibilities of the viewer. The patina of idealism had been scrubbed off to reveal truths. Dix’s art could still 48 ​dt​., ‘Chronik der Künste’, Frankfurter Zeitung? (Frankfurt), [no date] 1929. Newspaper clipping, Nachlaβ Otto Dix, DKA, GNM. The text ’Frankfurter Zeitung 8 March 1929’ is written on the clipping but it does not correspond to the 8 March issue of the newspaper. 49 O. H., ‘Aus der Kunstwelt. Kunst in Zürich’, Glarner Nachrichten (Glarus) 1929. Newspaper clipping, Nachlaß Otto Dix, DKA, GNM.

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shake the consciousness of those who saw it and lay bare the long-term effects of war, dialoguing the flagrantly reformed masculinity of veterans and women made destitute by the war – the constants of German streets in the 1920s. It inverted long-established models of war memorialization, and, as reviews demonstrated, prodded public consciousness on the consequences of a militarized society. While 1928 marked general success for Dix, it was something of a turning point in his career. Not until after World War II would he command so much positive attention from critics in Germany. Völkisch politics and culture, on the other hand, while remaining uninfluential in general, continued to gather momentum and the DKD saw sufficient renewed interest in its activities to apply increasing force to its attack on modernist artists. The Völkisch art journal, Deutsche Bildkunst (German Pictorial Art), and the arts report supplement the Bartelsbund-Korrespondenz had been founded in January 1927, the former with a print run of about 3,000. Eventually, the DKD had enough financial support to manage nationwide distribution of their militantly anti-modern bulletin, which was renamed the Deutsche Kunstkorrespondenz (German Art News) by May 1927.50 According to Feistel-Rohmeder, it was distributed, free of charge, with over a hundred newspapers across Germany, including the Völkischer Beobachter, the Deutschen Wochenschau, the Flamme (Stuttgart) and the Niederdeutschen Zeitung. Printing costs were met by the extreme right-wing, anti-Semitic Deutschbund (German League), which had accepted the DKD as a branch organization.51 At the same time, while the DKD’s battle against modern art was far from won in 1928, there were already many signs that attention was being drawn away from the anti-war artists’ campaigns from around the same time as the Feme murders were reported in Die Weltbühne. Kurt Tucholsky lamented the demise of ‘true’ pacifism, which was allowing militant right-wing factions to develop and spread throughout Germany.52 While the modernists (seen as pro-left, even if not always dogmatically so) had not yet been eclipsed by the Völkisch art movement, the failure of peace organizations, in the ordinary fabric of everyday life, was becoming evident: ‘And “life” goes on; – life, which in this case is the official ethos, which praises the war; the cinema which glorifies war; the newspaper, which does not dare to show the war in its true guise; the church which rushes to war; [. . .] 50 See Feistel-Rohmeder, Im Terror des Kunstbolschewismus, 3. 51 Feistel-Rohmeder, Im Terror des Kunstbolschewismus, 3. The bulk of the documents of the DKD were destroyed in a bombing raid in 1944. See Feistel-Rohmeder, Im Terror des Kunstbolschewismus, 214. For a detailed account of the relationship between the Deutschbund and the DKD, see Clinefelter, Artists for the Reich, 32. 52 Kurt Tucholsky, ‘Und immer wieder Max Hölz!’, Die Weltbühne 23, no. 43 (1927): 652.

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the school, which interprets the war untruthfully as a bombastic panopticon; the university, which celebrates war –, everywhere the war’.53 Socialist artist and one of Dix’s students (in the Dix-Schule (Dix-School)) at the Academy, Horst Naumann, painted Weimar Carnival (Figure 37), a little-studied work, which keenly observed Weimar’s clashing opposites, and was prescient of a tormented future, where

Figure 37  Horst Naumann, Weimarer Fasching (Weimar Carnival), 1928–9. Oil on canvas, 91 × 71 cm. Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden. 53 Tucholsky, ‘Über wirkungsvollen Pazifismus’, 555.

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the moderates and the Left refused to band together to keep the NSDAP out of government. It is a quite alternative vision of the annual Dresden Carnival held on Shrove Tuesday (to mark the beginning of Lent in the Christian calendar) when Dresden’s streets were filled with revellers in sartorial masquerade. A large central motif of a man mingles with various other motifs which recall the destruction caused by the war, including ruined buildings, gas-masked soldiers, coffins and war graves next to which is placed a portrait of Hindenburg, while the revue dancers recall Weimar’s glamorous cultural scene, which softened the appearance of harsher realities. The painting criticizes Hindenburg for prolonging the war and later perpetuating the myth of endurance of the German army, the Nazis whose ideology was nourished by the myth, and the evidence of the toll of the war. The central figure is a blackly ironic self-portrait of the artist, where he combines a swastika-emblazoned Freikorps steel helmet with a jester’s costume as mockery of the militants’ marching displays. Naumann alludes to the fact that the Freikorps regiments emerged out of World War  I, were among the first to employ the swastika in their military attire and played a leading role – endorsed by the new democratic government – in quashing the attempted communist revolution in the Winter of 1918–19, murdering both Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg in January 1919. Naumann and another student of the Dix-Schule, Curt Querner (1904–76), were, like Otto Griebel, active members of the Communist party and the Agitprop artists group, the ARBKD, which, along with over fifty other creatives, included writers, musicians, photographers and art critics. Naumann’s painting implied that central, uncomfortable truth regarding German democracy: its roots were founded in violence that allowed the freebooters to murder the communist leaders and others, and militant factions had since been allowed to flourish and remain little punished for their murderous activities, as Istvan Deak’s study showed. The Dresden-based communist artists who took to the city’s streets on 4 August 1929, with the KPD’s Bezirksgruppe Ost-Sachsen (East Saxony district group) and the Internationaler Bund der Kriegesopfer und der Arbeit (International Association of War Victims and Labour) did not ignore this fact. KPD member and prominent sculptor Eugen Hoffmann, an acquaintance of Dix who had created a bronze bust of the artist in 1925, created a soft sculpture of a dying World War I soldier trapped in barbed wire especially for the protest through the city streets (Figure 38). Hoffmann’s sculpture was clad in a real Feldgrau (field grey) uniform of the war years, a cartridge belt, spats and boots, and had a head carved out of wood,

144 Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

Figure 38  Anti-war demonstration in Dresden, 4 August 1928, with Eugen Hoffmann’s Sterbende Soldat im Drahtverhau (Dying Soldier in Barbed Wire). Stadtmuseum, Dresden, SMD Ph 2010 00621.

with a rifle hanging beneath him.54 The photograph also shows a placard on the right, on which is written, ‘Verreckt für den Kapitalismus’, meaning ‘died a wretched or miserable death for Capitalism, which reflected their belief that the sacrifices for the war effort by working-class soldiers were in vain in the hands of high-ranking military and democrats. The photograph does not convey the extent of the demonstration, however. As the procession made its way, other participants, ‘symbolic groups’, stood on either side of it, attired to drive the message home: children armed with helmets, brass sabres and uniforms, a model of a tank cruiser carried by six men, two large caricatures depicting Müller-Franken leading Wilhelm into the Promised Land, the figure of Death protected by priests, and gas-masked soldiers and fascists who dragged young proletarians like cattle for slaughter, and a replica tank. A giant drawing was captioned, ‘Shares goes up – even if men die’ – referencing war profiteers.55 The police forced the organizers to remove the sculpture, but the event was reported in the KPD’s Arbeiterstimme newspaper on 6 August:

54 Dietrich Schubert, ‘“Verreckt für den Kapitalismus”. Der sterbende Soldat im Drahtverhau, von Eugen Hoffmann, Dresden 1928’, in Die Politik in der Kunst und die Kunst in der Politik: für Klaus von Beyme, ed. Ariane Hellinger (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2013), 19. 55 Schubert, ‘Der sterbende Soldat im Drahtverhau’, 19.

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A group from the International Union of War Victims and Labour had gathered on Freiberger Platz (. . .) carrying a disturbing work of art: the corpse of a Feldgrau hung in barbed wire. The head and hands are horribly, but only too faithfully modelled by one of Dresden’s most famous sculptors. A dense crowd stands in front of this group, shaken mute – ‘Died for the Fatherland!’ – Then the leader of the police escort approaches and explains that ‘the figure in the old army uniform’ would be confiscated immediately if it wasn’t removed. Since the figure is too valuable for the police archive and is intended to serve as a demonstration object at the revolutionary anti-war exhibition that is being prepared, the corpse was removed with reluctance after the group had been photographed. But the cap and the rifle remain in the wire entanglement.56

The forced removal of the sculpture was also an attack on the freedom of art by the politicians, as had been the case with Georg Grosz’s powerful Gott mit uns portfolio (published 1920), which memorably castigated the brutality and stupidity of the German officer class and politicians, and the furore surrounding Dix’s Mädchen im Spiegel.57 Despite the energy and commitment of artists like Naumann and Hoffmann to the anti-war movement, support for the latter had already begun to wane as noted earlier from the early twenties, and particularly after the Treaty of Locarno, the terms of which appeared to render such groups unnecessary.58 The DKD found increased support in line with that for extreme Right and affiliated military groups, with whom the DKD was closely allied and which had a growing network across Germany, as reflected in the list of groups in the letter to Hindenburg. The beginnings of more sinister actions against modernist artists began in 1930, when Wilhelm Frick entered office on 23 January that year with responsibility for education in neighbouring Thuringia, from where Dix hailed. Though he only held this post until 1 April 1931 (he would become Thuringian Ministry of the Interior in January 1933), his actions anticipated the fate of German art under the Nazis. Enabled by his legal background, he purged the police force of republican influence, handed out positions (illegally) to Nazis 56 Anonymous, ‘Aufmarsch gegen den imperialistische Krieg’, Arbeiterstimme (Dresden), 6 August 1928, 2. 57 Schubert, ‘Der sterbende Soldat im Drahtverhau’, 19. 58 See Deak, Left-Wing Intellectuals, 114–18. Organized pacifism increased after the war and on 2 November 1918, under the banner of the Bund Neues Vaterland, about 100,000 people demonstrated in Berlin for universal disarmament. However, the peace movement lost much of its support after the German government officially embraced international arbitration after the Treaty of Locarno, 5–16 October 1925. ‘No More War’ demonstrations and exhibitions had to be abandoned due to lack of public interest.

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and set out to increase the militaristic spirit of Nazism and Völkisch culture.59 He banned ‘imported’ Jazz (another reason for supporters of Völkisch culture to despise Metropolis), replacing it with the chants of zealous militaristic and anti-Semitic propaganda marches. Schools celebrated the Volk for their military prowess and national honour. Frick banned the hugely popular anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque, 1929) and Lewis Milestone’s film adaptation of the same name (1930) in Thuringia in 1930. Frick worked closely with Paul Schultze-Naumburg, an honorary member of the DKD, who rejected modernism in all its forms. Schultze-Naumburg’s infamous book Kunst und Rasse attempted to show the ‘degeneration’ of art brought about by modernism by juxtaposing illustrations of modernist art with images of inmates of mental asylums.60 By 1930, on Frick’s recommendation, Schultze-Naumburg was made director of the Weimar School of Art and performed the first purges (Säuberungen) of Modern art, removing from view seventy works by Dix, Ernst Barlach, Lionel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, Oskar Kokoschka and others at the Weimar Castle Museum (Schloβmuseum). He also destroyed a fresco by Oskar Schlemmer in the State School of Architecture (Staatlichen Bauhochschule) and replaced it with ‘correct’ art.61 Also prominent was Dix’s former teacher Professor Richard Guhr of Dresden's Academy of Applied Arts who was an early supporter of Nazism and who in 1922 made public his deep disdain for Impressionist and modernist artists such as Max Liebermann and Oskar Kokoschka and described the Academy as a ‘breeding ground for bolshevist and communist theory’ (Brutstätten bolschewistischer und kommunistischer Theorien).62 Feistel-Rohmeder’s review of Metropolis indicated the importance of art as a didactic device in seducing the public with the objectives of the German extreme Right. But while the actual influence of Metropolis on the public can never be known, dystopian depictions of war and its effects seem to have had little real impact in Germany. Certainly, as history would bear out, it was the dynamic image of warriorhood that drew votes. That such pictures were accompanied by promises to avenge the terms of the Versailles Treaty tells its own story.

59 Robert Wistrich, Who’s Who in Nazi Germany (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982). 60 Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kunst und Rasse (Munich: JF Lehmann Verlag, 1928), 90–6. For more information on his involvement with the DKD, see Clinefelter, Artists for the Reich, 22ff. 61 Brenner, Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus, 33. 62 See Birgit Schwarz, Otto Dix. Großstadt (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1993). See also Bächler, ‘Die Akademie für bildende Künste zwischen Novemberrevolution und faschistischer Machtübernahme’, 305.

5

War at the Prussian Academy of Arts

The revolutionary says: Art is a weapon. And he means: Weapon of open, consistent attack on bourgeois culture. The nationalist says: Art is a weapon. And he means: Gas bombs for the obfuscation of (one’s) true position. The citizen says: Art is no weapon. [. . .] Only a harmless commercial aircraft, a guaranteed pure instrument of peace.1 By the time Otto Dix exhibited his monumental triptych War at the Prussian Academy of Arts in late 1932, artistic life in Dresden and the rest of Germany had become considerably affected by politics, in significant measure polarizing between far left and far right artistic groups. Modernist artists faced hostility from those in the city who acted as artistic watchdogs for the Nazis, who increasingly attacked modernist art as degenerate or ‘culturally Bolshevist’. Dix’s colleague at the Academy, DKD and now Nazi Party ally Richard Müller, as time would prove, hated Dix as much as Feistel-Rohmeder.2 Two former Dresden Academy students, Walther Gasch (1886–1962) and Willy Waldapfel (1883–1965), both veterans of the war, were leaders of two other Dresden-based extreme nationalist artists groups who would later work closely with Müller to destroy Dix’s career. Gasch led the so-called ‘Gaschgruppe’, described by Hans Grundig as a numerically strong Nazi group. Stylistically, according to Grundig, the Gaschgruppe sought to emulate the work of nineteenth-century realists while in depicting war, transferred Wagnerian heroicism to the ‘frischfröhlichen markigen’ (fresh, cheerfully vigorous) heroic death on the Western Front.3 The Deutscher Künstlerverband Dresden, as we have seen, was led by Willy 1 Adolf Behne, ‘Die Kunst im Trommelfeuer der politischen Parteien’, Sozialistische Monatshefte 37, no. 8 (1931): 779. 2 He is identified as the only Academy lecturer who was a member before 30 January 1933 in Dresden. Von der Königlichen Kunstakademie zur Hochschule für Bildende Künste, 1764–1989, p. 322. Griebel recalled that in 1932, Dix noticed a tiny, embroidered swastika on Müller’s tie and asked him directly if he was a member of the Nazi party, which Müller denied. Griebel, Ich war ein Mann, 314–15. 3 Grundig, Zwischen Karneval und Aschermittwoch. Erinnerungen eines Malers, 236–7. Grundig described Gasch as a ‘tall and stupid-faced man’ who ‘in accordance with his barbaric view, painted

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Waldapfel specifically to mount opposition to modernist art and promote Nazi ideology through exhibitions with strongly fascist themes.4 The fears of liberal and left-leaning artists were reflected in the conditions, which in January 1932, had led Otto Griebel and like-minded artists to form the communist-oriented Bund sozialistischer Geistesarbeiter (Union of Socialist Intellectual Workers, BSG) in Dresden, with meetings attended by between 200 and 250 intellectuals sympathetic to their cause. Griebel’s communist artists group, the ARBKD (Asso), joined forces with the KPD district management to defend their interests. He recalled that ‘we performed even more effectively than before in public and set up a meeting room in Falkenstrasse [in Dresden], in which we held well-attended debating groups with artist colleagues from all associations’. Interestingly, Nazi followers also appeared.5 Against this challenging background for modernists, 1932 had also been a somewhat mixed year critically for Otto Dix. As a letter from his Berlin gallerist Karl Nierendorf would testify in February 1933, his work had been receiving negative attention for some time and was proving difficult to sell. In Dresden, the political far left and far right camps singled out for criticism his work and influence on the younger generation at the Dresden Academy student Exhibition in March 1932. Excepting work by Richard Müller’s students, which for her exuded the true Völkisch spirit, Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder focused her criticism of the rest of the show on Dix’s students, which she saw as evidence of Dix’s power to destroy the German artistic spirit: Any visitor who shares German virtues looks at the testimonies of the Dix students completely outraged! Through this student show, Professor Otto Dix reveals himself as a destroyer of German youth, and it would well be the task of German women's associations to repeatedly publicly protest against a government that rewards the activities of such seducers of the people!6

racial pictures [. . .], simply ghastly in their repulsive stupidity’. Very few of Gasch’s pre-1933 war pictures appear to have survived. 4 See Bächler, ‘Die Akademie für bildende Künste zwischen Novemberrevolution und faschistischer Machtübernahme’, 305. This group is not to be confused with the Deutscher Künstlerbund (German Artists Association), founded in 1903 by Max Klinger and others to promote artistic freedom and new currents in art. 5 Griebel, Ich war ein Mann, 312–13. Griebel continues that at this time, he and Horst Naumann also underlined the long-term effects of war by writing and illustrating for the International War Victims Bulletin (Internationales Kriegsopfer-Bulletin), the organ of the International Associations of War and Labour Victims (Internationales Bundes der Kriegs – und Arbeitsopfer). 6 Feistel-Rohmeder, Im Terror des Kunstbolschewismus, 162–3.

