The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871-1933 1474226140, 9781474226141

Citation preview

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

A Modern History of Politics and Violence Series Editor: Paul Jackson (University of Northampton, UK) Editorial Board: Roger Griffin (Oxford Brookes University, UK) Leonard Weinberg (University of Nevada, USA) Ramon Spaaij (La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia) Richard Steigmann-Gall (Kent State University, USA) Aristotle Kallis (Lancaster University, UK) Matthew Feldman (University of Teesside, UK) Kathleen Blee (University of Pittsburgh, USA) A Modern History of Politics and Violence is a new book series that scrutinises the diverse history of political violence in the modern world. It includes original studies, edited collections and reference works that explore the cultural settings and key actors that have allowed violent solutions to become seen as desirable somehow at certain points in history. Published: Colin Jordan and Britain's Neo-Nazi Social Movement, Paul Jackson (2016) Neo-Fascist Network, Matteo Albanese and Pablo del Hierro (2016) Survivor Transitional Narratives of Nazi-Era Destruction: The Second Liberation, Dennis B. Klein (2017) Transnational Fascism in the Twentieth Century: Spain, Italy and the Global The Victims of Slavery, Colonization and the Holocaust, Kitty Millet (2017) Forthcoming: The Comparative History of Fascism in Eastern Europe, Constantin Iordachi (2018)

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933 Paul Fox

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 © Paul Fox, 2018 Paul Fox has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. 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. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-2614-1 ePDF: 978-1-4742-2615-8 eBook: 978-1-4742-2616-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: A Modern History of Politics and Violence Series design: Clare Turner Cover image: Not machines - but hearts decide the victory by S. Schilling, Simplicissimus magazine, Issue 25, 17 September 1918. Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

To Debbie, Thomas and Anna

vi

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements 1

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

viii xii 1

Part 1 2

Adolph Menzel and the Rhetoric of Command

49

Part 2 3 4 5

Combat and the Politics of Border Landscapes: Soldier-Farmers  Combat and the Politics of Landscape: Trench Warfare  Combat and the Politics of Landscape: Aerial Photography, Maps and the Cold Gaze

81 106 125

Part 3 6 7

Technology and Combat in the Franco-Prussian War  Technology and Combat in the First World War

141 156

Conclusion

183

Notes References Index

191 209 219

List of Figures Adolf Brütt, Taking Counsel at the Map Table, stone relief, Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Berlin, 1906. Photograph: author 52 Figure 2 Anton von Werner, Council of War at Versailles (November/ December 1870), oil on canvas, Hamburger Kunsthalle, 1900. © bpk-Bildagentur, Hamburger Kunsthalle, photograph Elke Walford 55 Figure 3 Adolph Menzel, Campaign Planning with Augustus III, wood-engraving, Life of Frederick the Great (Kugler and Menzel 1877: 192). Digital scan: author 59 Figure 4 Adolph Menzel, Frederick Addressing his Generals Before the First Silesian War, wood-engraving, Life of Frederick the Great (Kugler and Menzel 1877: 163). Digital scan: author 60 Figure 5 Adolph Menzel, Frederick the Great’s Address to his Generals Before the Battle of Leuthen, wood-engraving, Life of Frederick the Great (Kugler and Menzel 1877: 349). Digital scan: author 61 Figure 6 Adolph Menzel, Frederick at the Battle of Torgau, wood-engraving, Life of Frederick the Great (Kugler and Menzel 1877: 461). Digital scan: author 64 Figure 7 Adolph Menzel, Austrian Prisoners after Leuthen, wood-engraving, Life of Frederick the Great (Kugler and Menzel 1877: 355). Digital scan: author 67 Figure 8 Anton von Werner, Billet Outside Paris, oil on canvas, Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 1894. © bpk-Bildagentur, Nationalgalerie, SMB, photograph Jörg P. Anders 69 Figure 9 Ernst Schilling, Where is the Germans’ Fatherland?, Simplicissimus 23, no. 47 (18 February 1919), p. 592, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. © bpk-Bildagentur, Kunstbibliothek, SMB, photograph Dietmar Katz  82 Figure 10 Thomas Theodor Heine, New Year’s Wish 1915, lithograph, Simplicissimus 19, no. 39 (29 December 1914), p. 511, Figure 1

List of Figures

Figure 11

Figure 12

Figure 13

Figure 14

Figure 15

Figure 16

Figure 17

Figure 18

Figure 19

Figure 20 Figure 21 Figure 22

Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. © bpk-Bildagentur, Kunstbibliothek, SMB, photograph Dietmar Katz Heinrich Zille, East Prussians!, lithograph, Ulk 43, no. 37 (11 September 1914), p. 8, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. © bpk-Bildagentur, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Adolph Menzel, Allegory of War (Colossus), wood-engraving, Life of Frederick the Great (Kugler and Menzel 1877: 281). Digital scan: author Adolph Menzel, Incident from the Battle of Torgau, woodengraving, Life of Frederick the Great (Kugler and Menzel 1877: 459). Digital scan: author Ernst Zimmer, Four Riflemen Near Vionville, in War and Victory, 1870-71 (Pflugk-Harttung 1896a: 143). Digital scan: author Wilhelm Emelé, The Battlefield Seen from the South, (a contemporary sketch by W. Emelé), in War and Victory, 1870-71 (Pflugk-Harttung 1896a: 132). Digital scan: author Wilhelm Emelé, The 5th Division Memorial at Flavigny, War and Victory (Pflugk-Harttung 1896a: 149). Digital scan: author Otto Taubert, The Vionville Battlefield, engraving, The Metz Battlefields, 1894-1901, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. © bpk-Bildagentur, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Otto Taubert, The Avenue of Death, engraving, The Metz Battlefields, 1894-1901, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. © bpk-Bildagentur, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin D Halke, Cheers of the Fathers, lithograph, Das Hurrah der Väter, Ulk 43, no. 34 (21 August 1914), p.8, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. © bpk-Bildagentur, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Franz Schauwecker, Fort Douamont page layout, Thus Was The War (Schauwecker 1927: 76). Digital scan: author Sample page depicting tanks, The Face of The World War (Jünger, 1930: 247). Digital scan: author D Graf, Hand Grenade Throwers on the Kemmel, in Memorial to the German Army and Navy, 1871-1918, (Eisenhart-Rothe after 1918: 416). Digital scan: author

ix

85

87

90

94

95

97

101

102

104

107 111 112

115

x

List of Figures

Figure 23 Unknown photographer, German Assault Troops Reach the Wire Entanglement (Jünger, 1930: 101). Digital scan: author Figure 24 Unknown photographer, Firing Line Advances, (Schauwecker 1927: 49). Digital scan: author Figure 25 Unknown photographer, Drumfire on the Chemin des Dames and German Fire on an Enemy Position on the Aisne (Schauwecker 1927: 34). Digital scan: author Figure 26 Unknown photographer, Polish Village Photographed from an Aircraft (Jünger 1930: 297). Digital scan: author Figure 27 Unknown photographer, Craterfield in Flanders (Jünger 1930: 298). Digital scan: author Figure 28 Unknown cartographer(s), The Battlefields Around Metz (Pflugk-Harttung 1896a: 152). Digital scan: author Figure 29 Roederer, Battle Sketches of the Progress of the Assault on the Annaberg (Salomon 1938: 275). Digital scan: author Figure 30 Carl Röchling, Field Artillery Under Fire (Pflugk-Harttung 1896b: 35). Digital scan: author Figure 31 Richard Brend’amour, 21cm Bronze Mortar (1870), engraving, War and Victory (Pflugk-Harttung 1896b: 98). Digital scan: author Figure 32 Unknown photographer, Prussian 12-pounder (Pflugk-Harttung 1896b: 101). Digital scan: author Figure 33 Hermann von Müller, No. 1 Battery in Front of Neubreifach (Pflugk-Harttung 1896a: 100). Digital scan: author Figure 34 Richard Knötel, Bavarians in the Attack (Pflugk-Harttung 1896a: 15). Digital scan: author Figure 35 Unknown artist(s), Advancing in Bounds (Pflugk-Harttung 1896a: 14). Digital scan: author Figure 36 E Distling, Only if You Stay Calm, lithograph, 1917. IWM PST6455, Courtesy of Imperial War Museum, London Figure 37 Unknown photographer, Completely Destroyed English Tank (Jünger 1930: 247). Digital scan: author Figure 38 Eric Mattschaß, From the Great Tank Battle at Cambrai, 27 September to 8 October 1917, in Memorial to the German Army and Navy, 1871-1918 (1927: opposite 214). Digital scan: author

117 118

127 128 130 133 136 145

150 150 151 153 154 159 162

163

List of Figures

xi

Figure 39 Heinrich Kley, Mars Ironing his Civilian Clothes, Simplicissimus 23, no.39 (24 December 1918), p. 486, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. © bpk-Bildagentur, Kunstbibliothek, SMB, photograph Dietmar Katz 165 Figure 40 Fritz Erler, Help us to Victory!, poster, 1917, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. © Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte 167 Figure 41 Unknown photographer, Cavalry Regiment of the Baltic Home Defence Force (Oertzen, 1936: 80). Digital scan: author 169 Figure 42 Unknown photographer, A Picture from Postwar Berlin: Assault Troops with Tank and Artillery in Street Fighting in The Dangerous Moment (Bucholtz 1931: 160). Digital scan: author 170 Figure 43 Unknown photographer, The Last Second, photograph, in The Dangerous Moment (Bucholtz 1931: 72). Digital scan: author.  173 Figure 44 Unknown photographers, The Powerlessness of the Masses (Schultz and Jünger 1933: 34–5). Digital scan: author 176–7 Figure 45 Unknown photographers, Technology Draws the Face of the World (Schultz and Jünger 1933: 68–69). Digital scan: author 180–1

Acknowledgements This book is the product of a personal association with the Department of the History of Art at University College London extending back to 2003. My years as a mature postgraduate student and, later, as a teaching fellow, were transformative beyond my expectations. I recall with thanks the years of unstinting support provided by everyone there, not least Tom Gretton, who guided me through the technologies of nineteenth-century photomechanical reproduction and remains as ready to listen as he is to deliver robust criticism, and also Andrew Hemingway, who gave me twenty perfectly pitched masterclasses in postgraduate teaching. In particular, however, I am especially grateful to Frederic Schwartz, who gave me the time and space to develop my research interests from the outset, and who steered me through doctoral research funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Of the libraries and archives I visited, I would like especially to thank the staff of the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, who went out of their way to facilitate access to their collection of illustrated books, newspapers, posters and postcards. Elsewhere, Maria Barnett had the unenviable task of teaching me German, and Mike Mockford challenged me to draw on the knowledge accumulated during years spent as a photographic interpreter. In a sense, research for this book about military culture and its representation, began in 1975 at the outset of a military career that unexpectedly brought me to doors of UCL. I am grateful to a succession of military officers who stimulated me to think critically about military cultures. In particular: Nick Baker, Jim Beach, Patrick Mercer, Nigel Jones, Veronique Malone and Pete Williams. It is a pleasure also to thank all those friends, colleagues and acquaintances for their advice, critiques and support, not least: Hāleh Anvari, Stina Barchan, Warren Carter, Charles Ford, Tine Frøysaker, Cliff Lauson, Martin Perks, Toni Silver and Noëlle Streeton. And finally to remember Shayla Walmesley, who did not live long enough.

1

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

This book addresses thematic continuities in the visual representation of Germans at war. It traces the enduring relationship between German cultural production and a tradition of military thought extending back to the 1813– 15 wars of liberation, which sustained what is here categorized as a popular, prevailing, militarized mode of representation. In late-nineteenth-century Germany, recent wars were generally upheld as salient landmarks on the trajectory of the nation’s ascent to prominence in Europe. In particular, the 1870–1 Franco-Prussian War was regarded as the defining event from which the unified nation emerged. During the Weimar years, however, popular visual accounts of combat during the First World War circulated in a population profoundly affected by the experience of a lost war fought on an industrial scale. Despite these radically different circumstances, all the images addressed here relating to these polar events make common cause through their broadly positive address to the experience of armed conflict aimed at a mass-market audience. Writing in the context of commemoration in Germany after the First World War, Benjamin Ziemann has examined how wartime experience was subsequently systematically elaborated, tracing observations that can be equally applied to the production of illustrated histories after the Franco-Prussian War, too: One crucial element [of history writing] was its relative openness. Professional academic historians were only one, and most often not the decisive, stakeholder in this arena. Other interest groups included … former wartime officers; and, in a time when the mass media already shaped public opinion, all those who could mass-market popular genres of history writing. (Ziemann 2013: 199)

The images that are a constituent part of illustrated histories, together with the related material addressed here, amount to a coherent body of work, thematically linked over time, conflict and media, in five domains: a canonical

2

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

illustrated history of the eighteenth-century wars of Frederick the Great; images of the Franco-Prussian War produced around the time of the twentyfifth anniversary celebrations in 1896; drawings and photographs published in Germany’s illustrated press depicting conflict during and immediately after the First World War; photographs and art works reproduced in popular illustrated histories of the First World War; and images drawn from photobooks produced in collaboration with Ernst Jünger around 1930 arguing for the creation of an authoritarian state braced for the resumption of conflict in Europe.1 This field of inquiry, which includes representations of regional interstate conflict, total war, counter-insurgency and intimations of future mechanized warfare, is as eclectic as the German experience of conflict itself. What unites all of them is the tacit acknowledgement, the manifestation of an instance of cultural patterning in which contemporary reader-viewers were implicated over an extended period, that there was a German way of warfighting, characterized by an overweening will to battle, manifest in the translation of the military commander’s intent into offensive action. The art works and photographs addressed here engage autonomously with wartime experience; they were fundamentally neither subordinate to the textual component of illustrated material, nor reliant on a sophisticated analysis of the relationship between text and image in pursuit of their meaning. Their significance lies in what they suggest about how the makers of art works and photographs, and the author/editors of illustrated texts, employed visual representations of the putative German way of waging war to negotiate shifting political–military preoccupations over a sixtyyear period. The analysis centres on three illustrated histories and a photobook which are here understood as elements of a broad body of works, extending beyond the German Bildung tradition exemplified by the works of Schiller and Goethe, consumed nevertheless by what Lynne Tatlock calls the German ‘reading nation’: Franz Kugler and Adolph Menzel’s 1842 Life of Frederick the Great (Geschichte Friedrichs des Grossen); War and Victory 1870-71 (Krieg und Sieg, 1870-71), edited by Julius Pflugk-Harttung (1895); The Face of the World War (Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges) edited by Ernst Jünger in 1930; and his collaborative project with Edmund Schultz, the 1933 photobook, The Transformed World (Die Veränderte Welt).2 To the extent that The Transformed World is fundamentally about armed conflict – and here it is suggested so – all these works nod in the direction of the influential Life of Frederick the Great, with its dense array of wood-engravings by Menzel woven through Kugler’s text. Illustrated popular histories were a significant publishing phenomenon during the period, and remain worthy of

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

3

art historical scrutiny today for that reason, but also because they functioned as a bridge between academic and graphic art practices, advertising, propaganda, photojournalism, early handheld personal photography and official histories of conflict.3 War and Victory sits at the heart of this inquiry. Volume 1 of Pflugk-Harttung’s two-volume work is a history of Prussian military culture, as well as an account of selected wartime events and their outcomes. The narrative structure of Volume 2, in contrast, is teleological, describing the entire Franco-Prussian campaign from inception to conclusion. Descriptions of minor unit actions are interspersed with episodes describing leaders, decision-making processes, the putative national characteristics of the belligerents, weather and terrain, the impact of key technologies, the contribution of specialist military functions and the conduct of major battles. Both volumes steer clear of the deleterious aspects of war, notwithstanding occasional references to death and wounding. In the decade after unification, broadly positive accounts of the FrancoPrussian War appealed to a broad spectrum of German society, including readerviewers who supported the National Liberals, the largest party in the Reichstag, whose vision for the future had been fulfilled by the Reichsgründung, which had opened up the possibility of a liberal consolidation of the imperial constitution. The war was also lauded by a conservative ascendancy whose authority was predicated on military power and the role Junker families played in providing the armed services with leaders. Growing social insecurity and the process of class formation accompanying rapid industrialization in the 1880s did not tarnish this war memory. The decade was, however, marked by the rise of conservatism at the expense of the liberal faction, which struggled to adapt to the realities of industrial society. As a result, ‘The full party spectrum of the Kaiserreich emerged for the first time in organisational and programmatic terms, the former front – for or against the foundation of a kleindeutsch-Prussian nation-state – gave way to other, more differentiated fronts’ (Langewiesche 2000: 133). While the national movement assumed a more conservative hue, Liberals, Conservatives and, increasingly, Social Democrats alike nevertheless regarded themselves as members of a nation-state forged out of the conflicts of 1864–71. It is therefore neither possible nor necessary to define the audience for these accounts of conflict more exactly, beyond noting that it comprised a general, broadly conservative, non-radicalized, and largely male reading public sharing two characteristics: due to the practice of universal male conscription and the cachet of a commission in the Wilhelmine army Reserve, military literacy was widespread; secondly, many readers before the Great War believed that