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The ARBKD, in their magazine Stoß von Links, lamented the separation of art and politics in the exhibition and criticized Dix's art and that by some of his students because of its depressing depictions of the struggling working class.7 Yet, he had been given a solo show of his drawings, which included some portraits, in May 1932 in Dresden’s Galerie Arnold. Local critic Georg Paech was pleased that Dix, ‘for a time a narrator of creepy war horror stories’ was now doing what Paech believed great painters did – kept overt exaggeration away from their work; the show was also praised in the Dresdner Anzeiger.8 Additionally, he showed paintings in a major touring exhibition of recent German art in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, which was facilitated by the curator and director respectively of the National Gallery in Berlin, Ludwig Thormaehlen and Ludwig Justi.9 Dix was afforded an opportunity to finish the year on a high note with a solo show that opened at the Neue Kunst Fides in Dresden on 15 October and which attracted much of Dresden’s artistic circle.10 On the same day, his monumental triptych War went on public view for the first time as part of the prestigious Autumn Exhibition of the Prussian Academy in Berlin. Over four metres in width, War was and remains an exceptionally raw portrayal of life and death for the Frontschwein in the trenches of the Western Front (Figure 39). Yet, in 1932 it was no more than the gallery-going public had come to expect from Dix, especially since War’s central panel repeated much of the content of the highly controversial Trench and The War, which continued to be discussed. In 1931, Alfred H. Barr, director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, wrote that All Quiet on the Western Front, written by Dix's compatriot, is frequently named the greatest novel on the war. The memories and sketches which Otto Dix preserved from these years were ultimately made permanent in a folio of etchings and in a single great painting, works worthy to rank with Remarque's novel [. . .]. The painting, perhaps the most famous picture painted in post-war Europe, is [. . .] a masterpiece of unspeakable horror. [. . .] Painted with the

7 Stoß von Links, Sondernummer 9 (1932): 44, quoted in Bächler, ‘Die Akademie für bildende Künste zwischen Novemberrevolution und faschistischer Machtübernahme.’ 8 Georg Paech, ‘Otto Dix in der Galerie Arnold’, Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten (Dresden), 5 May 1932. W. H. (Holzhaufen), ‘Zeichnungen von Otto Dix in der Galerie Arnold’, Dresdner Anzeiger (Dresden), 22 May 1932, 2–3. 9 Ludwig Thormaehlen, Nyere Tysk Kunst: Maleri og skulptur 1932 (Oslo: Kunstnernes Hus, 1932). Ludwig Thormaehlen, Nyere Tysk Kunst: Maleri og skulptur: Maj 1932 (Copenhagen: Den Frie Udstilling, 1932). 10 Details of the show at the Fides are known mostly through newspaper reviews. Two reviews of the show mention a ‘war picture’ (Kriegsbild), but neither review names nor discusses it. See W. H. (Holzhaufen), ‘Neue Gemälde von Otto Dix in der Fides’, Dresdner Anzeiger (Dresden), 16 October 1932, 3. G. (Georg) P. (Paech), ‘Neue Bilder von Dix in der Fides’, Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten (Dresden ), 16 October 1932, 3.

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Figure 39  Otto Dix, Krieg (War), 1929–32. Mixed media on canvas, central panel 204 × 204 cm; left and right wing panels 204 × 102 cm; predella 60 × 204 cm. Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gal. No. 3754.

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152 Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture uncanny verisimilitude of wax works, this staggering vision of decay in death lives through the terrific loathing which Dix has concentrated in it. In 1924, Dix purged himself finally of war poison in a folio of fifty etchings bearing the title Der Krieg. These are documents in the spirit of the great painting, cumulatively as powerful and affording, naturally, a far greater variety. The etchings bear prosaic names; they present facts but seem an anthology of nightmares. Starshells lighting the farm at Monacu shows us shattered walls, an overturned caisson and writhing tree stumps drawn with that sensitive calligraphic delicacy which we find in the whiteline drawings of Altdorfer and Baldung Grien. A dead horse gestures with stiffened, protesting legs. Shellholes at Dontrien lit by rockets, near Langemarck, February, 1918, are landscapes as sterile and deathly as lava fields on the moon, or the etchings of Hercules Segers. Shock Troops advancing under Gas seems more inhuman than the two cadavers in another print who engage in grotesque conversation while grass sprouts from their skulls. Goya’s Desastres de la Guerra of course comes to mind, but Goya is at once more dramatic and more journalistic. He is outside, looking on, an observer and a commentator. But Dix is a survivor who has participated. Goya thinks in terms of contrived action, of violent forces; Dix depends on eloquent, spectral silence, on documentary precision. Goya, the classicist, the Latin, emphasizes the human dramatis personae, but for Dix war is a process of organic disintegration, a slow fantastic metamorphosis of life into death, in which the human being emerges, as it were, accidentally. Huysrnan, Poe, or Baudelaire might, perhaps, have done justice in words to Dix’s war painting and etchings though there is little about his work which suggests the love of the horrible or the decomposed for its own sake. Dix is no decadent taster of gamey delights nor a mere amateur of the macabre. He is an artist who has gone through four years of ‘quiet’ on the Western Front and expressed himself subsequently with a certain lack of restraint.11

Barr would probably not have packed The Trench out of sight in a storage room, as happened shortly after its purchase for the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden in 1928.12 This fact, along with the renewed interest in the production of visual media and literature that sought to memorialize and reframe the memory of the war for Germany in various ways may have prompted Dix to revisit the theme of World War I in 1932, although it was only many years later that he provided this rationale for creating the picture: 11 Alfred H. Barr, ‘Otto Dix’, The Arts 4 (1931): 244. Reproduced in the press release, ‘Exhibit of War Etchings by Otto Dix opens Aug.1’, Museum of Modern Art, New York. https://www​.moma​.org​/ momaorg​/shared​/pdfs​/docs​/press​_archives​/183​/releases​/MOMA​_1933​-34​_0050​_1934​-07​-28​.pdf (accessed 25 June 2020). 12 T h e painting was bought for the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden in November 1928 for 10,000 DM. It appears that it was exhibited for a short time before being sent to storage. See Schubert, ‘Die Verfolgung des Gemäldes Schützengraben’, 360.

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The picture began ten years after the First World War. I had made many studies during those years, in order to process the war experience artistically. In 1928 I felt ready to tackle the big theme [. . .]. At this time many books in the Weimar Republic were again promoting notions of the hero and heroism, long since reduced to absurdity in the trenches of the war. People had begun to forget the terrible suffering the war had brought to them. From this situation arose the triptych [. . .] I did not want to cause fear and panic but impart knowledge about the awfulness of war and thus awaken people’s powers of resistance.13

Dix worked intermittently on War until mid-1932, after about four and a half years of conceptual and substantive reconfigurations.14 When art historian Max Sauerlandt visited Dix in his studio on Brühl’s Terrace in November 1929, he reported that Dix is painting a large new war picture in the form of a triptych with a predella. The picture has been on his easel for a year and a half, and for the past year and a half he has been trying to come up with the definitive version of the composition, which now seems to be set. It was of the greatest interest to me to compare the first version, which was preserved during the breaks, with the solution that has now been found, which is almost complete. Only the left wing of the triptych remains in the form of the earlier draft. [. . .]. I have the impression that in the year and a half working on these big pieces, Dix has taken a decisive step forward, both inwardly and in the artistic presentation of his intentions, and that his entire art must reach a new level through the passionate work on this one picture.15

It is possible that this earlier version of the central panel had been exhibited at the Neue Kunst Fides gallery from 23 January 1929, ten months before Sauerlandt’s visit, and was painted over at a later date.16 In its absence a number of preparatory drawings and full-size cartoons hold clues to the earlier design seen by Sauerlandt. One is a drawing for the central panel, dated 1928–9, showing only the pile of dead and dying figures preserved in the final version, and a busier composition for the right-wing panel in the form of a full-size cartoon depicting soldiers, some carrying wounded comrades, as they return to the

13 Karl Heinz Hagen, ‘Zur Kunst gehört Können, Neues Deutschland-Exklusiv-Interview mit Professor Otto Dix’, Neues Deutschland (Berlin), 15 September 1964, 4. 14 T h e earliest sketches for War are dated as having been executed between 1927 and 1929. Considering that further drawings, including the cartoon, were laid out in 1929, the earlier dates of 1927–8 are possible. 15 Max Sauerlandt, Ausgewählte Schriften. Vol 1: Reiseberichte 1925-1932, 2 vols., vol. 1, ed. Heinz Speilmann (Hamburg: H Christians, 1971), 131–2. 16 Nachlaß Otto Dix, M, G. 1, B 5, DKA, GNM. On a sheet of headed paper dated 23.01.29 is written a list of photographs of ‘Gemälde’ (paintings) by Dix for installation, the first of which is ‘Mittelstück des Tryptichon’ (central panel of the triptych).

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trenches, leaving burning buildings behind them in the background.17 The final overall design of the entire triptych, albeit with some further changes (revealed in radiographic examinations of the painting during restoration, completed early 2014), is preserved in a full-size cartoon, with the left and central panels dated to 1930 and an undated right panel that establishes the final composition but not the self-portrait.18 In its depiction of the savagery of modern warfare, War built on The Trench’s controversial exhibition in Cologne in 1923–4 by again bringing an uncomfortable past into the present, in what was arguably the most monumental and extreme depiction of the effects of war on the soldier’s body in Western painting. The trench in the central panel of War, however, is barely a trench at all. Set among the ruins of a group of dwellings rather than a stretch of land, it is more likely heavily shelled land that provided temporary cover. The framing narrative provided by the wing panels and the predella significantly differentiates War from the earlier picture, something that contemporary critical reviews, nonetheless, almost completely failed to account for. From the left panel to the right, the narrative moves from morning to night, and from the onset of battle, where the troops set out, to the aftermath of a bombardment. It also moves from the general to the personal: the left wing and central panel do not focus on any single individual, but the right wing is, with little doubt, a self-portrait of Dix rescuing a comrade from no man’s land after the bombardment depicted in the central panel. The latter is an important development from The Trench because unlike the latter he identifies himself, more explicitly than in Metropolis, as a soldier of the war. Considered separately from the rest of the triptych, the left panel could be interpreted as Völkisch nationalist in spirit in its show of German military strength marching across the landscape. A battalion of hundreds of troops set out in the early morning mist, under a sweeping apocalyptic sky of billowing cloud backlit by the rising sun, the painting of which seems to owe something to Albrecht Altdorfer’s Battle of Issus of 1529, a key work in German battlefield painting.19 The large scale and placement of the two foreground figures as they 17 T h e drawing for the central panel is held at the Ulmer Museum, Inventory no. 1962.2390. The cartoon for the right panel is held at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kupferstichkabinett, Inventory no. 1978/60f. 18 See the catalogue for the special exhibition held in Dresden, 5 April–13 July 2014, which provides a detailed chronology of the painting’s development. Birgit Dalbajewa, Simone Fleischer and Olaf Peters, Otto Dix, Der Krieg - Das Dresdner Triptychon (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2014). The cartoon of the final version is held at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Inventory No. 1978-60a-d. 19 Albrecht Altdorfer, Battle of Issus [Alexanderschlacht], 1529. Oil on panel, 158.4 × 120.3 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

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round the curve in the path makes the viewer part of the march. The cartwheel at the bottom-left foreground, while possibly belonging to a cart carrying war materials, may also belong to a hand plough, signifying the Heimat (homeland) and recalling the tranquil agrarian landscape of Saxony and Thuringia from where the Saxon (Dix’s) regiments set out. This meaning gains some weight by referring to a preparatory drawing for the left panel, which reveals that Dix had originally planned to place a simple hand plough in the same corner.20 No evidence has emerged as to why Dix changed this detail. In any case, the agrarian motif of the cartwheel or plough-wheel juxtaposed with soldiers who represent the German people relates to the romantic Völkisch nationalist notion of Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) which, in connecting descent blood (of a people) to the land they cultivate, expressed their defence of it. Dix could not have been ignorant of this symbology, which featured in much Völkisch art such as that of Julius Paul Junghanns, who was a student at the Dresden Academy from 1896 to 1898.21 The notion of the landscape as Heimat is bolstered by the fact that Dix painted out the Panzers (tanks) on the horizon, visible in a preparatory cartoon, so that the setting instead doubles as battlefield and Heimat. But any pro-militarist, nationalistic overtures are tempered considerably by the central panel, which resolutely fixes attention on the viciousness of mechanized warfare and recalls – as The Trench had done in 1924 – the experiences of the thousands of horribly maimed men begging on post-war German streets. The frequent, somewhat Christian metaphor throughout the 1920s and 1930s (across the former belligerent nations of World War  I) of the ‘crucified’ soldier could hardly be less brutal in its presentation than it is here. A decapitated head, barely visible in reproductions, rolls to the edge of the bottom-left corner of the central panel and is crowned with barbed wire instead of Christ’s thorns, which are viciously matted with the hair and embedded in the forehead. The putrid grey-blue flesh indicates advanced decay while the gaping mouth clogged with coagulated, blackened blood and open left eye presents the undignified reality of a battlefield burial. Dix, like many other soldiers, recalled that repeated shelling re-opened graves, ‘killing’ soldiers again and again, re-exposing shattered, shredded, putrefying bodies of soldiers to the elements and deepening the misery 20 Otto Dix, Sketch of the left panel for War, 1928–9. Graphite on white paper, 480 × 313 cm. Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, C 1969-117. 21 Details on this artist’s training appear to differ. According to a number of websites that at the time of writing were selling Junghann’s work, the artist studied part-time at the Staatliche Akademie für Kunstgewerbe (State Academy for Applied Arts) in Dresden in 1895 and began study at the Dresden Academy in 1896 under Leon Pohle. He left to complete military service in 1898 and then from 1899 continued his study of art at the Royal Bavarian Academy. See for example the website of the Galerie Ostendorff, Münster: http://www​.ostendorff​.de​/nc​/kuenstler​/junghanns​-julius​-paul​.html.

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of those still living. The head brings to mind two wartime portraits where Dix portrays himself as little more than a skull (Figure 2). This ‘crucified’ soldier’s body is inelegantly knelt behind the head, facing in the opposite direction and appearing to grow into the charred wooden stump against which his neck is forced and which is sprayed with his blood. On the other side of the panel is a tangled pyramid of corpses in various stages of putrefaction, their entrails glistening as they slide and merge with the mud. Two of the at least ten soldiers in the central panel have possibly survived the bombardment: one appears to emerge, hand first, from under the sheet of corrugated iron in the centre foreground, another detail barely visible in reproductions, possibly after having taken cover during the attack and who now must claw and crawl over the grim mélange. The other wears a gas mask, which protects him from mustard gas but also from the stench of the dead. In the middleground are the mangled, heavily decomposed remains of a soldier. The pose of this figure bears a strong resemblance to works by Richard Müller. In 1920, while Dix was a master student there, Müller produced Drawing Class at the Academy (Figure 40), showing the studio in which Müller taught his students and with a model of a skeleton in a striding pose, right arm outstretched. This model was likely used for Müller’s earlier work, Der wirkliche Friede (The Real Peace) (1918) which symbolized the senselessness of the war. It is possible that either the model or Müller’s work or both influenced Dix, even though such a claim is controversial, given Müller’s later pro-Nazi stance and abhorrent treatment of Dix and his work in 1933. The reclining figures in the predella appear to be sleeping in the lower levels of the trench but even here, their relative comfort is disturbed by the two black rats who shuffle about at their feet. The picture parallels the artist’s experience of the war as recorded in some of his wartime letters, including one to his friend Helene Jakob on 1 August 1916 while he fought in the Battle of the Somme: ‘Suddenly a 28er blew so much dirt into the hole that we were up to our chests in it [. . .]. The following days were almost more terrible. [On the 10th] the enemy attacked. [. . .] Terrible dismay, horrible losses. The corpses lay around, arms and legs strewn and blown about. [. . .] Now we are far beyond this hell in a place called Maurois.’22 The triptych’s large scale, with its life-size figures and gaping, wounded land opening into the gallery space, places the viewer in the extreme foreground, where bodily entrails and accumulating floodwater threaten to spill over onto the shoes of whoever stands before it. Dix’s painting technique only serves to heighten one’s queasiness: the layers of transparent oil glaze brushed 22 Otto Dix, letter to Helene Jakob, 1 August 1916. Otto-Dix-Archiv, Vaduz.

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Figure 40 Richard Müller, Zeichenklasse in der Akademie (Drawing Class at the Academy), 1920. Oil on canvas, 120 × 90.5 cm. Albertinum | Galerie Neue Meister, Gal. No. 3141. © Photograph: Albertinum | Dresden State Art Collections, Franz Zadnicek. © Estate of Richard Müller, Bild-Kunst Bonn / IVARO Dublin, 2023.

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over thick impasto strokes create the illusion of everything appearing to seep and spew with the soaked earth. In the right panel, the artist portrays himself simultaneously as survivor, hero and victim of the war, in a pose that recalled the many images across popular media of the soldier-hero dragging his comrade to safety. Against the whorls of fire and smoke emerging from the ruined buildings sat amid the cratered landscape, the dramatically over-lit figure of Dix emerges as a kind of crazed phantom, with clenched jaw and fiery, iris-less eyes staring into oblivion as he drags a comrade to safety. It recalls that in October 1915 during the Second Battle of Champagne (won by Germany), he successfully led a counter-attack after his squad came under sustained heavy fire, and in 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, exhibited courage that earned him the Iron Cross, 2nd Class.23 But the pale colouration of Dix’s figure also suggests hallucination, as if he were reliving the episode – as if in a dream or nightmare he has ‘returned’ to the battlefield. Years later, discussing the triptych during an interview, he remarked that: ‘as a young man you don't notice at all that you were, after all, badly affected. For years afterwards, at least ten years, I kept getting these dreams, in which I had to crawl through ruined houses, through passages I could hardly get through. The ruins were constantly in my dreams’.24 The model for the moustached figure who appears in all four panels is very much the everyman and bears a strong resemblance to Dix’s father (compare with Portrait of the Artist’s Parents I, 1921). This is one way in which the painting counters the popular image of the muscled, idealized soldier in popular culture and instead memorializes the Frontschwein or ordinary front soldier, who suffered the highest exposure to mental and physical injury. As we have seen, Dix depicted in two major pictures in 1920 a somewhat ambivalent public that did not understand the extent of their suffering, which in many cases continued for the rest of their lives. Soldiers suffered crude and cruel treatments that sought to rehabilitate them and the facially disfigured were often hidden from view, sometimes by their own families, to ‘protect’ the public.25 Even worse, as Carol Poore recalls, around 70,000 starved to death in psychiatric institutions due to famine conditions during and after the war. Emasculated physically, they were perhaps even more emasculated as ‘hysterics’ who were considered weak rather than traumatized. Furthermore, the nineteenth-century ‘cult of health and 23 See the Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden (Sächsisches Staatsarchiv, 11356 Generalkommando des XII. Reservekorps, Nr. 191 (Laufendes bei Dekorationen und Verleihungen von Eisernen Kreuzen I. und II. Klasse). No exact date given for the award. 24 Otto Dix, quoted in an interview with Maria Wetzel, Maria Wetzel, ‘Ein harter Mann, dieser Maler. Gespräch mit Otto Dix’, Diplomatischer Kurier (Cologne) 1965. Reproduced in Schmidt and Dix, Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis, 269. 25 See for example Lerner, Hysterical Men, 32–9.