4

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

the army embodied the nation; and afterwards, many wished that it still did.4 Illustrated histories of the Prussian army and its allies on operations during the Franco-Prussian War presented the reader-viewer with images of exemplary behaviour deemed worthy of emulation. In 1918, however, this equilibrium was undermined. The demise of the Wilhelmine state, the defeat of the Bolshevik revolution and the emergence of democratic politics created conditions in which a radicalized yet predominantly conservative readership turned to popular histories of the First World War in order to account for Germany’s defeat, and to mourn the passing of an era in which the German army had been widely esteemed at home and abroad. The values of Wilhelmine conservatism survived the November 1918 Armistice and found expression among those who yearned nostalgically for the restoration of the Wilhelmine state. But a new brand of conservative thinking emerged from the ashes of war and revolution, whose adherents rejected the notion of a political restoration, were scornful of democratic politics and aspired to ‘socialism of the blood’ realized in a nationalist community modelled on wartime experience at the front. They sought to recover Germany’s political influence and military power in a world in which nations had apparently discarded moral standards governing international relations, and were now guided only by their ‘natural’ selfish interest (Woods 1996: 2). The so-called ‘Reactionary Modernists’, including Ernst Jünger, promoted this agenda, which borrows so much of the rhetoric of popular illustrated histories that it merits further introduction. Jeffrey Herf employs the term reactionary in this context to connote a tradition of the political right that was fundamentally illiberal and authoritarian. Reactionaries found in nationalism a force to oppose Marxism, capitalism, bourgeois materialism and what they perceived as the stultifying effects of an excess of civilization. Herf suggests that reactionary modernists were modernists in two ways: they believed that technology offered the possibility of a mode of social development that was currently denied by the chaotic orderings of the capitalist economy; and they identified with the right-wing cultural vanguard, whose central tenet was belief in the virtues of the ‘free creative spirit at war with the bourgeoisie’ (Herf 1998: 11–12). Reactionary modernist belief in the power of the will found a home in the long-established debate in military circles concerning the potency of the moral qualities of the soldier, relative to material battlefield conditions recently transformed by the exponential increase in firepower made possible by technological innovation, from the middle of the nineteenth century: If modern firepower favoured the defence, were

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

5

manifestations of obdurate will be sufficient to carry attacking soldiers onto defended positions? The dominant Wilhelmine tendency towards conservatism and the radicalization of elements of conservative opinion after 1918 notwithstanding, the audience for the post-1918 subject material addressed here spanned a broad range of political opinion. In particular, veterans, including those committed to the majority socialist democratic politics after 1918, found in the militarized mode of representation employed by the makers of illustrated popular histories of conflicts since 1871, visual accounts of experience they could empathize with, and which fed their need for a narrative that framed a sense of veteran identity characterized by the notion of a demanding job loyally and efficiently executed to the highest of standards, no matter what the circumstances.

Visual culture and its intersections While this project is fundamentally concerned with visual production it nevertheless intersects with other disciplines, in a manner common to art historical inquiry, typically borrowing in order to furnish context and to bring related methodologies to bear. The intersections traced here surface continuously across the themed chapters that follow, shaping the continuities this book suggests existed across the subject period. They comprise moral philosophy and the ‘cultural turn’ in military affairs; a ‘German way’ of war and the ‘spirit of the age’; remembrance and commemoration; narrative construction; identity and performativity; and border landscapes and national identity. The philosophy of armed conflict, reinforced by the recent ‘cultural turn’ in military affairs, suggests that moral legitimacy in the prosecution of armed conflict is an enduring preoccupation and is arguably the defining imperative underlying all the visual material assessed here. The pursuit of transparent moral legitimacy intersects with contemporary notions of culture conceived of as a powerful force in adversarial circumstances, not least as conveyed through compelling, or persuasive, images in the context of the World Wide Web and social media. Images are ‘weapons in this context’, bound up in contested notions of identity and values, and ultimately the quest for legitimacy (Michalski and Gow 2007: 197). This was no less true in 1871 or 1918 than it is today. Patrick Porter’s work speaks directly to the ‘cultural turn’ in applied military affairs characterized by an anthropological address to battlefield behaviours. According to Porter, all armed conflicts are ‘cultural acts’, proscribed by cultural

6

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

norms, to the extent that they are ‘an expression of identity as well as a means to an end’ (2009: 1). The ‘cultural turn’ energizes, and potentially ‘weaponises’, the notion that ‘war is a medium through which we judge the calibre of our own and other civilisations’ (2009: 3). This book engages closely with this agenda, advancing the argument that citizens of the new German state gazed at images of recent wars in order to formulate what it meant to be German, not least in comparison with the established Great Powers. This cultural impulse intersects with Mark Hewitson’s wider review of the historical field, characterized by the claim made by some historians that ‘calculations of power rather than national consciousness dictated the course of German history before and after unification’ while others have drawn attention to the gradual construction of identity ‘by means and ideas of representations of Deutschtum’ on the one hand, and ‘the instrumetalization of competing versions of German culture by late nineteenth and early twentieth-century nationalist ideologies on the other’ (Hewitson 2000: 253). The illustrated histories addressed here, in particular, occupy space between the ‘power’ and ‘culture’ constructs, both of which are bound up in social perceptions of political legitimacy, mediated via images of armed conflict. The ‘cultural turn’ reflects a resurgence of military interest in the uses and abuses of differentiated cultural values. But notions of legitimacy and the rules of war, themselves grounded in culture, have long been subjects in the field of political and moral philosophy. Michael Walzer considers that the law alone does not usefully serve to address what is at stake here, and instead wants to account for the ways in which men and women who are not lawyers but simply citizens (and sometimes soldiers) argue about war, and to expound the terms we commonly use. I am concerned precisely with the present structure of the moral world. … Though justifications and judgements cannot be studied like the records of a criminal court, they are nevertheless a legitimate subject of study. (1977: xxi)

Taking that idea forward, the ‘power’, or social currency, of an image is not to be understood here as being recognizably underpinned by positive laws regulating the conduct of armed conflict or the character of the German army. Rather, it rests in determinations of legitimacy founded in moral law: ‘to those general principles that we commonly acknowledge, even when we can’t or don’t live up to them. When I talk of the rules of war, I am referring to the more particular code that governs our judgements of combat behaviour’ (Walzer 1977: xxi–xxii).

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

7

This book invests in such thinking to the extent that the subject images are not here understood as furnishing evidence about battlefield acts from which we can make legally determined judgements about the appropriateness of historical events or behaviours. Rather, the issue rests on the extent to which they addressed a moral law, or determination, in German society, giving onto what can be identified as a set of general principles commonly, if tacitly, acceded to at the time, as to what constituted morally virtuous German battlefield behaviour, upheld even when, in reality, Germans couldn’t, or more prosaically simply didn’t, live up to them. To paraphrase Walzer, to talk of the cultural expression of a ‘German way’ of war and its representation, is to refer to the discernible aesthetic and rhetorical codes, extending to dominant visual tropes, which served to shape, police and affirm judgements about what how a ‘real German’ at war ought to behave, and what that implied about wider German identity and territorial integrity. Finally, in this context, it will be useful to note that Western just war theory characteristically seeks to explore the upper limits of what constitutes ‘acceptable’ practice in order to limit war and ensure its ‘just’ conduct: ‘limited war is always specific to a time and place, but so is every escalation, including the escalation beyond which war is hell’ (Walzer 1977: 25). The body of images addressed here contains examples of art works and photography that address directly the culturally constructed notion of unacceptable escalation (not least by Germany’s enemies in the context of defeat in 1918). This inquiry therefore checks the tendency to locate and explore upper moral limits, redirecting the tendency in the opposite direction to ask: What were the culturally constructed lower acceptable limits governing the representation of the German soldier at war, imagined as patriotic, disciplined, and imbued with an obdurate will to battle, in the ‘German way’: At what point, or threshold, does perceived underperformance also constitute unacceptable German behaviour? Whether understood in the context of a ‘cultural turn’, or a development in long-established applied moral and political philosophy, the nature of the discourse about the applied ethics of armed conflict is essentially anthropological, and gives on to the notion that it is possible to discern ‘national ways’ of waging armed conflict. Robert Citino’s work here provides all the military–historical context this study of visual culture requires. He traces a perceived tendency extending from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, during which striking continuities in thought and action amount to a recognizable, enduring political, military and cultural construct: a ‘German way’ of war.

8

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

According to Citino, the ‘German way’ was characterized by a commitment to short, violent campaigns, the securing of a decisive battlefield victory at the earliest opportunity; and the execution of sudden or surprising operational manoeuvres to get into the flank or rear of the enemy with one’s entire force (2005: 306). The ‘German way’ was predicated on the moral commitment to offensive action, with its ‘origins within the Kingdom of Prussia’ (2005: xiii). There is perhaps nothing startling new in what Citino has to say, but to the extent that he is manifestly interested in the force of cultural continuity evidenced in an enduring, quintessentially German, moral commitment to offensive action, his research interests parallel those addressed here; not in the context of warfighting itself, but in its corollary: its representation in German visual culture. This is not to say that visual production ‘mirrored’ enduring preoccupations; rather, this book pursues a line of inquiry suggesting that a significant strand of visual production over the period was actively implicated in a cultural phenomenon, strongly embedded in German society, that advanced established attitudes to militarism and the conduct of armed conflict, no matter what the period, military context or artistic medium. As such, this book speaks to an agenda rooted in the discipline of military history, inflecting the debate, and extending it laterally by focusing not on militarism and armed conflict as such, but on wider cultural expressions of that field of human thought and action. The expression of a ‘national way’ of warfighting rooted in German culture over an extended period finds its wider equivalent in the notion of the ‘spirit of an age’, a term indicative of the late-nineteenth-century preoccupation with periodicity and style in a world transformed by industrial modernity. In the catalogue to the 2001 exhibition, Spirit of an Age: Nineteenth-Century Paintings From the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Peter-Klaus Schuster writes: It may be imagined what an aura the idea of nationhood therefore took on in Germany, but also what problems it entailed. It may be imagined, too, what a burden of proof was thereby loaded onto art. Art was required, first, to show the Germans who they now were, who they had been and who they wanted or ought to become.

From this, Schuster tells us, arose the question ‘what is German art’? (ForsterHahn 2001: 11) The exhibition attempted, retrospectively, to review that question. In doing so its curators were also unwittingly paralleling the issues addressed here, albeit with a very different body of work for art historical reasons addressed in detail throughout this book. In summary, its curators follow a well-trodden

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

9

path signposted by academic art practice and the development of German modernism, understood as something ‘new’. This book, however, deliberately works out of a body of images that has received little attention, if any, in the discipline of art history. It is concerned with continuities in what is today a neglected field of visual production on the periphery of the art historical centre ground, characterized, in part, by its preoccupation with European modernism and its legacies. This centre ground, which privileges alterity, opposition, rupture and alienation/trauma, is not well placed to provide a platform for thinking rigorously about how armed conflict was inflected in ‘mainstream’, broadly conservative, visual culture. One of the great academic ironies of the legacy of the values of the so-called ‘new art history’ of the 1980s is that it privileges dissent without ever really taking seriously what it was that was being dissented from. The signal virtue of this book is that, consequently, it foregrounds material that has not been subject to academic inquiry for a very long time – if ever. The inclusion of art works by Adolph Menzel and Anton von Werner in both the exhibition and this project nevertheless serve as a bridge, demonstrating that there remains a lot more research to be undertaken in this field, not least in the context of the putative ‘spirit of art’ in the new nation, than dominant art historical preoccupations presently allow for.5 All of the material addressed here relates to events that had occurred within the lifetime of the majority of the people who made and originally consumed it; much of it was made in the context of commemorative projects. This project therefore also intersects with broader disciplinary interests in the field of war memory and commemorative practices, rooted in the wellspring of the ‘memory boom’ in the 1980s (Fussell 1975; Lowenthal 1985; Connerton 1989; Mosse 1990 and 1998; Winter 2000 and 2006; Boym 2002; Ricoeur 2006). The historiography in this field has grown exponentially over the past 30 years. Ashplant, Dawson and Roper observe that, in 2004 at least, an adequate explanation for this phenomenon had yet to be given (2004: 3). The contested quality of memory formation and commemoration, its dynamism and multivalent complexion, all of which are manifest in the works addressed here, perhaps provides part of the answer. Alon Confino writes that memory as a field of research ‘does not offer any true additional explanatory power. Only when linked to historical questions and problems can it be illuminating’ (1997: 1388). This book, which conflates questions of military experience, legitimacy and identity in the processes of justificatory post-war representation, is inescapably implicated in the methodological framework of memory studies, too.

10

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

This field poses a particular challenge. The voluminous memory studies historiography threatens to overwhelm any attempt to parse it out in pursuit of productive methodological borrowings. The works cited below have been particularly influential in the development of the argument taken forward here, but are by no means exclusive. Rather, they represent the tip of an iceberg; neither space nor methodological imperative allows the luxury of deeper immersion in the memory field in a project fundamentally concerned with visual production. Michael Böss writes that ‘Commemoration has been an instrument of power throughout history’ (2014: 8). The overwhelming majority of the material addressed here, including all the illustrated books, were made as (profit making) interventions in post-war debates about how a recent military past could and should be remembered. As such, they were inescapably immersed in concerns about institutional prestige, Germany’s political and social order, the status of veterans in particular and the moral legitimacy of territorial conquest. That said, many of these illustrated works present themselves as ‘histories’ of a conflict and indeed it would be anachronistic to suggest that they were conceived of as ‘memory works’ by their makers, although today they might be regarded as such. All of the works addressed here are associated with the rise of nationalism from the end of the eighteenth century. According to Pierre Nora, traditional communities of memory were supplanted in the nineteenth century. Instead, nations constructed ‘cultural markers such as flags … monuments, national holidays, historical events … and historical figures … to represent collective memory and values associated with them’ (Böss 2014: 9). The works addressed here were implicated in a construction of social memory driven by conceptions of nationhood expressed through language and aesthetic tradition. Presented in and as ‘histories’, the images analysed here served as evidence of cultural coherence over time, suggesting a past to be emulated in the modern nation, not least because not everyone in the new German nation was compelled to accede to what was essentially a Prussian cultural construct. The fact that that social and public memories were not necessarily congruent is beyond the scope of this book, which tackles only one genre of representation, understood as affirming positive putative experience in patriotic accounts of German battlefield ascendancy. Böss writes that ‘Historians are trained to be sceptical of memory as evidence of the past, whereas students of memory do not question subjective memories, but regard them as valid evidence of personal experience, and of the ways in which societies “remember”’. The subjectivities attending image production in particular, especially those depicting idealized forms of behaviour at war,

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

11

suggest that they had everything to do with how reader-viewers were induced to ‘remember’ past events in order to understand themselves, their communities and German society at large. In the absence of evidence, reception is a problematic in this respect. However these visual resources are here regarded as ‘memory works’ to the extent that this analysis does not question the validity of memories as such, but analyses these images in order to suggest how image makers and users related to ‘their’ past. To paraphrase Böss, historians of visual culture ‘may use [images] to [explore] how … events were [represented to] ordinary people and reflected in the lives and mentalities of a given age’ (2014: 8). Social memory has been commonly conceptualized as constituting three approaches: ‘collective’, or group, after Maurice Halbwachs (1992); ‘official’, comprising dominant, shared narratives constructed by elites and disseminated top-down; and bottom-up ‘popular’, with an emphasis on resistance, typically comprising counter-memories to the ‘official’ approach (Karner and Mertens 2013). This book is only concerned with broadly patriotic visual accounts of recent armed conflicts. It does not attempt to survey the wider field, partly because ‘mainstream’ art historians have dealt exhaustively with the unpatriotic, the oppositional and the ‘modern’. But also because, ironically, after the defeat in November 1918, conservative supporters of the now defunct Wilhelmine state were likely to regard themselves as a social group ‘suffering injustice, injury or trauma that originates in war [and became] increasingly prepared to demand public recognition of their experience, testimony and current status as ‘victims’ and survivors’ (Ashplant, Dawson and Roper 2004: 3). The triumphalism and moral certainty inflecting the dominant official and popular memory of the wars of unification after 1871 now gave way to acute insecurity as it became apparent that so many political and social certainties were in danger of being permanently displaced: ‘the world, it seemed, had been turned upside down’ (Bessel 1993: 222). Every armed conflict in the subject period proved more or less controversial in German society after the fact. The illustrated books and art works presented here were all of them overtly political in their intent in two related respects. First, whether they celebrated German victory in 1871 or negotiated the shame of defeat in 1918, they articulate unambiguously a keen sense of what was to be remembered – and cherished – about German conduct on operations, in order to uphold putative notions of honour and cohesion fundamental to the integrity of the German state. Secondly, their producers sought to bolster the institutional prestige of the German armed forces with close reference to exemplary personal conduct.