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beauty’ that prevailed in Weimar Germany worked to create hostility towards those viewed as ill, disabled or grotesque.26 To some extent at least, then, War, through its recounting of the battlefield experience, empathized with veterans and could encourage reflection by the public on their post-war fate. As he had done with Metropolis, Dix reengaged the triptych format as well as the technical, formal, stylistic, material and iconographical elements of late Medieval and Renaissance altarpieces. The wracked bodies of the soldiers, in their various stages of physical and nervous decay, have prompted many comparisons to the pock-marked, wasted body of Grünewald’s crucified Christ in the Isenheim Altarpiece. It is not recorded if Dix knew about an event involving the Isenheim Altarpiece during the war, when it was brought to Munich from Colmar (Alsace-Lorraine) in 1917 for restoration and safe-keeping and only very reluctantly returned by the Pinakothek on 27 September 1919, because Colmar was by then French territory.27 Before leaving Munich, it had become an object of pilgrimage. Art historian William Hausenstein, writing in the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten in December 1918, noted how the suffering expressed by the Altar reflected the suffering of Germans after World War I and drew thousands to it: Never before could people have made such a pilgrimage to an altar; it was like in the Middle Ages. They came. They were drawn to it. The altar was a magnet. [. . .] A changed spirit moved even in the dumb worship of the most wretched. After the mechanisms of more than four years of war, the masses gathered together for the first time before the spirit of a German artist – probably the greatest we have ever had – to share their innermost common predicament.28

Gustav Stolze, writing about War in his review of the Autumn Exhibition at the Prussian Academy in October 1932, saw in the triptych, which ‘without doubt made the strongest impression’, a new religious emotion that ‘adhered to Grünewald in terms of painting and thought, and negated the heroic’. If painted unevenly he continued, it was visually effective, composed insistently and, ‘despite all the horrible realism, not without emotional effects’.29 Indeed, in addition to the ‘crown of thorns’, from left to right the panels can be read in Christian terms as the road to Calvary, the Crucifixion and the Deposition, and the predella as the 26 Carol Poore, Disability in Twentieth Century German Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 25. 27 Ann Stieglitz, ‘The Reproduction of Agony: Toward a Reception-History of Grünewald's Isenheim Altar after the First World War’, Oxford Art Journal 12, no. 2 (1989): 93. 28 William Hausenstein, ‘Der Isenheimer Altar’, in Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, December 1918 (exact date not given), quoted in Stieglitz, ‘The Reproduction of Agony: Toward a ReceptionHistory of Grünewald's Isenheim Altar after the First World War’, 93. 29 Gustav Stolze, ‘Gemalte Gegenwart. Herbstausstellung der Akademie’, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger (Berlin), 15 October 1932, 3.

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Entombment. If War could hardly offer the same kind of comfort to the bereaved as Grünewald’s work, the purposeful depiction of intense suffering, for which Grünewald’s and other medieval and early northern Renaissance works are often noted, also worked to complicate War’s memorialization. Grünewald’s work was specific to the needs of the hospital order of the Anthonites, who in Grünewald’s time, cared for suffers of ergotism, or St. Anthony’s fire, an extremely painful, disfiguring disease. The emphasis on Christ’s suffering expressed through the exceptional (relative to other paintings of the Crucifixion) disfigurement of Christ’s body, was empathetic. The horribly wounded bodies of War’s dead and dying soldiers invoke Grünewald’s tortured Christ as well as the pierced body of Saint Sebastian in the altarpiece’s left panel (closed view), suggesting a deliberate attempt to associate the soldier’s suffering with Christian sacrifice and empathize with veterans in a similar manner. However, the hopeful message of salvation (e.g. the Resurrection), enhanced by the magnificent colouration of other panels (e.g. the Resurrection) in the Isenheim Altarpiece are absent in War, where the narrative is dominated by savagery and suffering – even bitterness, in a picture for the most part painted in dull, earthy tones. To some extent, War’s large scale could also draw interesting comparisons with the traditional battle-piece, a genre that reached its climax with World War I, but which was reissued countless times in popular commemorative illustrated books. The ‘snail’s eye view’ of the triptych offered the reverse perspective of these generally large, impersonal, panoramic and decorous works almost always created by non-combatants or official artists, instead portraying the personal recollection of horrifying violence experienced almost exclusively by the frontline soldier. Löffler recalled Dix’s wish to emphasize this confrontational element: ‘[Dix] had the idea of a bunker constructed in the heart of a big city, which would permit the viewer to stand silent for a moment and would exhort and admonish those who had forgotten. It was a suggestion that ought to have been taken up: as a gallery picture the triptych fails of its full effect.’30 Though made in hindsight, Dix’s remark that many books ‘were again promoting notions of the hero and heroism, long since reduced to absurdity in 30 Löffler, Otto Dix. Life and Work, 93. The work of Portuguese official World War I artist Adriano de Sousa Lopes and British official war artist John Singer Sargent were two of the very few World War I artists who portrayed the war’s tragedy in large scale paintings. Adriano de Sousa Lopes’ pictures, little studied until recently, are on view in the Military Museum, Lisbon. See for example Carlos Silveira, ‘A Paroxysm of Battle Painting: Adriano de Sousa Lopes and the Great War’, in Constructing the Memory of War in Visual Culture since 1914. The Eye on War, ed. Ann Murray (New York: Routledge, 2018), 193–203. Sargent’s widely referenced Gassed (1919, Imperial War Museum, London), depicts the aftermath of a mustard gas attack, with a line of wounded and blinded soldiers making their way to a dressing station.

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the trenches of the War’ and that ‘people had begun to forget the terrible suffering the war had brought to them’ merits some attention. He suggests that War was purposefully transgressive (in its presentation of the German war dead) as war memory, intended to shock the viewer by presenting the war’s least digestible aspects – in the visual culture of a country that largely eschewed it – in order to make the picture memorable and incisive. Aleida Assmann’s discussion on the role of imagines agentes in Classical Roman mnemotechnics – ‘actively effective and affective pictures’ that would act as powerful memory aids for concepts that were otherwise not striking, effectively describes how War as an affective agent of war memory could function. Assmann looks back to an unknown teacher of the Classical Roman art of memory to explain what consisted of an imagine agente: When we see everyday things [. . .] we generally fail to remember them. [. . .] But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonourable, extraordinary [. . .] we are likely to remember for a long time. We ought, then, to set up images [. . .] that can adhere longest in the memory. We shall do so if we establish likenesses as striking as possible. [. . .] If we assign them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness [. . .]. If we somehow disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint.31

Indeed, Dix’s ‘crucified’ soldiers stood out as the very opposite of the most visible monuments to the war dead – the countless public memorials erected since 1918 and found across Germany. Many of these include a sculpture modelled on the heroic male nudes of Classical art, such as that at Spandau, Berlin, completed in 1922 (Figure 41). The latter is an example of the many ideally perfect male figure sculptures found on German war memorials, symbolic of the ‘eternally young’ who had fallen on the battlefield, and which were already being appropriated as a feature of Nazi iconography. The myth of the war experience, as George Mosse called it, embodied by these sculptures’ representation of the sacrifice of heroic youth for the good of the homeland, helped promote the idea of these sculptures in Nazi iconography as representative of the aforementioned Siegfried, who having slain the enemy was ultimately killed by his own (for the Nazis, socialists and Jews, who they accused of failing veterans).32 War in this light became sacrilegious anti-memorial, desecrating the heroes’ bodies and echoing the thoughts of Swiss writer and veteran Blaise Cendrars, who wrote that ‘God is absent from the battlefields and the dead of the war’s beginning, 31 Ad C. Herennium, De Ratione Dicendi (Rhetorica Ad Herennium), Book III, XXII, 35–7, 219–21, quoted in Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilisation, 211. 32 George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers. Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 7.

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Figure 41  August Schreitmüller, Die Wacht (The Watch), Memorial of the GardeGrenadier-Regiment Nr. 5, 1922, Stabholzgarten, Berlin-Spandau. Bronze (figure) on Silesian granite (slab) and Franconian shell limestone (base).

those poor [young soldiers], lying forgotten in the grass, splashes as numerous as cow-pats in a meadow, and scarcely more important’.33 Where precisely War belonged in the ongoing battle to shape Germany’s fractured war memorialization is less than clear – even if the portrayal of the war as brutal and damaging was typical of pacifist or left-wing examples. To attempt to situate the picture, it is necessary to consider the broader context of visual culture by 1932. While artistic interpretations (in e.g. art, theatre, film and literature) and popular print media were far more nuanced in content than an extreme right–left divide, what characterized them were the diametrically opposed forms of remembering, which in politically fused examples and beyond saw in the opposition attempts to ‘misremember’ the war. Alternatively recalling the war as brutal or as evidence of German military endurance, such images were constantly reemphasized through reprints and distribution, or in the case of periodicals, daily, weekly or monthly circulation. Works that attempted to turn society against militarism and warfare included Kamerad im Westen. Ein Bericht in 221 Bildern (Comrades on the Western Front. A Report in 33 Blaise Cendrars quoted in Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction. Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 241.

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Figure 42 Kamerad im Westen. Ein Bericht in 221 Bildern, pictures 79 and 200, showing German dead in a French mass grave (top) and dead telephone operators.

221 Pictures), which ran to at least 25,000 copies and managed to have several relatively confrontational photographs passed by the censor (Figure 42). It also took care to note that the suppression of certain photographs by the censor meant it could not give the fullest account of what the war really

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looked like.34 Ernst Friedrich’s War against War! had run to ten editions by 1930. Among periodicals, the circulation of 500,000 copies of the leftist ArbeiterIllustrierte-Zeitung (Workers Illustrated Paper, AIZ), founded in 1924, ran to between 100,000 and 300,000 by 1932, and, among other things, warned against the militarism of the Nazis. Featuring John Heartfield’s pioneering, masterly photomontages, some of its repurposed photographs of battlefield dead characterized Nazism as the resurrection of the pre-war militarized society.35 In a similar vein, the SPD’s Wahre Jacob continued to warn against Nazi militarism – but also against communist extremists – with its satirical cartoons.36 For example, in its 14 March 1931 issue, it recalls the desolation of World War I in an illustration of an overgrown battlefield with a resurfaced skull in the foreground, a crow picking at the remains. The caption reads: ‘Hitler is undoubtedly right on one point: if Germany gets involved in a war, it will be rid of all its worries at one stroke. There are no longer unemployed people and no other economic hardships! Deep peace will prevail! And no one will have a headache anymore!’ (Figure 43). In its 16 January 1932 issue, it pointed to what the SPD saw as the equally ruinous aims of both Nazis and communists in an illustration captioned: ‘Who will deal with the unemployment question? Only National Socialists and Communists!’ (Figure 44). A humorous cartoon from 1931 poked fun at the vacuousness of art under the Nazis: ‘Now, Professor Müller-Schaumburg, does my boy have talent?’ ‘Excellent talent, even! These pictures prove a deep national experience without any foreign influence!’ (Figure 45). However, other publications, usually by pro-militants, portrayed the war much more positively. The popular Der Weltkrieg im Bild (The World War in Pictures), edited by former battalion commander and Stahlhelmer George Soldan and running to several reprints, in almost 400 photographs eschewed the harsher elements of combat experience and showed hardly any German dead.37 Much of the volume focuses on peripheral events in the war, incredible for a book that 34 Societäts-Verlag, Kamerad im Westen. Ein Bericht in 221 Bildern (Frankfurt am Main: SocietätsVerlag, 1930). 35 For numerous reproductions and insight to the creation of the photomontages, see David King and Ernst Volland, John Heartfield: Laughter is a Devastating Weapon (London: Tate Publishing, 2015). For a sustained scholarly study of Heartfield, see Sabine T. Kriebel, Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 110. Among other considerations, Kriebel examines how Heartfield’s montages invoked the memory of World War I to promote communism and how they ‘appeal[led] to the anxious psyche of a mass audience’ (16). 36 T h e magazine’s circulation in 1919 was 200,000. Figures are unclear for the later Weimar period but it is indicated that it remained the most heavily circulated satirical magazine of its time, with figures up to four times that of the famed Simplicissimus. See the Wahre Jacob project on the website of Heidelberg University: http://www​.der​-wahre​-jacob​.de​/index​.php​?id​=38. 37 George Soldan, Der Weltkrieg im Bild (Berlin-Oldenburg: Verlag Der Weltkrieg im Bild, 1931).

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Figure 43  Willibald Krain, In einem Punkt hat Hitler unzweifelhaft Recht . . . (Hitler is undoubtedly right on one point . . . ), Der wahre Jacob, 14 March 1931, p. 13.

Figure 44  Willi Steinert, Radikale Lösung (Radical Solution), Der wahre Jacob, 16 January 1932, p. 13.

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Figure 45  Georg Wilke, Kunst im Dritten Reich (Art in the Third Reich), Der wahre Jacob, 26 September 1931, p. 9.

Soldan claimed to be a keepsake for the German soldier. The heroic spirit of ‘young Siegfried’-type sculptures found in the public war memorials was taken up by the Nazis, who evidently discovered in them a readymade template for memorializing war that also suited their aims, exemplified by the imagery used in their Illustrierter Beobachter (IB, Illustrated Observer). The cover of the 26 March 1932 issue is captioned ‘From our Ashes the Avengers will arise’, while a photograph of the Brownshirts honouring the war dead at one such ‘Siegfried’ sculpture in the 22 October 1932 issue (Figures 46–47) exemplified the Nazis’ appropriation of popular war imagery. In tandem with their growing support from 1929, the Nazis increased circulation of the IB, awash with pro-militant propagandist ‘reports’ and seductive photography and reached a circulation of about 120,000 in 1931.38 The IB also channelled revulsive imagery but as justification for war – war against communists. The image of Sturmabteilung (SA) member Otto Striebel, ‘slain by the Reds’, is one of numerous deliberately horrifying photographs published in the IB during the early 1930s that rechannelled Ernst Friedrich’s anti-war intentions through photographs of disfigured soldiers (Figure 48).39 38 Statistic listed in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, ‘Reading  the  News’. Holocaust Encyclopaedia. http://www​.ushmm​.org​/wlc​/en​/article​.php​?ModuleId​=10007821 (accessed 15 June 2023). 39 T h e media power of the extreme Right reached beyond the IB (or its corollary the Völkischer Beobachter): formerly moderately conservative publishing houses were infiltrated, notably

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Figure 46  Illustrierter Beobachter, front cover, 26 March 1932.

Figure 47  Brownshirts salute the Flensburg War Memorial. Illustrierter Beobachter, 22 October 1932.

through staunch nationalist Alfred Hugenberg’s control of many regional papers, guaranteeing predominance of extreme right-wing views at grass-roots level. In Dresden, the popular liberal newspaper, the Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, which had constantly urged closer cooperation between the DDP (German Democratic Party) and the DVP (German People’s Party) as a means to strengthen the Left, was subsumed by the extreme Right. See Modris Eksteins, The limits of reason: the German democratic press and the collapse of the Weimar democracy (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 160. The same fate befell Germany’s (and Europe’s) leading newspaper concern, Ullstein. Its Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, with a circulation of 1.8 million and regarded as ‘the bastion of solid republicanism’ would become infiltrated by National Socialists well before the takeover of power. Istvan Deak, Left-Wing Intellectuals, 40, 286–7.

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Figure 48 Photograph of the murdered SA member Otto Streibel, Illustrierter Beobachter, 17 September 1932.

The work of conservative revolutionaries, most famously Ernst Jünger, continued to exert influence.40 Jünger published seven volumes on photography between 1928 and 1934, including two on World War I, the first of which was Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges: Fronterlebnisse deutscher Soldaten (The Face of the World War: Front Experiences of German Soldiers, 1930) that included six essays by Jünger alongside photographs of the battlefront. The second was an edited volume of photographs dealing with the war, Hier spricht der Feind: Kriegserlebnisse unserer Gegner (The Voice of the Enemy: War Experiences of our Adversaries, 1931). Though some photographs in these volumes depict the harshest aspects of warfare, it is overwhelmingly the enemy dead, not Germans that are shown, while the essays forwarded the idea of a society invigorated and bolstered by continuous war. Alongside the essay collection Krieg und Krieger (War and Warriors) (1930), these volumes were among the most nationalistic works of Jünger’s career. A review of Krieg und Krieger by Walter Benjamin condemned it as a justification of World War I and for its articulation of fascist thought.41 40 T h e Conservative Revolution, of which Jünger was the most famous adherent, was a German national conservative movement that gained prominence during the Weimar Republic. Though they generally opposed liberalism, democracy and the cultural spirit of modernity and the bourgeoisie, and favoured militarism and the organized society upheld by the Völkisch movement, many conservative revolutionaries did not support the racialism or totalitarianism of the Nazis. Hans Kohn’s seminal study noted that outside of the universities, Jünger was one of the most influential writers in shaping and expressing German thought during the Weimar Republic. See Hans Kohn, The Mind of Germany: the Education of a Nation (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960), 330. 41 Ernst Jünger, Krieg und Krieger (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt Verlag, 1930). For Benjamin’s review, see Benjamin, ‘Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays War and Warrior edited by Ernst Jünger’, New German Critique 17, no. 1 (1979), 120–28.’ Jünger’s two photographic collections of World War I were both published in Berlin by Neufeld and Henius.

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This polarizing imagery of the war filtered down into material aimed at youths. Benjamin Ziemann notes the fears among Social Democrats (and the Republican Veterans’ groups) by the early 1930s regarding how war memory was consumed by youth – namely the generation born between 1900 and 1910. Films and novels based on the war were extremely popular among youth and across class divisions, while working-class as well as middle-class youths read extreme nationalist works. If Remarque’s best-selling All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) was an unromantic telling of the frontline experience and Ernst Glaeser's pacifist Frieden (1930) described a society destroyed by war, aggressively nationalist books such as Franz Schauwecker’s Awakening of the Nation (1929) and Nazi author Karl Schenzinger’s Hitlerjunge Quex (1932) telling the story of (real-life Hitler Youth) Herbert ‘Quex’ Norkus, were also popular.42

The Exhibition of War at the Prussian Academy of Arts, 1932 War was Dix’s first – and last – work exhibited while he was a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin until after World War II  and was surely important to him; Dix had written to its president Ludwig Justi on 15 September 1931 expressing gratitude for accepting him as a member.43 Dix’s unromantic depiction of slaughtered German soldierhood, somewhat left-leaning in the context of the visual material discussed earlier, offered an experience that was different to the small-scale images in printed media; its monumental size and its relative isolation in the gallery space could focus the attention of the viewer in a way that photographs generally could not. Even today, standing in front of War in the Galerie Neue Meister in Dresden, the small scale of even the most confrontational photographs of maimed soldiers fades in comparison to this four-metre-wide picture, painted in a highly detailed, realistic manner and placing the viewer amidst the action. If photography offered documentary evidence of the war’s realities, War invited one to experience them through the eyes of a veteran. Where it belonged in relation to the visual culture around it was a matter for its audience.

42 Ziemann, Contested Commemorations. Republican War Veterans and Weimar Political Culture, 235–65. See also Katherine Larson Roper, ‘Images of German Youth in Weimar Novels’, Journal of Contemporary History 13, no. 3 (1978): 499–516. Luke Springman, Carpe Mundum: German Youth Culture of the Weimar Republic (New York: Peter Lang, 2007). 43 Archiv der Preußischen Akademie der Künste (hereafter PrAdK), 1099.

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As it turned out, critical reviews of the picture, in volume and content, only compounded criticisms of his work in recent months. If surviving reviews are representative, War excited critics much less in Berlin in 1932 than Metropolis did in Dresden in 1928. To start with, the Prussian Academy was not a sympathetic space for exhibiting a battle-piece infused with the spirit of modernity. Even though War was accompanied by another war triptych, Die Schlacht bei Döffingen, the painter of which was virtually forgotten so-called Neue Sachlichkeit painter Kurt Weinhold-Calw, it does not, based on the representation of war in Weinhold-Calw’s piece, indicate a general acceptance of modern art by the Academy. Die Schlacht had little in common with Dix’s confrontational presentation of the contemporary German soldier’s fate in industrialized warfare; Weinhold-Calw’s bird’s eye view composition, colouration and somewhat schematic treatment of the human figure in Die Schlacht’s central panel borrows heavily from Renaissance battle-pieces.44 In choosing War as the first picture he would exhibit as an Academy member, Dix probably considered it a superior example of his work – and that its subject was a timely one. But with the exceptions of Paul Klee, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Ernst Barlach, most members were highly conservative, academic artists.45 The Academy directorship had recently made efforts to rejuvenate the institution, still headed by renowned Impressionist painter Max Liebermann, who believed that although conservative in nature, the Academy would suffer if it wanted to treat the new generation of artists negatively. Yet, only a small cohort of newer artists were accepted as members. At this juncture, the only obvious advantage for Dix was being part of such a renowned institution.46 Minutes of Academy meetings reveal strong resistance to Dix’s application for membership in 1931, becoming the subject of lingering debate. While Dix’s name was on the final acceptance list, it was suggested that he could later be omitted (and membership was to be reviewed in October, the following year). Despite his international 44 Now apparently lost, Weinhold-Calw’s triptych is known through reproductions, which sometimes only include the central panel. It is described as a triptych on p. 17 of the catalogue for the 1932 exhibition. It depicted a battle that occurred on 23 August 1388 that marked the end of a war among the municipalities of Swabian cities as well as conflicts between knights and princes in the region. Weinhold-Calw was accepted by the Nazis to the extent that his work was shown in the Great German Art Exhibition of 1937 – the exact counterpoint to the Degenerate Art show held at the same time. 45 See the catalogue for the exhibition. Preußische Akademie der Künste, Herbstausstellung Oktober/ November 1932, Verlag der Preussischen Akademie der Künste zu Berlin, 1932. Käthe Kollwitz was a senate member but did not exhibit in the 1932 autumn show. 46 T he discussions surrounding the election of members are recorded in the archives of the Prussian Academy of Arts. See PrAdK 1315 (01.1, Statuten, Satzungen), ‘Vorbesprechung der Akademievertreter am 7. August 1931, nachmittags 4 Uhr’. Members present were painters Philipp Franck, Ulrich Hübner and Heinrich Amersdorffer and architect Hans Poelzig.

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renown, and a style which according to numerous opinions by prominent critics successfully married tradition with modernity, begrudging acceptance of Dix as a member reflected the Academy’s resistance to modern art.47 The Right was critical; opposition in the right-wing press, namely the Deutsche Tagezeitung, appeared just a week after the list of new academy members had been decided. It asked if the Academy was concerned more with art or politics, remarking that newly appointed members were ‘almost exclusively artists of an extreme direction and one feared that normally they would not be accepted into the Academy’.48 In response to such resistance perhaps, on 15 June the following year, Philipp Franck, chairing the 1932 Autumn Exhibition committee meetings, began by emphasizing that the committee must not let its work be affected by politics: ‘it can only concern itself with one thing; the art’.49 Efforts to include newer (if not younger) artists in the exhibition was a positive move. Yet, when the 1932 Autumn show finally opened on 15 October, the disjuncture between the art on show and those invited by the Academy board revealed, at least to Curt Glaser that ‘invited guests and free entries disproportionately filled up the large number of rooms’, indicating, it would seem that the audience included proportionally fewer individuals sympathetic to newer art.50 Dix’s single submission, one of three war-themed works in the show, received mixed reviews among the reports of the exhibition that are known. Glaser’s review compared War with another triptych in the show, Hans Purrmann’s joyous triptych, Allegory of Art and Science, which betrayed the influence of Purmann’s teacher and friend, Henri Matisse: It is a long way from Purrmann to Dix, from the festive merrymaking of a dreamed world of carefree existence to the cruel reality of death and decay, from lively colourful decoration to the sombre depiction of terrible reality, from the light layout of broad areas to the heavy layering of murkier colour in densely applied thick paint. But as embarrassing as the indulgence in the horrifying may be, one must admire the human and artistic seriousness in equal measure. The intensity of the work keeps pace with the uncanny mastery of form, the violence of expression with the fertile imagination that encapsulates the experience of

47 PrAdK, 1315, ‘Sitzung, 4 August 1931’. Artists not accepted that year included Max Beckmann and George Grosz; PrAdK 1315, ‘Verhandelt in der Reformkommission (Sektion für bil. Künste) am 7. August 1931, 5 Uhr’. 48 E. K. (full name unknown), ‘Kunst oder Politik’, Deutsche Tageszeitung, 14 August 1931, page number unknown. Newspaper cutting, PrAdK. 49 PrAdK 1254, ‘Verhandelt in der Ausstellungskommission am 15. June 1932’. 50 Curt Glaser, ‘Die Akademie-Ausstellung’, Berliner Börsen-Courier (Berlin), 16 October 1932, 10.

172 Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture war in the design of three dramatic acts, which is carried by the predella of the open tomb.51

Among other positive reviews were the aforementioned Stolz and that of Bruno E. Werner, reporting in one of the most widely circulated and influential art journals, Die Kunst für Alle, and reviewing War alongside the two other war-related works in the show. Briefly praising Weinhold-Calw’s homage to great German painters in his war triptych, he asked if the austere sculpture by Paul Merling (1895– 1945), Ehrenmal-Gruppe (Memorial Group), could offer the possibility of finally dedicating a figurative memorial to the war. On Dix’s War, he wrote that: This time [Dix] has used the purely legitimate means of painting, and in blood and horror has created the tattered human being, who merges vegetatively with the landscape, and thus certainly [describes] an episode of the war. But as one can see on the left wing with the marching soldiers, he always dangerously touches the border at which real art ends, because this painting remains essentially unspiritual. But a visible elementary experience breathes here that affects us all so that we today are affected once more by its shudder.52

In Das Kunstblatt, Paul Westheim wrote that in this variant of the ‘singular war picture that Dix painted ten years ago’, the experience of the war: the swaths of blood, the torn bodies, the senselessness, does not allow these ‘frontline fighters’ to come to rest. He paints a Mene Tekel on the wall; the word that Goya put on one of his war etchings: ‘hé visto’ – ‘I saw it’ could also be on this panel. And so, there are many things at this academy exhibition, something in almost every hall that concerns us seriously or could concern us today.53

This review reiterated Westheim’s long-standing admiration for Dix, whom he described in the previous year as ‘the Saxon who has become rabid in the trenches, in bloody mud and gas vapour [. . .]. Under the mask [. . .], the most unvarnished and relentless truthfulness is here evidently an ethos, that appears all the stronger, more provocative, because Dix does not preach again with a raised finger, but apparently uninterested,

51 Glaser, ‘Die Akademie-Ausstellung’, 10. Purrmann’s work (Allegorie auf und Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1932), is located in the Rathaus, Speyer. Purrmann (1880–1966) was a student and friend of Matisse. 52 Bruno E. Werner, ‘Der Herbstausstellung der Preuβischen Akademie’, Die Kunst für Alle 48, no. 3 (1932): 95–6. See also Werner’s review of War in his article for the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, Bruno E. Werner, ‘Zwischen Form und Erlebnis. Herbstausstellung der Akademie’, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (Berlin), 15 October 1932, 1. 53 Paul Westheim, ‘Die Akademie Ausstellung’, Das Kunstblatt 16 (1932): 83.

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apparently without drawing any conclusions from it, states what and how it has been’.54

While these critics could appreciate the picture’s ability to sensitize the viewer to the war’s effects, Max Osborn, one of the period’s most prominent art critics, was largely dismissive. In the Berlin-based newspaper the Vossische Zeitung, he praised the show in general but feeling ‘compelled to report the failures’, singled out War for particular criticism: ‘Otto Dix's great fantasy about the war, built up like an altarpiece with side wings and a predella, certainly betrays the lion's claw in the merciless depiction of the horrors of the trenches – although the older similar work is not surpassed by it – [but] is as a painterly work a failure. One would not have believed Dix capable of such dreadful colouration.’55

Even worse, and tellingly as it turned out, in the art journal Der Kunstwanderer, edited by left-wing art critic Adolph Donath, the reviewer wrote that ‘Dix has painted another war picture, a triptych, which revels in horror. Neither as an aim – today this is no more a weapon against war – nor as art is there something to appreciate here’.56 Donath himself, in his review for the Berliner Tageblatt, was pleased that new art continued to feature substantially despite the fact that Liebermann, who had sought to include new, less traditional art, was for the first time in twelve years uninvolved. But though Donath felt that Dix’s rationale was human, ‘the gas masks, smashed heads and high-flying legs pierced by bullets have a paralyzing effect’; for Donath, it was hardly different from the ‘smooth battle painting of yore’, despite its masterly execution; if ‘Dix's famous trench picture was an act that upset us’, then ‘his “war” of 1932 is just a variant that leaves one cold’.57 Somewhat bizarrely comparing War with symbolist works, art critic Kurt Kusenberg, better known for his short stories, was underwhelmed by the exhibition overall and wrote in the Weltkunst that: ‘The war triptych by Dix, a second version of the subject that cannot be compared with the first is on the level of a Fahrenkrog and is decidedly inferior to the image of the same name by Stuck.’58 54 Westheim, Helden und Abenteurer. Welt und Leben der Künstler, 230–1. 55 Max Osborn, ‘Akademie in groβer Form. Die Eröffnung der Herbstausstellung’, Vossische Zeitung (Berlin), 15 October 1932, Abend-Ausgabe, 6. 56 D. L., ‘Kunstausstellungen’, Der Kunstwanderer 14, no. 6 (1932): 364. 57 Adolph Donath, ‘Akademie der Künste. Die Herbstausstellung’, Berliner Tageblatt und HandelsZeitung (Berlin), 15 October 1932, Abend-Ausgabe, 2. 58 Kurt Kusenberg, ‘Herbstausstellung der Berliner Akademie’, Weltkunst 6, no. 43 (23 October 1932): 4. https://doi​.org​/10​.11588​/diglit​.44980​.42. Ludwig Fahrenkrog (1867–1952) was a painter of Christian and later symbolist images such as Fate (Das Schicksal), 1917. He is associated with

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In his memoirs, Otto Griebel, fellow artist and acquaintance, noted that War aroused the fury of the Nazi press. Such fury-filled reviews, which are not currently known, could prove insightful as unlike those earlier, Griebel indicates a strong reaction to the picture.59 It appears that Dix’s arch-enemies in the DKD, who to date had roundly slammed everything that Dix had produced, released no pamphlets between July 1932 and January 1933.60 However, a surviving review by Nazi activist and architect Winifried Wendland, who wrote for Joseph Goebbels’s paper Der Angriff, indicated that not everyone in the extreme rightwing camp concurred with the DKD. Considering War to be ‘astonishingly well painted’, he lamented that Dix’s ‘pacifist war picture’ served ‘such a materialist concept of the world’.61 Dix’s gallerist Karl Nierendorf, writing to the artist some weeks after the Academy show had closed, was frustrated by Dix’s lack of success. Though he does not refer to the Academy show directly, his words describe a sinking artistic career. In addition to substantiating the negative criticism in the press beyond the Academy show, Nierendorf also imparts some of the attitudes towards Dix by the public and art buyers: You cannot be indifferent to the fact that in recent years public opinion has treated you with an acid tolerance. You were a leader and should have stayed away from the Flechtheim exhibition (like Beckmann, Mataré, Scholz, Fuher, etc.) rather than letting yourself be degraded. Years ago, despite many obstacles, I pushed you through. You are about to be ruined. That will become clear to you from the press itself, even though the gentlemen are all spicy in their oral statements, only bitter-sweet in writing. I am opposed to the fact that an artist, to whom I had temporarily adjusted my entire profession, my enthusiasm, my company, should be dismissed as a minor Richard Müller. I am still called Nierendix [. . .]. It is also damaging to me if you are written off as conformist and boring, [and] “artistically bankrupt and out of impotence pathetic.” The most repulsive, however, are those who speak gently of the “tragic Dix case” and who have been allegedly following the constant decline into the Völkisch movement. The War (Der Krieg), a symbolist-mythological work by Franz von Stuck (1863–1928), was painted in 1894. John Heartfield parodied the work in a montage in 1933, titled ‘Ein Gemälde von Franz v. Stuck. Zeitgemäβ montiert von John Heartfield’ (A Painting by Franz v. Stuck. Contemporary montage by John Heartfield). 59 Griebel, Ich war ein Mann, 313. 60 T h e July 1932 pamphlet consisting of one short paragraph appears to be a fragment. Bettina FeistelRohmeder does not record in 1938 whether or not pamphlets were published between July 1932 and January 1933. 61 Winfried Wendland, ‘Die Akademie-Ausstellung: Unhaltbarer Ausstellungsbetriebe’, Der Angriff, 31 October 1932.

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banality for years. DISGUSTING. It must also be important to you to make this general talk ad absurdum through an artistic success, especially since people like Haubrich are already beginning to become insecure. He recently told me that he would think twice before buying a picture by you. The pleasure of collectors is not exactly increased when an artist is mistreated by the press. Nobody is completely free from influence.62

Apart from ongoing personal difficulties, Dix’s constant enemies in the art world were growing in number. On 2 November 1932, Max Osborn observed the increasing visibility of Völkisch groups, now emboldened by the Nazis’ electoral successes63 and warned that It is necessary to prepare for the struggle for the freedom of art which lies ahead of us – which in fact through a whole chain of border incidents [. . .], has already begun. Clearly, the coalition of powers alien to art unites. Sluggishness of the spirit, philistinism, regression, a grouchy mind and misguided idealism shake hands. Its advances apply to nearly all elements and forces in visual art in particular and design in general, which has propagated the German creative imagination since the beginning of the century, provided it with juvenescent impulses and reestablished its place in the world. All of this is indiscriminately stuffed into the faded concept of cultural Bolshevism, which unfortunately the current Reich government has included in one of its first rallies. What is cultural Bolshevism in art? For those who coined the word, it is always the new that they do not yet understand. Because everything new in art, if it is significant, has above all the characteristics to challenge prior views, to topple or ‘tatter’ something, and whoever cannot follow the leading artists is always inclined to come to terms with the otherwise incomprehensible process by merely observing the corrosive and subversive and crying wolf. [. . .] The individualistic carefreeness of our painters and sculptors is lashed out against and demands are made for national art. [. . .] The toxic incitement that goes around today always pretends that the artists and trends at the forefront, so to speak, were put there by illegal means. [. . .] German art cannot thrive if this subterranean, hateful activity continues, if it poisons public art cultivation in the German states and cities, which unfortunately is only too threateningly close. Art needs freedom in every direction. [. . .] All those who truly care about 62 Letter from Karl Nierendorf to Otto Dix, 6 February 1933. Nachlaβ Otto Dix, DKA, GNM. Joseph Haubrich was a significant art collector based in Cologne. He donated his collection to the city of Cologne in 1946. 63 T h e Reichstag elections concluding on 6 November 1932 returned 196 seats for the National Socialists, 52 for the Nationalists, 121 for the SPD and 100 for the KPD, giving the National Socialists a 34 per cent share of the vote. See John Willett, Art and Politics in the Weimar Period: The New Sobriety, 1917-1933 (London: Da Capo Press, 1996), 258.