12

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

In this context, Chris Lorenz usefully identifies a typography of latenineteenth-century national histories pertinent to the illustrated material addressed here, which challenges the applicability of the reductive social memory categories outlined above. Whether top-down ‘official’ or bottom-up ‘popular’, all these works typically address a unique national identity that excludes others; friend–foe relationships; battles as dominant storylines; shared social experience within the national ‘family’ experienced as a harmonious collective; and continuity with the past (Tilmans, van Vree and Winter 2010: 78–9). Perhaps this is unsurprising; these works are, after all, rooted in historical events. However categorized, all the subject works are here understood as ‘popular’ in the vernacular sense: they were calculated to appeal to a broad readership who could afford to buy them; who expected to have affirmed their broad political convictions and, where applicable, their identity as veterans. Overall, their collective rhetorical conviction lies in their visual construction of the putative memory of battlefield events performed by German men at war. Samuel Hynes, in his foundational work of particular relevance to this inquiry, has argued that what emerged after the First World War in Britain was a discourse of radical discontinuity from the past, and that this solidified into what he calls the defining ‘Myth of the War’ typified by a fall from innocence into the hell of mud, blood and futility, in which a generation was traduced by those who should have known better and were in any event incompetent. Hynes stresses that the Myth of the War was no falsification of reality, but a dominant narrative amounting to an imaginative version of what had occurred, that came, he suggests, to be regarded by many as true (1990: ix–x). All the images addressed here were channelled into accounts that were, as Hynes suggests, highly imaginative in their conception, albeit in very different political circumstances, and no less likely to be regarded as conveying wartime truths. German conservatives in early 1919 confronted a reality characterized by defeat, the imposition of radical political transformation and an urgent sense of discontinuity with the past made more acute by Communist attempts to overthrow the legitimate government by armed force. In these circumstances cultural producers seeking to mount reassuring patriotic accounts of the First World War mapped out visual and rhetorical continuities with equivalent material relating to war memory and commemoration produced in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, not least that timed to coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations in 1896. Jay Winter writes that ‘warfare in this period moved the cult of memory onto the level of mass production and consumption [after the Franco-Prussian war]

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

13

the commemorative moment was powerful’ (2006: 25). After 1918 this tendency became tumultuous: commemoration focused, he suggests, on remembering ‘the sacrifice, the suffering, the slaughter, the names of the fallen’ (Winter 2006: 26). This book challenges his emphasis on suffering and slaughter to the exclusion of other categories of remembrance which, no less subjectively constructed, appealed to the imaginations of those seeking reassurance on dominant pre-war terms: accounts of sound leadership, resolve, heroism, team working, triumph and endurance in adversity. These themes dominate the material addressed here which, for many reader-viewers, was no less likely to be regarded as conveying wartime truths. As such, this book inflects the dominant memory studies agenda, too. Developing this further, this project takes memory formation into the realm of institutional prestige (of the German army) with particular reference to the exemplary conduct of the individual soldier. Illustrated histories lie at the heart of this study, and Joep Leerssen reminds us that literature and reading constitute a ‘nodal point in the dissemination (in space) and transmission (across generations) of cultural memory [further] the literary evocation of identity is not just a matter of straightforward transgenerational perpetuation, but forms part of a complex of self/other dialectics’ (Tilmans, van Vree and Winter 2010: 235). To which this project adds the categories art, photography and the act of viewing to the mix, a necessary broadening of the field in the context of a body of works that, together, also function to reveal the presentational and rhetorical impact of technological advances in photomechanical reproduction on book illustration over the period (Beegan 2008; Biggs 1950). Working out of arguments developed by Ann Rigney, Leerssen makes a case for the power of historical fiction to conjure in the reader a state of mind he describes as ‘performative immersion and identification’. This project advances these ideas, making a case for their singular relevance in the context of illustrated popular military histories. In particular, this analysis propounds the view that such publications, and some independent art works too, ‘evoke the peculiar psychological power of narrative [and] also illustrates how that power establishes the capacity of literary [and visual] texts to influence their readership beyond the passing moment of the reading experience itself ’. In the context of influence – and evidence of influence drives the iconological methodology employed here – Leerssen suggests that the capacity of these illustrated texts to carry forward emotion-driven patriotic messages is compelling, made socially significant by the sheer accumulation of reader-viewers, of ideas, and of visual tropes over time: a cultural phenomenon constitutive of continuity (Tilmans,

14

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

van Vree and Winter 2010: 237). In this context, although Pierre Nora has argued for a correlation between the rise of memory as a social phenomenon and the fall of national histories (1989: 8–9) this inquiry suggests that the two categories cannot easily be distinguished, still less held apart. Perhaps the most interesting – and unanswerable – question here relates to the suspension of disbelief that fiction may demand. Leerssen suggests that reading historical fiction can cause powerful after-effects and can even amount to a significant life-changing experience. If so, then what were the implications for illustrated popular military histories, rooted more firmly in claims to truth telling, and which served not only to treat with the past, but also to offer evidence of exemplary behaviour to be emulated, perhaps by reader-viewers themselves, in the future. This project is therefore also tangential to the study of literature, where it also gives onto the notion of performativity. Illustrated popular histories occupy an anomalous, sometimes unstable, space between a positivist reading of German military doctrine, warfighting ethos and the ‘hard facts’ of campaigning, constituting historical accounts in the ‘epic’ mode on the one hand, and a romantic, performative mode of writing/drawing/painting and photograph captioning, described in structuralist terms by Hyden White as ‘a drama of self-identification symbolised by the hero’s transcendence of the world of experience, his victory over it’ that together conjoin history and remembrance – but which emphatically privilege the martial virtues of idealized battlefield behaviour understood as performance: physical, intellectual and, especially, psychological (1975: 8). Graham Dawson’s work on the construction of the image of the soldier hero engages directly with the notion of campaigning being synonymous with an adventurous quest. Reader-viewers of illustrated popular histories encountered images of German soldiers on operations conducting tasks in circumstances that tested ‘human will and … capabilities against the vicissitudes of a world that remains deeply uncertain’ (Dawson 2005: 53). The rhetorical power of the visual component of these works transports the reader-viewer into an imagined world related to, but distinct from, the accompanying historical account of the circumstances in which they occurred. They generate a maximum of excitement without overwhelming the viewer with a sense of danger or insecurity: Narrative pleasure derives from the contrast between the conserving familiarity of well established generic conventions [visual tropes] made stable through endless repetition and offering the comfort of a known [viewing] experience, and the stimulating and unsettling material that is the very stuff of formula stories, carrying an intense charge of interest and excitement. (Dawson 2005: 54)