176 Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture German culture and intellectuality must join together to ward off the enemies of artistic freedom, the lack of understanding hiding behind magniloquent platitudes.64

The activities of the Dresdner Sezession 1932 in 1932 and 1933 would be among the final acts by a group of modernist artists who could operate relatively free of political interference.65 Founded in June 1932, the group held their first exhibition on 1 September 1932 in the rear rooms of the Sächsische Kunstverein on Brühlsche Terrasse, with Dix as a guest exhibitor.66 The small, slim, catalogue included texts written by a number of the participating artists which asserted the rights of artists to creative autonomy. Although the artists were in principle reacting to the dire economic conditions endured by independent artists and the stranglehold of the local Vereine on artistic funding, Fritz Tröger’s words seemed to rail against the deterioration of artistic life that would soon grip the entire country: It is a presumption of political thought to put art at the service of politics and to support art only if it can be used for political purposes or, better said, misused. Art is subject only to its own, inherent, laws. It is independent and places its independence only in the service of life and humanity and not in the service of one-sided and narrow-minded power exponents or political parties. [. . .] Every coercion leads to a stunting of artistic creativity, and every coercion over artistic viability is a crime against the human spirit!67

Perhaps anticipating the actions of the newly empowered Völkisch groups after Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor on 30 January 1933, sometime in February Dix had War packed up and sent to his pacifist friend Fritz Bienert in DresdenPlauen for storage.68 The triptych would remain out of sight until 1946. 64 Max Osborn, ‘Kampf um die Kunst’, Vossische Zeitung (Berlin), 2 November 1932, 5. 65 Not to be confused with earlier configurations of the Dresdner Sezession, such as that formed in 1919 and the Neue Dresdner Sezession 1931. 66 See Pol Cassel, Dresdner Sezession 1932. 1. Ausstellung (Dresden: Krause & Baumann, 1932). For a detailed account of the Dresdner Sezession 1932’s activities, see Karin Müller-Kelwing, Die Dresdner Sezession 1932: Eine Künstlergruppe im Spannungsfeld von Kunst und Politik (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2010). 67 Fritz Tröger, ‘Kunst und Politik’, in Dresdner Sezession 1932. 1. Ausstellung, ed. Pol Cassel (Dresden: Krause & Baumann, 1932), 19. Tröger (1894-1978) was born in Dresden and studied at the Dresden Academy under Max Feldbauer, Otto Hettner and Otto Guβmann. See Fritz Tröger and Galerie Himmel, Fritz Tröger: Alltag und Sachlichkeit (Dresden: Galerie Himmel, 2018). The main Vereine (English: guilds, societies or associations) in Dresden were the Künstlervereinigung Dresden and Dresdner Kunstgenossenschaft. 68 Letter from Dix to Martha Dix, exact date unknown, February 1933, Otto-Dix-Archiv, Vaduz. He noted that the big pictures would be sent to Biernert, which included the ‘Flandernbild’ [Flanders], completed later. He wrote in the same letter that he had to go to Berlin to submit documents to the Reichskulturkammer ‘wenn es ratsam ist’ [when it is prudent].

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The Nazi takeover did, as is well documented, profoundly alter German cultural life, most infamously of all in the visual arts. Much modernist art, considered to be harmful, un-German ‘degenerate’ art was quickly stripped from gallery walls and banished to an uncertain fate. From now on, the visual memorialization of war would, for the most part, reconstitute the bombastic, heroic model of the nineteenth century that exhorted German military brilliance, but even more fervently than in the past. Among the greatest offenders of the Nazis’ artistic ideology, War Cripples and The Trench, both in the possession of the now Nazicontrolled Dresden State Collections, disappeared from view once the cycle of degenerate art exhibitions which began only weeks after the takeover, ended during the earliest phases of World War II, never to be recovered.

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The fate of the war pictures in the early years of the Third Reich

‘Is the swine still alive, then?’ Manfred von Killinger, after 1933.1 The removal of Otto Dix from German cultural life was swift and merciless. It began, at least officially, with firing him from his professorship. In a letter to the new Reichskommissar of Saxony, the notorious Manfred von Killinger, dated 6 April 1933, Richard Müller, who had just succeeded Georg Lührig as director of the Academy, confirmed that following a directive given by telephone from von Killinger, he would remove Dix from his post.2 Müller evidently wasted no time in despatching a letter to von Killinger following the telephone call, where he stated that as soon as he put down the phone, he looked for Dix to tell him of his dismissal (without a pension, he noted), but that unfortunately, Dix was not there. Müller reassured Killinger that the artist was forbidden to enter the grounds of the Academy and that he (Killinger) would be notified when Dix showed up.3 In any case, von Killinger wrote to Dix a week later, confirming his official removal since 7 April 1933, and that he would keep his earnings for three months after his dismissal, adding that the conditions of his employment did not entitle him to a pension.4 While Müller is usually the only figure spotlighted as Dix’s enemy at the Academy, it appears, in the absence of any written evidence that no staff member at the Academy protested Dix’s dismissal, even friends among 1 Manfred von Killinger, quoted in Löffler, Otto Dix. Life and Work, 97–8. 2 Numerous other prominent artists who held positions at art schools were fired, including Willi Baumeister and Max Beckmann (Frankfurt), Karl Hofer and Käthe Kollwitz (Berlin) and Paul Klee (Düsseldorf). See Christoph Zuschlag, ‘Von “Schreckenskammern”, “Horrorkabinetten” und “Schandausstellungen”. Die NS-Kampagne gegen “Entartete Kunst”’, in Moderne am Pranger. Die NS-Aktion ‘Entartete Kunst’ vor 75 Jahren. Werke aus der Sammlung Gerhard Schneider, ed. Christiane Ladleif and Gerhard Schneider (Bönen (Westphalia): DruckVerlag Kettler, 2012), 21. 3 Richard Müller, ‘Letter from Richard Müller to Reichskommissar for Saxony, Manfred von Killinger’, 1933, Nachlaß Otto Dix, DKA, GNM. 4 Letter from Manfred von Killinger to Otto Dix, Sächsisches Ministerium des Innern, 13 April 1933, Dix, Otto, 1, B-32, Nachlaβ Otto Dix, DKA, GNM.

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the teaching staff such as sculptor Karl Albiker and architect Wilhelm Kreis. That Albiker and Kreis would soon join the NSDAP explains in part, perhaps, why protests by Dix’s students went unheeded.5 Some of Dix’s students in fact wrote to the National Socialist Studentenbund (Student Association), emphasizing the urdeutsche (essentially German) component in Dix’s art and protested vigorously against rumours that described the Dix-School as un-German.6 A letter from Lührig signalled the intended removal of any remaining traces of Dix’s influence at the Academy; Lührig’s letter also expressed the practical nature with which Dix’s former colleagues dealt with his dismissal: I propose that the academy should decide: ‘The previous Dix school (joint and individual school) is to be dissolved in the same way as the Dreher school. The students at the Dix School are given the option of registering with one of the other professors. If there is a wish for some of the students to primarily continue their graphic training, they can also report to the painter Mr. Rudolph. The decision is to be made as quickly as possible and announced immediately’. Reason: After the statement by the State Commissioner Dr. Hartrake at the last meeting, ‘that there is no question of appointing a new teacher and that Prof. Dix cannot be reinstated,’ there is no longer any point in keeping the Dix school operational. In addition, the ideological and human basis of the school must be transformed in the sense of the new state and cultural idea. After a successful inspection of the rooms and the works created there, it seems urgently necessary that an artistically and ethically better disciplined course of study take place there and that sufficient supervision and guidance be provided.7

Lührig’s advice was followed, and students associated with the Dix-School could continue their studies; though Dix-students Wilhelm Dodel, Ernst Bursche and Roland Hettner were later arrested and expelled from the Academy, it was because of their connections to the Communist Party, not because of their connections to Dix.8 The fate of their teacher was much different. According to Löffler, Dix was lucky to remain alive. A note by von Killinger made some time 5 Rainer Beck, ‘‘‘Flucht ist immer falsch” – Otto Dix im Dritten Reich’, in Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte. Geschichte und bildende Kunst, ed. Moshe Zuckermann (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006), 151. 6 Letter dated 15 March 1933 from the students Anneliese Wagner, Rudolf Nitschke, Kurt Wüsteney, Kurt Sillack, Eberhard Schilde, Erika Streit und Heinz Hamisch to the Studentenbund der Akademie der Bildenden Künste zu Dresden, referenced in Beck, ‘“Flucht ist immer falsch”’, 152. 7 Letter from Georg Lührig to the Dresden Academy of Art, 3 May 1933, Otto Dix, 1, B-32, DKA, GNM, Nuremberg. (Richard) Dreher had died in October 1932. Works by (Wilhelm) Rudolph were included in the major Entartete Kunst exhibition in Munich in 1937 and Rudolph was eventually dismissed from the Academy in 1939. 8 Beck, ‘“Flucht ist immer falsch”’, 151.

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later (Löffler does not state exactly when) in Dix’s personal dossier asking if ‘the swine was still alive’ explains the worry of friends for Dix’s fate. Löffler wrote that only the intervention of old friends saved him from camp and prison in 1933.9 From the earliest weeks of the new regime, the many exhibitions of so-called entartete Kunst or degenerate art began, coinciding with those of ‘true’ German art. As Dresden’s Nazi periodical Der Freiheitskampf reported, the first of many exhibitions of ‘true’ German art opened in May in Braunschweig (Brunswick). The organizer of the latter and newly appointed director of the Karlsruhe Academy of Art, Hans Adolf Bühler, acknowledged the efforts of his ‘colleague Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder’ for her ‘unwavering struggle’ to restore German art.10 From the very beginning, Dix’s works featured in the degenerate art exhibitions that began with a show at the Kunsthalle in Mannheim under the title Kulturbolshewistische Bilder (Images of Cultural Bolshevism) (4 April to 5 June 1933).11 Any possible defence against the defamation of modernist art was effectively silenced by the Nazis’ dominance of the media. Dresden’s degenerate art exhibition was among the most important of those early shows and was conceived by artists Willy Waldapfel, now a city councillor, Walther Gasch, now the official art commissioner for Dresden, and Richard Müller. Simply titled Entartete Kunst, it took place in the atrium of Dresden’s new city hall from 23 September to 18 October 1933. Sometime before 1 September, Dix, who would later name the war pictures as the reason for his dismissal from the Dresden Academy, seems to have communicated with officials managing the show.12 Acknowledging the possibility of missing documentation to the contrary, the existing available evidence indicates that Dix attempted to withdraw War Cripples only, in exchange for another work by his hand. The response from the Rathaus was Your letter of July 8th of this year in which you made the city the offer to preserve your picture, War Cripples, from inclusion in the planned exhibition by exchanging it for another work by your hand, which has now become the property of the city museum as a donation, was submitted to the commission 9 Löffler, Otto Dix. Life and Work, 95–7. 10 Anonymous, ‘Die erste Ausstellung rein deutscher Kunst’, Der Freiheitskampf (Dresden), 9 May 1933, 10. Bühler worked alongside Feistel-Rohmeder as a contributor to Das Bild, the new title for the Deutsche Bildkunst and Deutscher Kunstbericht. 11 Christoph Zuschlag, ‘An “Educational Exhibition.” The Precursors of Entartete Kunst and Its Individual Venues’, in ‘Degenerate Art’. The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, ed. Stephanie Barron (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991), 98. This essay includes a detailed list of the many precursors to the better known 1937 exhibition. 12 In the typed brief autobiography, Dix recalled that ‘in March 1933 the Nazis fired me without notice because of my war pictures and etchings’. Otto Dix, IB – 6. DKA, GNM.

182 Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture set up to prepare the exhibition. This commission has stated that your proposal cannot be considered [. . .]. The acceptance of your proposal would result in similar requests from other artists, which in their entirety the management of the collection has no reason to fulfil. Since the picture, War Cripples, is to be regarded as a typical work of the artistic period to be shown by the exhibition, its inclusion in this exhibition can be expected.13

There was never any question that Dix would get the painting back because War Cripples, along with The Trench, as the spotlighting of them in reviews convey, were considered the prize catches for the show. The day before the exhibition opening, the Dresdner Nachrichten, recalling the ‘violent feuding’ over the picture in 1924, noted that the ‘infamous’ Trench (referred to as War), was ‘the most terrifying work in the show, and that the “gruesome” War Cripples, which was a “gift, albeit a Danaergeschenk” was an utter grimace of derision’.14 The show included around 207 works (drawings, paintings, sculptures), mainly drawn from the Stadtmuseum’s collections, and according to the DKD’s Deutsche Kunstbericht, drew around 85,000 visitors.15 Due to arrangements made by the new mayor of Dresden Ernst Zörner, the exhibition would tour to at least eight German cities between 1934 and 1937, with varying modifications to the selection of works on show, making it the major precursor and model for the better-known show that took place in Munich in 1937.16 It focused on works owned by the Stadtmuseum Dresden, with particular emphasis, as one might expect, given to Expressionist artists associated with Die Brücke, the Dresdner Sezession Gruppe 1919 and the ARBKD. Alongside his paintings, graphic work by Dix was also featured. The Trench was centrally placed in the exhibition, with adequate space for visitors to crowd before it (Figure 49). Otto Griebel recalled that an SA-Mann was stationed next to it.17 The chorus of local extreme right-wing ‘reviews’, if one can call them that, are nonetheless useful in forming a more complete insight to the reception of 13 Letter from the Rat der Landeshauptstadt Dresden to Otto Dix, 1 September 1933. Nachlaβ Otto Dix 1, B-32, DKA, GNM. 14 F. Z., ‘Ausstellung “Entartete Kunst”. Lichthof des neuen Rathauses’, Dresdner Nachrichten (Dresden), 22 September 1933, 3. A ‘Danaergeschenk’, literally ‘Greek gift’, refers to the Trojan Horse from Virgil’s Aeneid, ‘danaer’ meaning ‘Greek’. 15 Christoph Zuschlag, ‘Die Dresdner Ausstellung “Entartete Kunst” 1933 bis 1937’, Dresdner Hefte 22, 77, no. 1 (2004): 20, 25. The entry in the Deutsche Kunstbericht is reproduced in Christoph Zuschlag, ‘Entartete Kunst’: Ausstellungsstrategien im Nazi-Deutschland (Worms: Werner, 1995), 131. This entry is not reproduced in Feistel-Rohmeder, Im Terror des Kunstbolschewismus. 16 Christoph Zuschlag, ‘75 Jahre Ausstellung “Entartete Kunst”’, in Der Berliner Skulpturenfund: ‘Entartete Kunst’ im Bombenschutt. Entdeckung - Deutung - Perspektive, ed. Matthias Wernhoff (Regensberg: Schnell & Steiner, 2012). 17 Griebel, Ich war ein Mann, 350.

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Figure 49  Peter Cohen, dir., Architecture of Doom. © Poj Filmproduktion AB, Stiftelsen Svenska Filminstitutet, Sveriges Television AB, Sandrew Film & Teater AB, 1989–95 (English version). Still (00:12:32) showing The Trench in the exhibition Degenerate Art, Rathaus, Dresden, 23 September to 18 October 1933.

Dix’s work in the Nazi era. Müller’s review, published in the Dresdner Anzeiger (taken over by the Nazis almost immediately after the change of government) was among the most circulated: The exhibition is a faithful commitment of the art city of Dresden to the guiding words of the Führer in Nuremberg, and so it will be warmly welcomed by the artists of Dresden and Saxony and by all art lovers, as long as they have retained their innate senses. It visibly wants to draw the line under a time of decline. [The] paralyzing atmosphere surrounds those who enter the exhibition and who strive to look through the long line of exhibits. In the main hall [we] notice the large scale of ‘The War’ by Otto Dix. [. . .] One can see the inside of a trench after the bombardment. The seriously wounded, corpses, body parts, torn skulls lie in a tangled mess. And a rat gnaws on a shot head, the brain of which is exposed. A portrayal of the war that any active panopticon owner might incorporate as an attraction in his war section in the hope of getting a good deal of business. The main thing is the thrill – it does not matter whether a trade is made with the heroes of a people, with the holy dead. One could also think of the painting as a demonstration piece by communist agitators shouting to the

184 Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture excited crowd that there are people to be seen here who were stupid enough to defend their fatherland. [. . .]. The picture would receive a just appreciation if one wanted to see it as a degradation of the fallen German front-line soldier – who deserves to have an honourable memorial erected in his honour after his heroic death, not one that consists of such horrific portrayal of misery. [. . .] One would recommend [the critics] to take a closer look at ‘the trenches’ for its technical deficiencies – perhaps also the ‘war cripples’ from 1920: four frontline soldiers are the target of mockery because of their lost limbs [. . .], an image that represents the utmost meanness that could be shown to decent people, a picture which in an orderly state the police would have laid their hands on before it became museum property. From these motifs, the step is only small to those that are characteristic of Dix and which he has modified in numerous ways – brothel scenes, pimps, prostitutes in the most daring positions, exasperated bon vivants, etc. That is his true face and so we see him and do not allow ourselves to be deceived, as some critics do, when he adapts to the circumstances of the time and today paints ‘suitable subjects’ such as children playing. What grave guilt some people took on themselves when they appointed this man, of all people, as a teacher at the art academy, thus exposing the youth to his poisoning influence for years, an activity which was brought to a well-deserved end by his dismissal in spring this year.

Further down, among numerous criticisms of other artists, he likened George Grosz to Dix in his preference to look for subject matter ‘in public houses or in dubious locations where philistines enjoy themselves with animal lust’. But Müller’s deep dislike – even jealousy – towards Dix, surfaces when he resorts to criticizing a very early work: ‘It would go too far to mention every single picture, every sculpture and every graphic, but nobody neglects to look at Dix’s Sunrise, from 1913. Any amateur could have painted it’. Finally, he points out the etching, ‘The Match Seller, [which] again shows the mean tendency that he pursues’.18 Of course, the idea of The Trench as panopticon and an insult to fallen soldiers was simply a convenient reflection of the negative reviews in 1924, and like them, Müller stumbled in failing to explain the ‘technical deficiencies’. Dix had also painted numerous ‘suitable subjects’ before 1933. Really, Müller seemed bent on condemning Dix personally by exposing his ‘degeneracy’ through his interest in and characteristically visceral portrayal of dead soldiers and prostitutes. In ‘not allow[ing] ourselves to be deceived, as some critics do’, Müller differed from his

18 Richard Müller, ‘Die Ausstellung “Spiegelbilder des Verfalls in der Kunst”’, Dresdner Anzeiger (Dresden), 23 September 1933, 2. Müller’s article title is misleading in that it suggests that the exhibition was titled ‘Mirror-Images [or Reflections] of Decay in Art’.

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former student, artist and writer Wolfgang Willrich, who would later heavily defame Dix’s war pieces in his infamous book, Säuberung des Kunsttempels (Cleansing of the Art Temples), but for now saw something ‘positive’ in Dix, who with his portraits could be a valuable personality for German art.19 The review in Der Freiheitskampf, was also, if indirectly so, far less condemnatory than Müller. In this review, ‘it was only necessary to mention the very few who were also leading artists’ because ‘next to the great destroyers are only poor followers who did not even find their own way of depicting the decay’. Dix was one of [t]he demons, whose dangerousness lay in their great ability, which they misused in incomprehensible madness, [and who] have different names. Above all, it is George Groβ and Otto Dix who, through their unbridled cynicism, have degraded art, one has to say, to the point of whore. The focus of the show is a trench picture by Dix, in whose hideous, horrifying “realism” he tries to get rid of his war experiences at our expense!20

Luckily, according to this reviewer, some great works were made during these fourteen years of darkness, such as that by sculptor Fritz Maskos. Maskos’ Mutter und Kind (Mother and Child) was put on display as an example of degeneracy but his ‘bust of Hitler has now been acquired in several copies by the city because it is of really excellent value’.21 It is difficult to decide what one finds most amusing – that the figure of Adolf Hitler magically diffuses the degeneracy that taints Maskos’ Mother and Child, or that Dix’s cathartic, ‘horrifying “realism”’ should be offloaded on the public. Yet, what Dix reflected upon years later – that the Nazis could not deny his abilities – is clear in this review.22 Additionally, there is no claim for ‘degeneracy’ in how the German soldier was portrayed, nor denial of its realism; rather outrage is expressed only at Dix’s sharing of his war experiences. In a kind of backhanded way, the review acknowledges the value of the pictures as expressive of the impact of the war on participants – and

19 Wolfgang Willrich, ‘Dresdner Ausstellungen’, Dresdner Anzeiger (Dresden), 28 April 1933. Referenced in Beck, ‘“Flucht ist immer falsch”’, 152; Wolfgang Willrich, Säuberung des Kunsttempels: eine kunstpolitische Kampfschrift zur Gesundung deutscher Kunst im Geiste nordischer Art (Munich: Lehmann, 1937). 20 W. F.(?), ‘Entartete Kunst. Eine Abrechnung mit der früheren “Kunstpolitik” der Stadt Dresden’, Der Freiheitskampf (Dresden), 23 September 1933, 4. 21 For the reference to Maskos’s Mother and Child, see Zuschlag, ‘An “Educational Exhibition”’, 100. Maskos (1896–1967) featured in numerous prominent exhibitions during the Weimar era, in addition to exhibitions of both degenerate and ‘healthy’ German art during the Nazi years. 22 ‘The biggest annoyance of the Nazis was that they could not deny my talent.’ Otto Dix, quoted in a clipping (handwritten reference reproduced on the magazine page) from the Badische Illustrierte nr 12, 7 August 1948, Nachlaβ Otto Dix, I B 7 a, DKA, GNM.

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that the act of making the work was cathartic and restorative for the artist. A few days later, Walther Gasch followed with another review of the exhibition in Der Freiheitskampf which as expected looked back at the damaging influence of ‘Bolshevist non-art’ and lauded the efforts of the Nazis to remove it from view. The review only mentions Dix in relation to money spent on works by him and other artists for the city’s art collections.23 Perhaps the least contrived of observations came from an SA guard stationed next to The Trench. Otto Griebel recalled seeing ‘a rather weathered-looking “better lady”’ in front of the painting, who asked the highly decorated SA guard indignantly: ‘You were out there, it never was like that!’ But then this former soldier suddenly felt like explaining: ’What, wasn’t it like that?’24 Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder, in the September/October edition of the Deutscher Kunstbericht (German Art Report) (the interim title for Das Bild: A Monthly Publication for German Art in the Past and Present (renamed from Deutsche Bildkunst)), excitedly reported on the successful ‘exposure’ of Dresden’s ‘degenerate’ art. She summarized her numerous attempts to warn the public against Dix and his art since 1927, and targeted the purchasing commission for the procurement of The Trench as a terrible waste of 10,000 Marks and more or less reiterated Müller’s diatribe: The fanatic of atrocities, the mocker of heroic man, the prostitute painter Dix [who] in the year of liberation has mingled with respectable people [and] has ‘fallen into line’ and paints fatherly joys. [. . .] We were not aware that the [German Art Report] was not printed, even in one of the hundred newspapers that received it. But Dix, who has committed the obscenest disparagement imaginable on the German Feldgrauen, marches in the ranks of the old masters.25

But as her report reveals, her anger at Dix’s mingling with ‘respectable people’ stemmed from the praise given to Dix by Prof Dr Ferdinand Zimmermann, 23 Walther Gasch, ‘Sumpfblüten der Kunst. Noch ein Wort zur Ausstellung im Lichthofsaal des Neuen Rathauses’, Der Freiheitskampf (Dresden), 26 September 1933, 5–6. 24 Griebel, Ich war ein Mann, 350–1. 25 Feistel-Rohmeder, Deutscher Kunstbericht, Folge 75/76, September/October 1933, reproduced in Feistel-Rohmeder, Im Terror des Kunstbolschewismus, 206. The ’feldgrauen’, literally the ‘fieldgrey’, is translated as ‘German soldiers’. The term refers to the German soldier’s uniform, usually described as ‘field grey’ in colour and is commonly used as a synonym for the German soldiers. Feistel-Rohmeder notes here that no newspaper published the report but this may not mean that none of the material was ever published. Clinefelter notes Feistel-Rohmeder’s claim that the Korrespondenz was used by the following before 1933: the NSDAP papers Völkischer Beobachter (Munich) and the Der Angriff (Berlin); the newspapers Niederdeutsche Zeitung and the Neue Sächsische Landeszeitung (Dresden); the German League publication Deutschbund-Blätter; Ernst Jünger’s Die Kommenden, Theodor Fritzsch’s Der Hammer und Flamme (Stuttgart). Three foreign newspapers used the Korrespondenz: the Rochester Abendpost, the Sonntagsboten (Pittsburgh) and the Urwaldboten (Brazil).

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the art reporter for the Dresdner Nachrichten, who remarked on the mastery of the artist’s depictions of ‘fatherly joys’ in his review on 9 September 1933 of an exhibition of work by the Dresdner Sezession: His mastery is unassailable, and it is exemplary how in the case of the ‘Child with Spinning Top’ he brings about the interaction of the solid material of the chair and the soft formation of the child’s body purely by means of technical skill. The ‘Self-Portrait with Son’ is a tradition-bound, Old Master painting style piece of work that will probably one day be given classical significance.26

Zimmermann was referring to works that Dix had showed at an exhibition that had opened the previous month in Dresden, the Gemeinsame Ausstellung 3 Künstlergruppen (Joint Exhibition of Three Artists’ Groups) (18 August–15 October), spread between the Künstlervereinigung’s new municipal exhibition building on Lennéstraße and the Royal Castle.27 The liberal Künstlervereinigung and Dresdner Sezession 1932, exhibiting alongside the extreme right-leaning Deutscher Künstlerverband served to emphasize the blurred divisions between what was acceptable and unacceptable for the new leadership. The works exhibited by Dix did seem to suggest, as Müller and Feistel-Rohmeder claimed, a will to continue working under the regime, even if he could never make peace with it.28 But the Deutscher Künstlerverband’s Willy Waldapfel, one of the organizers of the degenerate art show, exhibited a work that betrayed more than a passing nod to Dix’s War and indicated that the terms by which art was defined as sufficiently modernist to warrant removal were by no means clear. Waldapfel, who gained particular prominence in Dresden under the new leadership, appropriately sanitized his imagery of warfare but his painterly approach owes much, as did some of Müller’s work, to the influence of Neue Sachlichkeit in Dresden. Waldapfel, like Dix, was an art student in Dresden prior to World War I, Dix at the Staatliche Akademie für Kunstgewerbe (State Academy for Applied Arts), the older Waldapfel possibly at the Academy,29 and both served in the Saxon army during the war (though details of Waldpafel’s war experience are scant). Both were also exhibited in the 1916 exhibition of work by soldiers serving in the Saxon army (see Chapter 1), where Waldapfel

26 Ferdinand Zimmermann, quoted in Feistel-Rohmeder, Im Terror des Kunstbolschewismus, 206. 27 Fritz Löffler, ed., Gemeinsame Ausstellung 3 Künstlergruppen 1933 (Dresden, 1933). 28 T h e two works referred to by Feistel-Rohmeder are known as Self-Portrait with Child (Self-Portrait with Ursus), 1930 and Child with Spinning Top (Ursus with Spinning Top), 1928. 29 Willy Waldapfel was born in 1883. Details of his life and work are scant. Christa Bächler identifies Waldapfel as a former student of the Academy. See Bächler, ‘Die Akademie für bildende Künste zwischen Novemberrevolution und faschistischer Machtübernahme’, 305.

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showed twelve pieces depicting war-related subjects.30 Unlike Dix, however, who demonstrated no post-war interest in militarist activity, Waldapfel became a Stahlhelmer, and a member of the DKD, as well as founding the Deutscher Künstlerverband Dresden in reaction to the 1926 International Art Exhibition Dresden as a vehicle to promote, like the DKD, what its members considered to be true German art. Waldapfel’s work achieved nothing like Dix’s success during the Weimar Republic but in 1932 Waldapfel was elected to the city council of Dresden as an NSDAP member. After Ernst Zörner became mayor of Dresden in August 1933, he gave Waldapfel increased powers that saw him deeply involved in organizing the degenerate art exhibition in the City Hall and later, many other exhibitions.31 He created numerous, though now lost, drawings and paintings of the World War I battlefield. Waldapfel’s Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden (I once had a Comrade) (Figure 50), in a manner somewhat similar to Dix’s pictures, focuses on a small group, here an injured World War I soldier-drummer on the battlefield surrounded by dead or dying comrades. He defiantly moves forward, drumming to the tune, possibly, of the famous song popular among German World War I soldiers, Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden (I once had a comrade). The title and figure summon a typically nationalistic, nostalgic and comforting visual memory of the war. Waldapfel showcased his triptych War on The Western Front (1933 or earlier, Figure 51) at this group show. Repeating Dix’s triptych format, the panels are titled (from left to right) Der Spielmann (The Minstrel), Kämpfen und Sterben (Fighting and Dying) and Kameraden (Comrades). It rehashes Dix’s pictorial narrative of marching out, the site of battle and recovery of the wounded. Where Dix’s destroyed trench of haemorrhaging, pulverized flesh and land exposed the horror of the war, Waldapfel instead plays down the meaningless destruction, replacing Dix’s everyman figures with athletic, sturdy, stereotypically masculine soldiers. Dix’s short depth of field is replicated but the dramatic lighting in Dix’s 30 Galerie Arnold, Zweite Ausstellung dresdner Künstler die im Heeresdienste stehen, 14, 43. Waldapfel exhibited one painting, Lunch in the Trench (Mittagessen im Schützengraben) and twelve works in the section for‘watercolours, drawings, etc’. The latter were Ein Soldatenhof bei Auberive (Soldiers Yard at Auberive) and Die Trümmer von Vaudincourt (The Ruins of Vaudincourt). None are either illustrated in the catalogue or seem to have survived in original form or reproduction. Several of his surviving works are owned by the city of Wetter, where he lived after World War II. Waldapfel replaced Richard Müller as director of the Dresden Academy in 1935. See Bächler, ‘Die Akademie für bildende Künste zwischen Novemberrevolution und faschistischer Machtübernahme’, 324. 31 See Gertrud Thiele, ‘Die Akademie unter der Herrschaft des deutschen Faschismus, 1933-1945’, in Dresden. Von der Königlichen Kunstakademie zur Hochschule für Bildende Künste, 1764-1989, ed. Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1990), 307–90. Waldapfel also became director of the Dresden Academy of Arts in 1942.

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Figure 50 Wilhelm (Willy) Waldapfel, Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden (I once had a Comrade), 1930. Lost. Oil on canvas, dimensions unknown. Photograph c. 1935, © SLUB/Deutsche Fotothek/Unknown photographer.

right panel is moved to an almost cinematic staging in the central panel which shows an athletic soldier, resilient under duress and dramatically backlit by the blazing battlefield. As one review remarked, it was among the few pictures in the show that dealt with the theme of the war, and clearly and fittingly foregrounded, in line with the militarism of the new leadership, the spirit of camaraderie: Fire and iron, ruin and death spurt out from the pounding locks. And in the foreground the fallen friend who can no longer shake hands. [. . .] Wounded comrades lead themselves back over destroyed and smoking terrain. Officer and soldier, now bound by fate. Perhaps one must have had the experience of comradeship in the field in order to be able to fully understand the language of this picture.32

If Waldapfel’s picture was a more fitting and desirable, even glamorous retelling of the war experience, technically his pictures’ naturalistic representation, strong 32 Anonymous, ‘Zeiterleben und bildenden Kunst. Bermerkungen zu einer Dresdner Ausstellung’, Dresdner Anzeiger (Dresden), 22 September 1933, 2.

Figure 51  Willy (Willhelm) Waldapfel, Der Front im Westen (War on the Western Front), 1933 or earlier. Lost. Shown as reproduced in the catalogue, Gemeinsame Ausstellung 3 Künstlergruppen: Dresden 1933 vom 17. August–15. Oktober Schloss u. Lennéstrasse / Künstlervereinigung, Deutscher Künstlerverband, Dresdner Sezession.

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sense of movement and fresh, vigorous brushstrokes echo Neue Sachlichkeit far more closely than the nineteenth-century German examples that the Nazis so cherished. And there were more contradictions, as in some of the works on display at an exhibition of war art at the Städtische Galerie in Munich the following December, which also betrayed strong modernist influence. A review of this show in Weltkunst noted the variety of interpretations that attempted to capture ‘the grandiose struggle, the nameless torment and senseless annihilation differently’. If these state-approved artists included Fritz Erler, well-known for his modernist though patriotic war posters, they also counted the impressionist Hans von Hayek and Ed Thöny, who had lampooned the military in the magazine Simplicissimus.33 The three-group show proved to be the final exhibition of Dix’s work in Dresden before the outbreak of World War  II. Seeing no future in Dresden, in the summer of 1933 he moved with his family to Randegg Castle in Hegau. In February 1934, the exhibition Aquarelle und Zeichnungen der Dresdener Secession (Dresden Secession Watercolours and Drawings) at the Galerie Arnold was more than enough of an excuse for the raid by new Gauleiter des Reichskartells (district leader of the Reich Cartel) Walther Gasch, who was poised, as Feistel-Rohmeder had noted, to clear out any ‘degenerate’ art that remained in its possession.34 April 1934 saw the opening of a Völkisch exhibition, long-windedly titled Aus Anlaβ des Führergeburtstages warden Bildnisse der wichtigsten Führer der nationalsozialistischen Bewegung gezeigt: Dr. Goebbels, General Ritter von Epp, Stabschef Röhm, Reichswehrminister von Blomberg, G. Feder, Reichssportführer von Tschammer-Osten, Dr. Ley (On the occasion of the Führer’s birthday, portraits of the principle leaders of the National Socialist movement will be exhibited: Dr Goebbels, General Ritter von Epp, Chief of Staff Röhm, Reichswehr Minister von Blomberg, G. Feder, Chief of Sports von Tschammer-Osten, Dr Ley).35 In May 1934, as soon as the NS leader portraits were taken down, they were replaced with another exhibition of NS-approved art: Landschaften von Eduard Leonhardi/Zeichnungen von Walter Jacob (Landscapes by Eduard Leonhardi/Drawings by Walter Jacob). In the press notice published 33 F. (anonymous), ‘Kriegsbilder in der Städt. Galerie München’, Weltkunst 7, no. 50 (10 December 1933): 4. 34 Negendanck, Galerie Arnold in Dresden 1893-1951, 176. Feistel-Rohmeder was closely associated with Gasch, noting in her report on the degenerate art exhibition in Dresden that ‘the places of the murky swamp, the two, art salons, Arnold and, Neue Kunst Fides, will not be forgotten! With the Gauleiter of the Reich Cartel, Walther Gasch [. . .], we demand: immediate removal from office of those professors who knowingly and in such an unheard-of manner have acted against the dignity and reputation of German art [. . .]. Feistel-Rohmeder, Im Terror des Kunstbolschewismus, 207. 35 Negendanck, Galerie Arnold in Dresden 1893-1951, 549.