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

15

Emplotted as romantic adventure in structuralist terms, illustrated popular histories functioned, after Dawson, ‘to embody the imaginative charge of wish-fulfilling idealization’ (2005: 54; White 1975; Frye 1957). This project therefore also speaks directly to the theory of performativity, as expounded by Judith Butler. Butler is interested in the performance of gender identity, and her exposition of the concept of performativity transfers readily into this debate, as an extract from her work, substituting the word ‘martial’ for ‘gender’, demonstrates: [Martial] reality is performative, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed. It seems fair to say that certain kinds of acts are usually interpreted as expressive of a [martial] core or identity, and that these acts either conform to an expected [martial] identity or contest that expectation in some way.’ Butler contests the notion that acts and gestures are merely symptomatic of an underlying condition – in her case the givenness of primary sexual characteristics defined reductively and in absolute terms as either male or female (1990: 278–9, quoted in Loxley 2007: 118). In equivalent terms, this inquiry checks any inclination to consider that the makers and reader-viewers of the material addressed here considered that the ‘German way’ of war and the putative will to battle seemingly evinced by German men was in some way innate, a condition waiting for the right moment to reveal itself; veterans of all the wars addressed here were only too well aware that individuals responded to privation, hardship, danger and the presence of death in a myriad of ways, many of them far from ideal in the act; and that military units, under different leaders and in different times and places, performed more, or less, well. Nor was the German population ignorant of the impact of modern firepower that had shaped the character of combat since the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, in the context of mobilization in 1914 Alex Watson has challenged the prevailing notion that ‘volunteers were predominantly aggressive, upper-middle-class schoolchildren or students who entered war jubilantly with unrealistic expectations of heroism and adventure’ (2005: 47). To take this reductive approach is to miss the anthropological point made manifest in Butler’s critical theory. The theory of performativity, lightly sketched in this book, suggests how the works addressed here spoke not to a lived reality, but to the expectation, emplotted in the romantic mode, that past performance will be remembered in a manner transcending the critique mounted by alternative accounts, and in an exemplary manner, thereby shoring up the prestige of national institutions and the integrity of individuals, with one eye to the past and the other to the future: ‘If [martial] attributes, however, are

16

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

not expressive but performative, then these attributes effectively constitute the identity they are said to express or reveal’ (Butler 1990: 278–9, quoted in Loxley 2007: 118). Overall, the makers of the illustrated popular histories at the heart of this inquiry staked a claim to what was worth remembering about recent wartime experience. The material they produced was fundamentally performative in both its inception and consumption. Jay Winter suggests that ‘the performative act of remembrance is an essential way in which collective identities are formed and reiterated’ (Tilmans, van Vree and Winter 2010: 15). None of this material can be regarded as culturally peripheral or politically inconsequential. Researching, writing, drawing, photomechanically reproducing, publishing and, finally, reading/viewing the published, or exhibited, material addressed here can all be considered performative acts of remembrance, fundamental to the formation of war memory, albeit in very different, and always contested, fields, after both the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War. Turning to narrative structure, the concept of narrative has been fundamental to the field of memory studies since its inception. Alistair Thomson has shown how Australian veterans of the First World War came to remember their military past with close reference to the narrative accounts that came to underpin the public legend, or myth, of Australia’s war effort (1993: 10). Böss argues that ‘narrative templates are … reproduced through institutional, cultural, and psychological means. They emerge from cultural tools provided by a sociocultural context.’ Significantly in this context, he suggests, noting the subjectivities this implies, that this raises questions concerning the way collectives sustain cultural and cognitive continuity (Böss 2014: 11). James Wertsch develops these ideas, working out of the parallel observation that ‘narrative sometimes seems to take on as many guises as there are disciplines looking at it’ (Böss 2014: 81). Wertsch’s methodological approach harmonizes neatly with this book’s preoccupations. He too defines narrative loosely, situating his inquiry in collective acts of national remembrance. Wertsch poses two core questions also addressed here. First, is it possible to identify the existence of an underlying code that shapes what he calls, after Eviatar Zerubavel, a ‘mnemonic community’? Secondly, what is the source of the emotional and cognitive power that fuels these narrative templates?’ (Böss 2014: 12). This book provides an upfront answer to both questions: an underlying code did exist; it was carried by a mnemonic community understood, narrowly, as comprising anyone who had undertaken military service in Germany since 1871, extending even to the entire German nation in a culture which valorized martial values and propounded a culture of nationhood predicated on winning violent armed conflicts. Further,

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

17

the source of the emotional and cognitive power fuelling the narrative templates encountered here was nothing less than military doctrine itself, the wellspring of ‘how we fight’ that shaped and sustained both the training and operational experience. Military doctrine and its implementation informed the cultural tool that is narrative, which, in turn, shaped how past military experience was remembered by the mnemonic community that was Germany. In the case of national war memory, the salient narratological characteristics of the many illustrated popular histories published over the period ensured, after Wertsch, that they served as ‘co-authors’ to those who employ them to create accounts of past wartime experience. Put differently, in art historical terms, the underlying code comprised a series of enduring visual tropes that conformed (or not) to established expectations as to what images should depict, how that subject matter should be represented and what meanings inhered in them. In summary, reader-viewers, functioning as active agents, used narrative tools to make sense of the past, and that these tools offered avenues and constraints which shaped how this was achieved. Wertsch also usefully points to a typology of narratives after Paul Ricoeur (1984–6). The material presented here overwhelmingly confirms to the notion of a closed narrative presenting ‘only their own, uncontested perspective as legitimate’. Moreover, it also generally conforms to the characteristics of ‘specific narratives’, typical of national narratives: ‘specific in terms of setting, time, agents, and aspects of particular events’. The illustrated histories and the standalone art works addressed typically organize information in two dimensions: horizontal, securing temporal order; and vertical, in which a plot combines information into a coherent whole. Together, they ‘involve the sort of conscious reflection that goes into composing texts for public presentation’ (Wertsch, in Böss 2014: 20 and 25). This analysis does not seek to make a claim for the overwhelming dominance of one or other narrative forms at any particular time or place. Benjamin Ziemann, for example, argues, after Alan Kramer, that ‘Throughout the Weimar Republic, right-wing authors and associations on the one hand, and Social Democrats on the other, were locked into an intense and often bitter dispute over public representations of the war experience. For this reason, and owing to the substantial range of and presence of pro-republican recollections of the Great War, there was ‘no dominant memory of the war in Germany’ (2013: 3–4). Rather, this book calls to attention the existence of a loose but strongly coded narrative template providing evidence of what can be understood as a ‘mnemonic community’; that its origins predated unification; and that it

18

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

endured at least until 1933. As such, it situates visual production in this field within what François Hartog calls a ‘regime of historicity … linking together past, present and future, or of mixing the three categories and recognising that one will always be dominant, allowing individuals or groups to situate themselves and develop in time, that is, the forms taken by their historical condition’ (2015: xv.) Finally, some account must be made of the interdisciplinary intersections attending the relationship between the representation of embodied performance during armed conflict and the situating of historical events in a ‘hallowed’ landscape defined as quintessentially German by right of conquest or sustained tenure. Fundamental to this is the notion of a haunting presence, explored by Heonik Kwon in an ethnography of mourning and memorialization in the context of modern Vietnam. Kwon addresses the cultural specificity of the role of the body in mourning revealed through the ‘different value placed on “closure” as opposed to a sustained relationship with the dead through ghosts and haunting’ (2008: 13). The notion of haunting surfaces here too, in the context of representations of graves as metonyms for soldiers’ corpses occupying conquered territory, their presence testifying to an ‘unquiet closure’, itself an enduring concept today, as suggested by Brian Bond’s address to The Unquiet Western Front (2002). In this context, Bruce Scates’s inquiry into what he calls the manufacturing of Australian memory at Gallipoli after 1918 is similarly productive. Scates draws attention to the post-war appropriation of the Gallipoli landscape by enforced legal tenure, the planting of non-native (Australian) plant species, and the scattered distribution of war graves, all of which had the effect of making a ‘landscape strangely familiar’, via an aesthetic that triggered powerful affective responses in those who visited or looked at photographs associated with battlefield pilgrimages to Gallipoli (2009: 59). Layla Renshaw, has similarly charted changing attitudes towards individual identity, death and memorialization in the context of the Spanish Civil War. Her work throws into relief the stark contrast presented by unchanging German attitudes to the war dead in the decades after unification: warriors’ graves in the landscape signified selfless commitment, furnished material evidence of national unity and their enduring presence upheld the right to tenure (2011). Such concerns intersect with the materiality of sovereignty in the context of the ‘anthropology of space and place’, figured by Yael Navaro-Yashin, for example, as ‘make-believe space’ in the context of the Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus after partition. His address is not so much to maps themselves, but ‘the work (the practices) that went into their making’, a process designed

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

19

to overwrite evidence of ownership provided by the 1911 Department of Land Surveys documentation showing the attribution of title deeds and extending to the naming of places (2012: 37; Weizman 2007). Eric Hirsch conceptualizes landscape, after Tim Ingold, as ‘a “cultural process” rooted in the practices of everyday social life on a landscape in a fashion that is culturally contextualised and differentiated’. Navaro-Yashin argues, however, that anthropological re-framings of landscape generate tension with ‘humancentred (humanist) Western approaches to space and place that privilege the study of memory, discourse, the imagination, and representations’ (2012: 41). He cites Kevin Hetherington’s approach to space and place, which proposes that ‘place … is mobilised through the placing of things in complex relation to one another and the agency-power effects that are performed by those arrangements’ (Navaro-Yashin 2012: 42). The representations of landscape encountered here, including maps, diagrams and terrain sketches are calculated specifically to provoke memory work via appeals to an imagination facilitated by accompanying textual narratives. All these works emphasize human agency, in pursuit of operational aims enabled by the putative will to battle of the German soldier. Scates’s address to the politics of landscape at Gallipoli in the context of photograph finds its direct equivalence in German artistic representations of the former battlefields of the Franco-Prussian War, reproduced in illustrated histories and commemorative maps: ‘Photographs offer insight into the emotional world of pilgrimage; they also suggest how sites like Gallipoli, accessible to the few who could afford to travel, could also be popularized for the many. [Photographs enabled] ‘readers to imagine not just a loved one’s grave but also the landscape that claimed him’ (Bruce Scates’s essay, ‘Manufacturing memory at Gallipoli’, in Keren and Herwig 2009: 60). All these interdisciplinary intersections inform, and are infirmed by, this iconological address to continuities in ‘popular’ visual production over the subject period.