192 Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

in the now NS-controlled newspaper, the Dresdner Neuste Nachrichten, Ludwig Gutbier presented Walter Jacob not only as a famous and successful Dresden painter but also as a ‘Truppführer der Leibstandarte’ (leader of the Leibstandarte), a division of the Waffen SS, in whose work ‘the spirit of National Socialism is given expression through its youthful freshness and sharpness’.36 Yet, much of Jacob’s work was representative of the second generation of German Expressionism, and like Dix, his work was also included in the Dresden degenerate art exhibition.37 Dix was officially banned from exhibiting in 1934, driving him and his family into dire financial straits: ‘We live in extremely miserable circumstances, from hand to mouth, so to speak. [. . .] For a year now, sales and orders have completely stopped. It is also likely that things will be no better for the next ten years.’38 Attempts by artist friends to include Dix in other exhibitions would fail, such as that by Bernhard Kretzschmar, whose protest against Dix’s ban was dismissed by Walter Hofmann, managing director (Geschäftsführer) of the Reichskammer der Bildenden Künste, on 10 June 1934.39 One can only imagine Dix’s thoughts on receiving an Ehrenkreuz für Frontkämpfer (Cross of Honour for Combatants) on 31 October 1934, issued to soldiers who had served in World War I. It reads: ‘in the name of the Führer and Reich Chancellery, to artist Otto Dix, in Randegg, Constance, based on the decree of 13 July 1934 in memory of the World War 1914–18, founded by President General Field Marshall von Hindenburg, awards the Cross of Honour for Combatants’. But in spite of, and because of, conditions in Germany, Dix’s work, including some war-related pieces, were exhibited on several occasions between 1934 and 1936 in and beyond German borders, and even reviewed within Germany. Several appeared in the Kunst der Nation, a short-lived broadsheet founded in defiance and edited by a member of the Nazi Party, Otto Andreas Schreiber, who fought for the (re)establishment of German modernist art as representative of the ‘new Germany’. Schreiber was a leading voice in the Berlin-centred NSD-Studentenbund (National Socialist German Students, League) and fought against the ‘attempt by uncreative people to shape art historical dogmas’: 36 Announcement by Galerie Ernst Arnold in the Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, 18 May 1934, reproduced in Negendanck, Galerie Arnold in Dresden 1893-1951, 551. The Leibstandarte was a Nazi army unit founded by Josef Dietrich in 1932 which became the Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler (LAH), Hitler’s personal army. 37 Jacob is mentioned in Richard Müller, ‘Spiegelbilder des Verfalls in der Kunst’, Dresdner Anzeiger (Dresden), 23 September 1933. 38 Otto Dix to Israel Ber Neumann, New York, 20 June 1934, Otto-Dix-Archiv, Vaduz. 39 T h e letter was signed on behalf of Walter Hofmann, Geschäftsführer of the Reichskammer der Bildenden Künste in a letter from the office of the president of the Reichskammer to Bernhard Kretzchmar, 10 June 1934, Nachlaß Otto Dix, DKA, GNM.

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The National Socialist students are fighting against reactionary views in the arts because they believe in the vital developmental power of art, and because they reject the denial of a generation of German artists that preceded today’s, and whose powers flow into the art of the future. [. . .] National Socialist youth believes in nothing more adamantly than the triumph of quality and of truth. The vital principle of art is freedom.40

If Schreiber’s idea of artistic freedom was warped in that the Studentenbund organized book burnings and targeted numerous modernist artists, the Kunst der Nation had no reservations about slating the newly exalted Richard Müller. The scathing commentary on Reclining Nude with Green Parasol was clearly a rebuke for Müller’s attack on Dix and his former colleagues: In a detailed essay in the Dresdner Anzeiger of September 23, 1933, the director of the Academy of Art, discussed the exhibition, Reflections of Decay in German Art, and all the sad acquisitions that have been made by the art administration of the Dresden municipal authorities in the years 1919–33. With relentless frankness, he uncovers all the damage [. . .]. Unfortunately, the writer of this essay did not succeed in extending his certainly great influence on Dresden art conditions to such an extent that the painting shown here also had to disappear from the Stadtmuseum in Dresden: because even with the most tolerant judgment there will be no one who counts this picture as pure art.41

Both in Germany and internationally, the broadsheet’s reports offered some hope that modernist art would be re-established.42 The War was shown as part of the Ausstellung neuere deutsche Graphik (Exhibition of New German Graphic Work) held at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in June/July and reviewed by a certain C. Gr. in Kunst der Nation as evocative of ‘the people of this hard time [who] unshakably believed that just like hardship and joy, so also life and death were nothing more and nothing less than states of the soul that every mortal

40 Schreiber, quoted in Hildegard Brenner, ‘Die Kunst im politischen Machtkampf der Jahre 1933/34’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 10, no. 1 (January 1962): 22, quoted in Iain Boyd Whyte, ‘Nikolaus Pevsner: Art History, Nation, and Exile’, Online article, RIHA Journal, no. 75 (23 October 2013). https://journals​.ub​.uni​-heidelberg​.de​/index​.php​/rihajournal​/article​/view​/69832​ /67262#sdfootnote21sym (accessed 4 April 2022). 41 Anonymous, ‘Der Direktor der Staatlichen Kunstakademie, Dresden’, Kunst der Nation 2, no. 20 (15 October 1934): 6. As noted earlier, ‘Reflections of Decay’ was not the title of the exhibition but only the title of Müller’s article. 42 See, for example, Kunsthaus-Zurich, Neue deutsche Malerei, ed. Kunsthaus Zurich (Zurich: Kunsthaus Zurich, 15 June 1934), 5–6. ‘According to oral reports and reports from a new magazine, Kunst der Nation,, a reconnection with German Expressionism seems to be taking place in relevant places, one hears and reads about successful exhibitions by Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff, Otto Müller.’

194 Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

must experience at some point’.43 Five Dix works were shown at the exhibition Neue deutsche Malerei (New German Painting) at the Kunsthaus, Zurich (21 June to 15 July 1934), which according to the catalogue was planned as a means for artists persecuted in Germany to show and sell their works.44 The opening of the exhibition The War: Etchings by Otto Dix at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on 1 August 1934, the twentieth anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, gave the artist a reason for quiet satisfaction. The exhibition had been made possible, as the press release revealed, by the donation of an entire set of the etchings to the museum by an anonymous donor.45 The press release reproduced part of Alfred H. Barr’s 1931 article on the etchings and The Trench. In October 1934, F. Paul, the pseudonym of Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, wrote about Dix’s only known sculpture, a bust of Fredrich Nietzsche, in an article in Kunst der Nation on artistic portraits of Nietzsche. Comparing Dix’s work to the famed bust by Max Klinger, an artist revered by the Nazis, Schmidt praised it as a worthy if not superior portrait of the philosopher, writing that ‘it is believed that a dissatisfaction with Klinger’s solution has prompted [Dix] to surpass [Klinger’s] marble and to extract what the sagacity of the famous master still owed to an unrestrained feeling’, and that ‘despite some artistic objections, this bust, along with the previously little-known portrait of Edvard Munch, will perhaps determine the impression that posterity should keep of Nietzsche’.46 The article included a large reproduction of Dix’s bust on the front cover (Figure 52), with Klinger’s bust shown on page 2. Though banned from exhibiting, Dix did in fact exhibit several times in 1935 and 1936. He showed some landscapes in a joint exhibition with Franz Lenk at the Galerie Nierendorf from January to March 1935, the result of a working collaboration between the two artists who had included paintings of Hegau and the Swabian and Swiss surroundings located near Dix’s new home at Singen, where he would live until 1936. Praising the resulting work, Paul Ferdinand Schmidt considered this ‘synthesis of romanticism and realism’ to be ‘a good way out of the present situation’ for Dix.47 It was one of those landscapes, 43 C. Gr., ‘Von der vorauschauenden Kraft der bildenden Kunst. Zur Ausstellung Neuere deutsche Graphik im Frankfurter Kunstverein’, Kunst der Nation 2, no. 14 (July 1934): 2. 44 Kunsthaus-Zurich, ‘Neue deutsche Malerei’, 4–6. https://digital​.kunsthaus​.ch​/viewer​/image​/47357​ /1/ (accessed 27 September 2021). The works by Dix exhibited, all in oil, were: Playing Children (1929); Ursus (1931); Lady in White (1932); Young Couple (1933) and Winter Landscape (1933). 45 T h e donor was Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, then treasurer of the museum. 46 Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, ‘Nietzsche-Bildnisse’, Kunst der Nation 2, no. 20 (15 October 1934): 2. Under the pseudonym F. Paul. 47 Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, ‘Dix und Lenk. Gemeinschaftsausstellung in Berlin bei Nierendorf ’, Kunst der Nation 3, no. 3 (1935): 3. Under the pseudonym F. Paul.

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Figure 52  Front page of Kunst der Nation, 15 October 1934, with a photograph of Otto Dix’s bust of Nietzsche as an illustration for the article ‘Nietzsche-Bildnisse’ by F. Paul (Paul Ferdinand Schmidt).

196 Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

the painting Winterabend (Winter Evening) that would represent the artist at the Carnegie Institute’s annual International Exhibition of Paintings (Pittsburgh), held on 17 October–8 December 1935, and which was described as one of the most successful pictures in the show in the letter of thanks to Dix’s wife Martha.48 However, Dix had originally wanted to send The War. In a letter to Karl Nierendorf in July 1935, he wrote: Dear Karl! Attached is the exhibition copy of the Carnegie Institute. I beg you to take care of it for me and send the best war etchings. Of course, it would be best to exhibit the entire cycle – but I don’t know if that is possible. If you think that the German government is making a stink about it, I will write a letter to Goebbels and draw his attention to the fact that these prints represent the most important thing that has been said about the war and that it can only serve Germany as an honour. Write to me about it and don’t forget it.49

No available evidence remains that suggests Dix ever wrote to Goebbels, though the letter to Nierendorf clearly shows how strongly the artist believed in the power of the etchings; more, evidently, than he did in his newer landscapes. The landscapes had old-fashioned crowd-pleasing power and could trace lineage through their similarity to works by Caspar David Friedrich. But one senses that they were created primarily because he could not paint what he wanted anymore, without some degree of risk. He recalled in 1965 that the Nazis had ‘banished [him] to the landscape’ but that he had no real interest in it.50 In any case, the Carnegie show focused on paintings, making the etchings unsuitable. And given the situation for Dix in Germany, an attempt to keep the Nazis informed of any exhibition of the war pictures would have been unwise. Yet, he did in fact manage to keep exhibiting them beyond German borders. When he moved to Hemmenhofen, near the Bodensee (Lake Constance) the following year, proximity to neutral Switzerland would allow him to continue exhibiting his work in that country, at least until the outbreak of war in 1939.

48 Letter from the director to Martha Dix, 22 November 1935, Smithsonian, Archives of American Art, Carnegie Institute, Museum of Art records, 1883–1962, bulk 1885–1962, Box 223, Folder 17: Loans, requests, 1935. https://www​.aaa​.si​.edu​/collections​/carnegie​-institute​-museum​-art​-records​ -7343​/series​-4​/box​-223​-folder​-17 (accessed 25 September 2021). The exhibition took place 17 October–8 December 1935. 49 Otto Dix, Letter to Karl Nierendorf, July 1935, Otto-Dix-Stiftung, Vaduz. 50 Schmidt and Dix, Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis, 271.

Conclusion

In 1936 Dix settled with his family on the Höri Peninsula at Hemmenhofen on the shores of Lake Constance (Bodensee), choosing inner emigration rather than flight, though he would continue to make annual visits to his private studio on Kesselsdorfer Strasse in Dresden until 1943. But despite his near invisibility in public life, the Nazis were far from finished hounding him. As he recalled, he was under constant surveillance from the Gestapo and in late 1938, he was imprisoned by the Gestapo for fourteen days after the assassination attempt on Hitler at the Munich Hofbräuhaus. Works by him – around 250, although that figure has changed over time – that had been confiscated from public collections were in part destroyed (‘burned’).1 The public defamation continued throughout the 1930s as his pictures continued to be part of the touring degenerate art exhibitions, notably the infamous 1937 show in Munich where again, War Cripples and The Trench were spotlighted, among other of his works (Figure 53). They also appeared in publications on degenerate art such as Wolfgang Willrich’s Säuberung des Kunsttempels (Cleansing of the Art Temples) and Adolf Dresler’s ‘instructional’ book on ‘degenerate’ art, Deutsche Kunst und entartete Kunst, which contrasted Dix’s depictions of soldiers in War Cripples with Elk Eber’s then-well-known Letzte Handgranate (Last Hand Grenade) (1936–7).2 If inner emigration has been controversial because some of those figures who remained in Germany appeared to hardly criticize the regime they later professed to hate, Dix quietly continued to paint the war. Flanders (1933/4–6), the artist’s last major war picture, was shown as part of a solo exhibition of Dix’s works at the Kunstsalon Wolfsberg in Zurich from March to May 1938. There it caught the particular attention of renowned art historian Oto Bihalji-Merin, writing under the pseudonym of Peter Thoene, for whom Flanders was crafted as both a memorial to the fallen of the last war and symbolized the threat of another:

1 DKA, GNM, Otto Dix, 1 B – 6. 2 Willrich, Säuberung des Kunsttempels; Adolf Dresler, Deutsche Kunst und entartete Kunst. Kunstwerk und Zerrbild als Spiegel der Weltanschauung (Munich: Deutsche Volksverlag, 1938). An untitled picture of a woman, in watercolour and/or gouache and identified as formerly in the Prints and Drawings Collection of the National Gallery in Berlin, is shown on p. 48.

198 Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

Figure 53  View of the first and second rooms on the upper floor of the courtyard arcade, with Otto Dix's War Cripples visible on the right side, Degenerate Art Exhibition, Institute of Archaeology, Hofgarten, Munich, 19 July–30 November 1937. Among [Dix’s] new works is the war picture Flanders. Once before, the Trench, a painted manifesto of unconditional pacifism, met with enthusiasm and hateful persecution. In 1936/37 the trauma of the war resurfaced in Dix, perhaps no longer simply as a memory of the past, but as a premonition of death to come. Decayed creatures crouch, lie, grow from the humus of blood and brain. Old skulls from which new, forgetful Spring already sprouts blossoms. Greenish shimmering ditches seep through the landscape. In the background [. . .], the destroyed city shines and the setting or rising of the sun is reflected in the water. Nature, people and things are interwoven. The dead hand next to the gnarled branch that towers up in the desert before it gets completely light or completely dark, surrounded by a wreath of thorns: a crucified tree stump. After all the honours from official dignitaries, Dix erected such a memorial to the unknown soldiers of the past and coming war.3

If on the face of it, Flanders did not extend the narrative of death and dying in War, read in the context of early 1938, when international tensions were growing in the wake of the annexation of Austria on 12 March 1938, the picture symbolically expressed the threat of a repeat of the carnage of the last war and by extension, the futility of deploying art as a deterrent against future wars, as Adolf Behne had reflected in 1931.4 Also among the sixty-four works were The 3 Oto Bihalji-Merin (under the pseudonym of Peter Thoene), ‘Bemerkungen über die deutsche Malerei der Gegenwart: zu den Ausstellungen von Otto Dix und Max Beckmann’, Das Werk: Architektur und Kunst/ L’oeuvre: architecture et art 25, no. 11 (1938): 347. https://doi​.org​/10​.5169​/ seals​-86737. 4 Behne, ‘Die Kunst im Trommelfeuer’, 779.

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Seven Deadly Sins (1933) and The Triumph of Death (1934). In the former he quietly satirized Hitler by adding the moustache to the squat figure of Envy in the foreground in a sketch for The Seven Deadly Sins in 1933.5 The exhibition was lauded in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, which also featured the painting Die Mutter des Künstlers und die Nichte Eva Kolberg-Implon (The Mother of the Artist and her Granddaughter Eva Kolberg-Implon) (1935) and recommended that this exhibition, with memories of the war and post-war years, should not be missed by artists or art lovers, ‘as it testifies to one of the strongest, most idiosyncratic German painters of the present’.6 While Dix somehow navigated a semblance of public artistic activity beyond 1933, his former colleague Richard Müller’s career, if not exactly regenerated by his favour towards the NSDAP, did continue to develop up to the end of World War II. Müller was expelled from the Academy in 1935 by the Nazis, apparently because his art had developed ‘degenerate traits’.7 In his lesser stature, he was nevertheless added to the so-called ‘God-Gifted List’ (Gottbegnadeten-Liste) in 1944 by the Reich Ministry, which included artists considered central to Nazi culture.8 Müller’s series of drawings themed around the life of Hitler, worked to sanctify the Nazi leader.9 To this day Müller’s estate holder argues that Müller was only peripherally involved in the Dresden Degenerate Art show, supported by Fritz Löffler’s sworn statement (and others) at Müller’s denazification trial in 1948; Löffler’s statement strongly conflicts with his negative portrayal of Müller in his future biography of Otto Dix, after both Müller and Dix had died: ‘In 1933, I was a research assistant in the City Collections, Dresden, and witnessed the development and construction of the Degenerate Art Exhibition. During these months, Professor Richard Müller was not seen in the rooms of the City Collection and could not have been involved in the assembly of the exhibition.’10 Löffler nonetheless reiterated Müller’s involvement in the Frankfurter Allgemeine

5 The Seven Deadly Sins [Die Sieben Todsünden], 1933. Chalk on card, study for the painting of the same name, 1933. Dix did not add the moustache to the painting until much later, stating in a videorecording that he didn’t want to be locked up for a moustache. See Arena, Otto Dix: Postcards from the Front (London: BBC, 1992). For a discussion of the sketch and the painting, see Dietrich Schubert, ‘Otto Dix: 1933 - Die Sieben Todsünden’, in Architektur im Museum 1977-2012 (Festschrift Winfried Nerdinger), ed. Uwe Kiessler (Munich: Detail, 2012), 241. 6 Anonymous, ‘Otto Dix im “Wolfsberg”’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Zurich), 8 May 1938, 8/33. 7 See Thiele, ‘Die Akademie unter der Herrschaft des deutschen Faschismus, 1933–1945’, 324. 8 See Bundesarchiv, BArch, R 55/20252a, Gottbegnadetenliste, 1944, p. 6. https://invenio.bundesarchiv. de/invenio/direktlink/952f82dc-a0eb-492f-a7ab-74ca2667c2e9/ (accessed 6 August 2023). 9 These appeared in the DKD’s journal Das Bild, in October 1936. 10 Transcript of sworn statement of Fritz Löffler given during police interview, 29 December 1947, Kriminalamt Dresden, Kommissariat K 5 – A. Z.: V – A/298/47/2o1. Bundesarchiv, BArch /MfS BV Ddn AS.