The history of art and its disciplinary conceits These wider disciplinary concerns contrast sharply with the self-imposed constraints that frequently accompany art historical sensibilities. Many (art) historians still refuse to deal with the complex environment that constitutes war, militarism and its representation. Alex Roland writes:

20

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933 Among the distinguishing characteristics of [historians] is an aversion in scholarly circles to things military. … Many scholars simply find war and its associated activities distasteful. Comparable distaste has not stopped historians of medicine from studying epidemic diseases, nor has it stopped historians of science from studying eugenics or historians of technology from studying sewers. But it does seem to deter many scholars from studying war or things military. … Much of the literature on technology and war succeeds in the academy by presenting a decidedly antimilitary tone or interpretation. Indeed, part of its success may be derived from resonance with the antimilitary sentiment within the academy. (Roland 1995: S84–5)

The limitations implied by this critique of the self-imposed boundaries of academic discourse are developed by Roger Woods, who cautions against research that shies away from engagement with ideas and ideology. Not necessarily because, as Woods would have it, ‘they are seen as surface phenomena which are unlikely to produce as much information about motives and purpose as a consideration of circumstantial evidence’ (Woods 1996: 5), but because the content is deemed unpalatable. Many of the images discussed here fall into the unfashionable, if not necessarily the unpalatable, category today, yet are significant because they are suggestive of ever-present concerns about how the projection of state power by military means is represented to domestic audiences. Robert Kunath’s essay on German First World War official war artist Ludwig Dettman, cited in Chapter 7, provides a pertinent example. Dettman, a founder member of the Berlin Secession in 1898, had gone on to reject artistic modernism. In 1914, when he was the director of the Royal Academy in Königsberg, Dettman secured a position as an official war artist. Public exhibitions of his work from 1915 caused him to be regarded at the time as the quintessential realist war artist who ‘succeeded with unprecedented power and authenticity in depicting the reality of war’ (Barnstone and Haakenson 2012: 66). Kunath argues that despite his historical significance, Dettman’s art has been neglected precisely because it seemingly adopts a pro-war, nationistic stance, contrary to the modernist myth of a war only to be ‘correctly’ understood in the context of mud, blood and futility: Modern commentators ‘know’ that Dettman’s art cannot be authentic, and that viewers who responded to it were the more deceived. But it is worthwhile to look at Dettman’s art with a keener sense of the historical context, and thus begin the process of rescuing those viewers, and Ludwig Dettman, from the enormous condescension of modernity. (Barnstone and Haakenson 2013: 78)

The long historical view adopted here is calculated to check the condescension so clearly exposed by Kunath. Woods again provides a useful perspective, noting

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

21

that ‘there is a tendency for modern commentators to indulge in a snapshot approach to … sources on the First World War, to home in on individual statements, on fragments of text’. The problem with this, he argues, is that the texts are stripped of their nuance and presented as unambiguous statements. The outcome is a handy version of the Mainstream Revolutionary view of the First World War. … It has been suggested that books on the First World War written in the Weimar years fall into one of two categories: either they show it as a heroic event or as a senseless torture. In nationalist writings on the war it is a test of manhood and heroism, in pacifist writings the collapse of humanity. (Woods 1996: 7–8)

The challenge taken up here is to reject this polarizing approach and explore the intervening terrain. An equivalent tendency towards a handy version of appraising the practice of military art is discernible in the discipline of history of art today. ‘War art’ is typically positioned in one of the two categories Woods refers to: as affirming of martial values and operational success, in which case it is likely to be regarded as uninteresting (unpalatable); or as estimable because it points up the horror and futility of war. Consider, for example, Dora Apel’s analysis of popular photographic histories published in Weimar Germany, which she contrasts with Ernst Friedrich’s 1924 pacifist photobook War Against War! Apel declares that by 1925, ‘war imagery shifted dramatically away from antiwar statements in graphic art and painting toward heroic imagery in hugely popular patriotic photography albums’ (Apel 1999: 49). There was undoubtedly a polarity at play at the time, encouraged by Friedrich’s visual strategy, which concentrated on the image of the soldier cast as a victim of the war juxtaposed with images of the apparently complacent leaders who directed it. Apel advances the view that essentially conservative cultural producers counter-attacked by constructing ‘generalised heroic narratives … avoiding emotional engagement with the soldier’. She argues that this strategy ‘achieved visual and cultural dominance through its ability to trump the liberal humanist discourse of universal brotherhood … with a strongly nationalist one’. Her argument is persuasive: Friedrich’s humanist stance is indeed weak because it lacks historical specificity. But Apel doesn’t fully establish why what she describes as ‘a heroic German particularity’ articulated in popular accounts proved so appealing in the light of what had occurred at the Front between 1914 and 1918. Above all, she does not tackle the cultural hinterland providing the foundation on which these works were produced and consumed (Apel 1999: 50).

22

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

Falling back on Apel’s choice of quotes from illustrated histories, on what terms are we to understand Franz Schauwecker’s derision of the pacifist ‘exclusion of the personal and the spiritual’; what motivates Schauwecker to consider that there was more to the experience of war than ‘foolish slaughter’; why does Jünger suggest that ‘appealing only to our revulsion to suffering would be a betrayal of our moral essence, as would a beautification of such a serious matter as that which was embodied by this war’; why did these authors judge that these opinions might appeal to their intended reader-viewers (Apel 1999: 78–9). On Woods’ terms, Apel deploys the snapshot reductively to suggest a polarity between accounts of death and mutilation, and those of courage and self-sacrifice. Apel concludes that the power of nationalist narratives lay in their construction of a positive national identity built around the image of the selfsacrificing heroic warrior type. But an unmediated appeal to heroic self-sacrifice for the nation is, in principle, no more compelling than Friedrich’s address to suffering humanity. Her conclusion is perhaps only part of the answer to her question. One aspect of Apel’s commentary on the subjectivity of photography can usefully be read across to her main argument in order to broaden the terms of this debate: ‘What makes the production of a subject through representation meaningful are the practices and institutions through which the photograph can exercise an effect’ (Apel 1999: 52). The warfighting doctrine of the German army, experienced by generations of men called to military service before and after 1870, including over eleven million veterans of the Great War, shaped how accounts of combat might be produced and received. John Pocock tells us that ‘language is part of the social structure, and not epiphenomenal to it, and … we are studying an aspect of social reality when we study the ways in which it appeared real to the persons to whom it was more real than to anyone else’ (Apel 1999: 52). The values attached to the visual rhetoric of military activity were deeply ingrained in German society. In the years between 1871 and 1933 the language of combat and its basis in military doctrine spoke of a compelling reality to veterans, volunteers, conscripts and reservists alike. An enduring tenet of German military thinking, rehearsed repeatedly during training, practised in war and upheld as exemplary in historical accounts of combat was the conviction that engagements are won by soldiers committed to realizing their commanders’ aims through aggressive offensive action: the moral superiority of the German soldier who stuck to his task, come what may, was promoted as a campaign-winning factor of the first order, and therefore fundamental to the

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

23

integrity of the nation. Whether or not exhortations were cloaked in the rhetoric of nationalism or military necessity, Germans were inculcated in the belief that what epitomized the values of the German soldier was this manifest will to battle. The core argument of this book is that positive, popular, fundamentally conservative illustrated accounts of conflict between 1871 and 1933 clung to this outlook, continuously reinterpreting what it might imply about Germany and its soldiers in order to secure meanings commensurate with contemporary political circumstances. The notion of reinterpretation is significant. Dirk Bönker writes that the historiographical construct of an authoritarian German militarism set against political modernity and civil society at large has been overturned in favour of the view that the German experience of armed conflict and of militarism was one that shared in common with broader European and transatlantic war cultures. Bönker’s argument finds its expression in this analysis when he writes of the importance of ‘technocratic reasoning and industrialized warfare in understanding the German military’ (Torp and Müller 2011: 227).