200 Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

Zeitung in 1975.11 George Grosz, also targeted by Müller’s article in the Dresdner Anzeiger in 1933, appeared to show no grudge when he praised the latter in his autobiography for giving him a solid foundation in drawing.12 After World War II, when Müller’s career was in tatters, Grosz sent aid packages from the United States to his former teacher; it is not clear if Grosz was aware of Müller’s defamation of him in the 1933 article.13 Müller continues to be controversial, reflected by the protests against what was considered to be the rehabilitation of his work in the exhibition Beauty and the Beast – Richard Müller & Mel Ramos & Wolfgang Joop (Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig, 13 October 2013–12 January 2014).14 While Dix was one of those who chose to remain in Germany, many other creatives deemed ‘degenerate’ and liberal writers, who had supported Dix directly or indirectly, were forced to flee or meet a much darker fate. Paul Westheim, whose journal Das Kunstblatt supported Dix and many other young artists, was one of the more fortunate, becoming a central figure in German culture in exile and playing a pivotal role in the preservation and exhibition of German modernist art. His work included that for the Union des Artistes Libres (Union of Free Artists) in France, whose greatest achievement was the show held at the Maison de la Culture in Paris in 1938. Westheim also managed the publication of the Union’s bulletin, Freie Kunst und Literatur.15 Seeing no future in a Nazified Germany, George Grosz had left Germany by late 1932 and immigrated to New York with his family, while John Heartfield, at one point number five on the Gestapo’s most wanted list, was fortunate to escape Germany alive in April 1933, eventually settling in London in 1938. However, Carl von Ossietsky, the courageous editor of the Weltbühne, chose, like Dix, to remain in Germany, stating in 1933 that it was a hollow voice that spoke beyond the border.16 Around the same time as Dix’s dismissal from the Dresden Academy 11 Fritz Löffler, ‘Ein Antwort aus Dresden. Wer war der Maler Richard Müller?’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Frankfurt), 12 March 1975. 12 George Grosz, The Autobiography of George Grosz: A Small Yes and a Big No (London: Allison & Busby 1982), 50–1. 13 T h e original United States customs clearance for a parcel could until July 2023 be viewed on the now-defunct Galerie Saxonia (Munich, previously NOVA, Dresden) website. Grosz’s support of Müller is noted in Günther, ‘Der Fall Richard Müller’, 10. 14 See for example MONAliesA Leipzig, ‘Protest gegen frauenfeindliche Ausstellung!’, MONAliesA Leipzig, 14 October 2013. https://monaliesa​.de​/2013​/10​/14​/1072/ (accessed 30 September 2022); Peter Nowak, ‘Die Schöne und das Nazibiest’, Der Freitag, 5 December 2013. https://www​.freitag​.de​ /autoren​/peter​-nowak​/die​-schoene​-und​-das​-nazibiest-3 (accessed 30 September 2022). 15 Jean-Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile. The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America (London: Verso, 2017), 217–18. 16 ‘Carl von Ossietzky’, The Nobel Foundation, 1935. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1935/ ossietzky/facts/ (accessed 9 June 2023).

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came the infamous ‘Weltbühne Trial’ (Weltbühne Prozess), after which von Ossietzky was imprisoned for eighteen months at Esterwegen concentration camp (near Oldenburg), among other camps. He won the Nobel Prize for peace in 1936 but was not allowed to receive it in person. He was released in the same year but died in a hospital in 1938 from tuberculosis, which his incarcerators left untreated.17 Prolific Weltbühne writer Kurt Tucholsky, who after seeing his many warnings about rising militarism and unpunished political murders fall on deaf ears, had already moved to Sweden in 1930. His work was among the first to be publicly burned by the Nazis. Tucholsky died of an overdose of sleeping pills in December 1935, which some believe was suicide. Carl Einstein, regularly targeted by the right wing in the Weimar years, found himself trapped in southern France after the Nazis defeated the Third Republic and committed suicide by jumping off a bridge in July 1940. The fate of Germany’s ‘degenerate’ art – arguably the richest body of modernist art by any one country since 1918, is well known. Some works remain missing or were destroyed during or after the war, though the most complete surviving list of degenerate art compiled by the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda around 1941–2, reveals that The Trench (listed as Der Krieg/ The War) was, with other works by Dix, listed as offered for sale, suggesting it may have been bought and saved from destruction.18 Among the very last public sales of Germany’s modernist art before the outbreak of World War II on 1 September 1939, which included three works by Otto Dix – was the infamous auction that took place at the Grand Hotel National, Lucerne, on 30 June that year, and which also included international art removed from German public and private collections. The auction, which excited considerable local and international interest, was organized by the dominant presence on the Swiss Art Market, Theodor Fischer, working with the Nazis to dispose of the art. It was reported that a long line of local and foreign cars was parked in front of the hotel. In an anteroom there were pictures from private collections in Berlin. In a packed hall mingled 300 people – Swiss, German, French, Dutch and English, to await the announcement of the 125 works to be offered for sale. Big names present included museum directors, collectors, dealers and art critics, among 17 ‘Carl von Ossietzky’. 18 Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, ‘Entartete’ Kunst: Digital Reproduction of a Typescript Inventory Prepared by the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, ca. 1941/42 (Unknown provenance: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2014), 1. http://www​.vam​.ac​ .uk​/entartetekunst, V&A/NAL/MSL/1996/7. Unpaginated; The Trench and War Cripples are listed under ‘Dresden’, ‘Stadtmuseum’. War Cripples and a number of other works are not marked with an ‘X’, which denoted that a work was destroyed.

202 Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture

them the editor of the Art News in New York and Curt Valentin, who bought five lots on behalf of Alfred J. Barr of MoMA. In front of the podium, next to sculptures by Barlach and Lehmbruck, was Dix’s sculpture of Nietzsche, which, in what was possibly its last public appearance, ‘watched the hustle and bustle with philosophical calm’. As the reporter reflected, if by the end of the auction the works that were still housed together as an important modernist collection were distributed across the world, at least they had been freed from the blemish of being ‘degenerate’.19 If the fate of German art reflected destroyed careers and in some cases destroyed lives, the true cruelty of the new regime was not symbolized by the fate of the art but by the fate of those artists, including Jewish artist Felix Nussbaum, whose remarkable work, sometimes diaristic, permitted a singular insight into life under persecution. Nussbaum, in Rome studying under a scholarship in 1933, spent the next ten years between Belgium, Switzerland and France before being finally captured and taken to Auschwitz. He and his wife were murdered there on 9 August 1944.

19 J. O. K., ‘Gemälde und Plastiken aus deutschen Museen unter dem Hammer’, Der Bund (Bern), 6 July 1939, Abend-Ausgabe, 1–2. For the reference to Valentin and Barr, see ‘MoMA’s Problematic Provenances’, ARTnews, 2011. https://www​.artnews​.com​/art​-news​/news​/momas​-problematic​ -provenances​-477/ (accessed 19 April 2022).

Sources

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Index Alexander, Gertrude  53 Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung  164 Assmann, Aleida  8, 161 Asso. See Assoziation revolutionärer bildender Künstler Deutschlands (ARBKD) Assoziation revolutionärer bildender Künstler Deutschlands (ARBKD)  119–20, 143–4, 149, 182 Baldung (Grien), Hans  131, 152 Barbusse, Henri  80, 97, 101–2, 105, 109 Baumgärtel, Otto  15, 34 Behne, Adolf  52–3, 77, 106, 147, 198 Bergius, Hanna  49, 52 Berliner Tageblatt  67, 87, 96–7, 114, 173 Berlin Secession  25, 54–5, 65 Bessel, Richard  84, 95 Black Reichswehr  69, 117 Brenner, Hildegard  5 Buchloh, Benjamin  7 Cassirer, Paul  25 Conservative Revolutionaries  81, 168 Conzelmann, Otto  4, 24 Cubo-Futurism  15, 17, 34 Dada  6, 7, 10, 12, 37, 39–40, 43–5, 47, 48–53, 63–5, 71, 89, 102, 136 Dadaists. See Dada degenerate art  5, 52, 134, 138, 147, 177, 181, 183, 186–8, 191–2, 199, 200, 201–2 Degenerate Art Exhibition, Dresden 1933  5, 13, 181–7, 192, 199 Degenerate Art Exhibition, Munich 1937  5, 197–8 Dettmann, Ludwig  84, 103 Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung  90, 95

Deutsche Kunstgesellschaft Dresden (DKD)  5, 12, 120, 123–4, 134, 136–8, 141, 145–6, 147, 174, 182, 188 Deutscher Künstlerverband Dresden  123, 147, 187, 188, 190 Dix, Otto and memorialization of war  1–3, 6, 9, 11–12, 24, 35, 41, 65, 84–5, 89, 94, 107, 111, 128, 130–1, 135–6, 141, 158, 160 and reception of works  1–2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, 13, 32, 44, 52–3, 63–5, 67, 75, 77, 79–95, 101–6, 108– 14, 124, 128, 132–40, 148–9, 152–3, 159, 171–4, 183–7, 194, 197–8 and works discussed Barricade (intaglio)  72 Barricade (painting)  54–5, 55, 60–1, 62–4, 65, 124 Battle  20 A Beautiful Grave  22–3 Butcher’s Shop (intaglio)  69 Butcher’s Shop (painting)  50–2 Death and Resurrection (intaglio suite)  72, 110, 139 Dugout Tunnel  32–3 Dying Soldier  99–100 Dying Warrior (drawing)  20 Dying Warrior (painting)  15 Fighting Solders  20, 197–8 Flanders  13, 113 Grave of a Frenchman (Champagne)  30–1 Gunner  38 Match Seller  41, 42–4, 54, 57, 58, 62, 63, 131 Metropolis  12–13, 115–24, 126–46, 154, 159, 170 Montage of Mobile Figures  50–1

220

Index

Moon (Fallen), The  30 Mud  31–2 Nietzsche  194–5, 202 Prague Street  54–8, 62, 131 Self-Portrait as Mars  17–18 Self-Portrait as Shooting Target  16 Self-Portrait as Smoking Soldier with Cap  21 Self-Portrait as Soldier  16–17 Self-Portrait in Mirror Shards  21, 22 sex murder pictures  72 Skat Players, The  54–60, 64–5, 134 Still-Life with Widow’s Veil  108, 109–10, 124 Streetbattle  124–5, 128, 139–40 Trench, The  3, 4, 12–13, 62, 67–96, 98, 102–3, 104, 105, 107–110, 111–14, 136, 149, 152, 154, 155, 173, 177, 182–4, 185, 186, 188, 194, 197, 198, 201 Untitled (Prostitute and War Wounded)  73–4, 129 War (triptych)  13, 147–51 War, The (intaglio suite)  12, 69, 71, 83, 96–107, 110, 112–14, 139, 149, 193–4, 196 War Cripples (45% Fit for Work)  13, 44–50, 92, 136, 177, 181–2, 184, 197–8 War Wounded  70–1 Drechsler, Erich  61–2 Dresdner Anzeiger  30, 39, 115, 134–5, 136, 137, 149, 183–4, 193, 200 Dresdner Nachrichten  43, 182, 187 Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten  43, 63, 133, 200 Dresdner Sezession Gruppe 1919  38, 39, 42, 54, 182 Dresdner Volks-Zeitung  30, 33 Einstein, Carl  24, 77, 201 Emil Richter Gallery  38, 39, 40, 54 entartete Kunst. See degenerate art Escherich, Mela  112 Expressionism  63, 65, 83, 192 Expressive Realism  7

Fechter, Paul  63, 83–4, 86, 88, 89–91 Feistel-Rohmeder, Bettina  12, 120, 123, 134–8, 141, 146, 147, 148, 181, 186–7, 191 Felixmüller, Conrad  38, 44, 69, 108, 109 First General Exhibition of German Art (Moscow, Saratov, Leningrad)  105–6 Frankfurter Zeitung  87, 95, 139–40 Freiheitskampf, Die  181, 185, 186 Freikorps  37, 61, 82–82, 95, 128, 143 Friedrich, Casper David  130–1, 196, 199 Friedrich, Ernst  96, 164, 166 Frommer, Maria  63–4, 65 Futurism  17–19, 21 Galerie Arnold  25, 29, 34, 35, 54, 62, 149, 191 Gasch, Walther  13, 123, 147, 181, 186, 191 Giedion, Sigfried  108–9, 139–40 Glaser, Curt  65, 89, 102–3, 171–2 Goya, Francisco  23, 98, 102, 104, 105, 109, 110, 124, 128, 152, 172 Griebel, Otto  3, 30, 40, 61, 69–70, 119, 123, 143, 147, 148, 174, 182, 186 Grohmann, Will  35, 38, 131–2 Grosz, George  3, 37, 44, 49, 63, 65, 73, 83, 91, 97, 104, 106, 108–9, 110, 118, 131, 145, 184, 200 Grundig, Hans  119, 123, 147 Grünewald, Matthias  79–80, 85, 87, 93, 103, 128, 159–60 Hausmann, Raoul  37, 40, 52, 53 Heartfield, John  37, 44, 49–50, 63, 73, 164, 200 Heinemann, Dora  110 Hermann-Neiβe, Max  83, 104 Herzfelde, Wieland  40, 49, 51, 97 Hoffmann, Anton  118 Hoffmann, Eugen  143–45 Illustrierter Beobachter  166–8 International Workers Aid (IAH)  105–6 Jaeckel, Willy  25–7, 128 Jünger, Ernst  81–2, 96, 112, 168

Index Justi, Ludwig  92, 149, 169 Kállai, Ernő (Ernst)  82–3 Kapp–Lüttwitz Putsch  43, 61–2 Kemp, Wolfgang  2 Klemperer, Victor  46–7, 48 Knauf, Erich  88 Kokoschka, Oskar  42–3, 95, 109, 146 Kollwitz, Käthe  37, 96, 106, 110 Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD)  37, 143, 144–5, 148, 153 Krain, Wilibald  106, 165 Kriegszeit  25–6, 94 Kunstblatt, Das  77, 83, 86, 94, 172, 200 Kunst der Nation  192–3, 194–5 Kunstsalon Wolfsberg  128, 138–9, 197 Kuttner, Erich  47–8 Liebermann, Max  87, 89–90, 92–4, 108, 109, 146, 170, 173 Löffler, Fritz  4–5, 21, 60, 62–3, 70, 124, 128, 130, 160, 180–1, 199 Lührig, Georg  179–80 Meier-Graefe, Julius  34, 89–92, 94–5, 103, 107 memorialization  37, 41, 65, 85, 87, 89, 94–5, 110–11, 114, 117–18, 141, 162, 166, 177 Meunier, Ernst  63 Müller, Richard  12–13, 61, 88–9, 120, 124, 137, 147–8, 156–7, 174, 179, 181, 183–7, 193, 199–200 National Socialists (NSDAP)  4, 5, 6, 12, 13, 52, 69, 88, 120, 122, 123, 124, 128, 143, 145–6, 147, 161, 164, 166, 175, 177, 180, 181, 183, 185, 186, 188, 191, 194, 196, 197, 199, 201 Naumann, Horst  142–3, 145 Nazis. See National Socialists Neue Kunst Fides (gallery)  124, 133, 135, 149, 153 Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity)  6, 7, 63, 113, 115, 128, 135, 170, 187, 191 Neue Zürcher Nachrichten  108–9

221

Neumann, Israel B.  25, 61, 73, 97 New Sobriety. See Neue Sachlichkeit Nierendorf, Karl (Galerie Nierendorf)  61, 71, 95, 97–102, 111, 148, 174, 194, 196 Nietzsche, Friedrich  11, 16–17, 194 No More War (anti-war) movement  13, 37, 52, 68, 96–7, 110–11, 141–2, 143–5 Nora, Pierre  8 Osborn, Max  87, 173, 175 Paech, Georg  124, 133–4, 149 Riegl, Alois  2 Rocholl, Theodor  25, 28 Rote Fahne, Die  53 Rote Gruppe (Red Group)  106, 111 Rückenfigur  130–1 Salmony, Alfred  79–80, 109 Scheffler, Karl  91–2, 104 Schlichter, Rudolf  50, 65, 97, 106 Schmidt, Hans Werner  119 Schmidt, Paul Ferdinand  10, 54, 64, 92–4, 103, 107, 136, 194–5 Schmits, Walter  75, 80, 84–6 Schubert, Otto  11, 33–4, 38 Schultze-Naumburg, Paul  137, 146 Secker, Hans F.  75, 77, 93, 94 Slevogt, Max  25, 27, 29 Soldan, George  164–5 Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD)  37, 57, 115–16, 138, 164, 169 stab-in-the-back theory  37, 43, 54, 122 Stahl, Fritz  87–8, 107 Stahlhelm  37, 95, 117, 164, 188 Stiller, Richard  39, 63 Theweleit, Klaus  82 Thoene, Peter (Oto Bihalji-Merin)  197– 8 Thoma, Hans  120–2 Tröger, Fritz  176 Tucholsky, Kurt  7–8, 117, 141–2, 201 Vereshchagin, Vassily  91–2

222 veterans. See war veterans Völkisch art  120, 123, 135, 138, 148, 175, 191. See also Deutsche Kunstgesellschaft Dresden (DKD) Völkisch nationalism  6, 120, 135, 137, 141, 146, 155, 175 von Killinger, Manfred  179 von Ossietzky, Carl  117, 201 von Watzdorf, Erna  132 Wagner, Karl  81 Wahre Jacob, Der  116–17, 164–6 Waldapfel, Willy  13, 123, 147–8, 181, 187–90

Index Wallraf-Richardz Museum  69, 75, 77, 87 war veterans  2, 10, 11, 12, 37, 39, 42, 46, 47, 71, 78–9, 80, 108, 117, 128, 131, 138 and disability  40, 42, 45–9, 54, 57–9, 64, 129–31, 133 Weltbühne, Die  69, 92, 117, 141, 200–1 Westheim, Paul  10, 67, 86, 90, 94–5, 103–4, 107, 111–12, 172–3, 200 Willrich, Wolfgang  185, 197 Wolfradt, Willi  107 Wollheim, Gert  69, 73, 75–6 Zehder, Hugo  39 Zimmermann, Rainer  7

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