Being German: The will to battle Methodologically, the book addresses images of conflict whose meanings were shaped by values learned, promoted and reinforced during recurring periods of conscripted military service, values that suffused German society at large. Jonathan Crary defines an ‘observer’ as one who observes rules, codes and practices; ‘one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations’ (Crary 1990: 3). The contemporary German reader-viewer was invested in a system of conventions whose meanings, it is argued, were coincident with the core values of Germany military culture. This account will employ military concepts and a related specialist vocabulary that may appear as novel to a reader unfamiliar with German military doctrine as it is surely banal for the military historian; this is, after all, a history of visual culture, not of German militarism as such, or of armed conflict itself. The concepts set out below provided access to familiar ideas and shared experiences for reader-viewers throughout the period. Carl von Clausewitz’s 1832 On War, which proposes a formal system of thought, or doctrine, for the projection of state power sets out two frequently rehearsed concepts: the ‘friction’ and the ‘fog’ of war. Michael Howard comments that Clausewitz’s posthumously published work was greeted with great respect, not least because Clausewitz belonged to the ‘great generation of Prussian

24

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

military reformers, a pupil of Scharnhorst and a close colleague of Gneisenau. … Even those who had not read him knew that his teachings embodied that freedom of thinking, that emphasis on the creative action of the individual and disdain for formalism which had lain at the root of Scharnhorst’s reforms of the Prussian Army’ (Clausewitz 1989: 27). Addressing what he called ‘friction’, Clausewitz writes: If one has never personally experienced war, one cannot understand in what the difficulties … really consist. … Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war. … Countless minor incidents – the kind you can never really foresee – combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls short of the intended goal. Iron will-power can overcome this friction; it pulverises every obstacle, but of course it wears down the machine as well. … The proud spirit’s firm will dominates the art of war as an obelisk dominates the town square on which all roads merge. (Clausewitz 1989: 119)

In relation to ‘fog’: If we pursue the demands that war makes on those who practice it, we come to the region dominated by the powers of intellect. War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and discriminating judgement is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth. (Clausewitz 1989: 101).

Clausewitz sets up a phenomenology of campaigning experience in order to suggest that the impact of fog and friction can be mitigated by moral qualities: the application of skilled intelligence and ‘firm will’. The effective exercise of command and the maintenance of the will to battle in combat consequently comprise dominant strands in the German rhetoric of performing excellence at war, representations of which are the salient objects of this inquiry. Helmut von Moltke, Prussia’s chief of the General Staff and architect of the successful wars against Austria in 1866 and France in 1870–1, was a disciple of Clausewitz. His 1859–70 Thoughts on Command and the 1869 Instructions for Large Unit Commanders, on the conduct of battle, were built on a Clausewitzian foundation. Howard notes,: Moltke was to cite On War … as one of the truly seminal works which had moulded his own thinking. … Many of the ideas we now think of as peculiarly Clausewitzian and to which Moltke was so signally to give effect in his

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

25

campaigns – the annihilation of the enemy’s main force, the concentration of effort at the decisive point, the overriding importance of moral factors, the need for self-reliance in the commander and flexibility in tactical method – were commonplaces among young Prussian officers who had shared the Napoleonic experience. … Moltke’s thinking should perhaps be seen rather as reinforcing and demonstrating Clausewitz’s ideas than as simply deriving from them. (Clausewitz 1989: 30)

In this present context Molke’s relevance is best exemplified by what Howard considers ‘his best reflection [of Clausewitz] of all: “In war it is often less important what one does than how one does it”’ (Clausewitz 1989: 30). Military context relating to the conduct of the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War and its aftermath is adequately provided here by authoritative secondary sources offering an overview of events and of contemporary military tactics. In some cases it will be seen that images stand so close to a theoretical point that they appear to exemplify it, as is frequently the case in Wilhelmine art practice on the subject of the Franco-Prussian War. In others, the relationship is tangential, less obviously related to the work’s related meanings. Elsewhere, artists, authors and editors will be seen to have deliberately avoided making close contextual points in order to advance more open arguments – as Jünger does – or to concentrate on a particular historical phenomenon, such as Menzel’s address to Frederick the Great’s leadership style. In every case, however, the rhetoric of martial values, together with some understanding of the military–historical context, is here perceived to be fundamental to meaning production. Influenced by Clausewitzian thinking, the German army continuously developed a doctrine calculated to maximize its own fighting power while minimizing that of its opponents. To the extent that images of conflict were implicated in evolving battlefield tactics, implications for meaning production are here addressed by considering military functionality within three interrelated fields which, after Clausewitz, have more recently come to be understood as comprising the ‘components of fighting power’: the moral, the physical and the conceptual. The moral component comprises the motivation to fight, manifested in offensive spirit and determination to achieve the aim. Clausewitz writes: The moral elements are among the most important in war. They constitute the spirit that permeates war as a whole, and at an early stage they establish a close affinity with the will that moves and leads the whole mass of force, practically merging with it, since the will is itself a moral quality. Unfortunately, they will not yield to academic wisdom. They cannot be classified or counted. They have to be seen or felt. (Clausewitz 1989: 184)

26

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

George Mosse has examined how ‘the spirit that permeates war’ was conceived of in German society before and after 1918, noting the impact of the wars of liberation and exploring the wider cultural context in which the military rhetoric of morale and conviction found its moral basis. He writes: Freedom in the past had often meant individual freedom, and sometimes in a collectivity, but violence and freedom had never been so closely linked. … Hegel wrote in 1807 (after Prussia’s recent defeat by Napoleon) that men assert their freedom through battle. War, he continued, recalled man’s consciousness to its very being, stripped of any exterior influences, even of life itself. (Mosse 1990: 27)

The rhetoric of regeneration after the Napoleonic Wars advanced an ideal of manliness grounded in the virtues of comradeship and a search for meaning in life. In particular, ‘the obvious fact that soldiers were men was emphasised in order to project a moral posture exemplifying courage, strength, hardness, control over the passions, and the ability to protect the moral fabric of society by living a so-called manly life’ (Mosse 1990: 27). Throughout the nineteenth century the putative moral qualities of the Prusso-German soldier were understood to be vital to the well-being of army and nation. The conceptual component of fighting power is here understood as located in a body of doctrine, the output of the intellectual effort towards establishing how an army should, in principle, apply its combat power (how it fights), from the lowest (tactical) level, through the (operational) direction of an entire campaign, to (strategic) considerations at the political–military interface. Representations of ‘how we fight’, a manifestation of the conceptual component, at all three levels, are found in all the following chapters, whenever operational activity is the subject of art or photography. Recognizing this component for what it comprises is significant because it draws together subject matter as diverse as generals in a conference, soldiers advancing in formation over a ploughed field, and even a diagram specifying the design of a field fortification. From generals in their headquarters, to teams of soldiers on the front line, soldiers are depicted conducting wartime tasks in images that coalesce under the umbrella of a doctrinally coherent approach to campaigning. In each case, whatever the specific subject matter, such images proclaim commitment to the unified nation through the manifest commitment to a doctrinally coherent execution of the task in hand, even in the most challenging intellectual or physical circumstances. In post-war images of command during the Franco-Prussian War, for example, any latent tendency to draw a critical distinction between ‘us’ (subjects of the new German state) and ‘them’ (its Prussian leaders), is challenged by the

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

27

sheer volume of images depicting men from every corner of federal Germany participating in collective action according to shared doctrinal norms, carried to a victorious conclusion.6 The same rhetorical strategy is observable in the context of the First World War after the Armistice. Here too, in the context of very different battlefield conditions, soldiers are depicted performing their roles in a doctrinally coherent manner, understood as a manifestation of an indomitable will to battle, enacted according to German doctrinal norms in the teeth of a technologically more powerful and materially well-endowed enemy. The images encountered here are also implicated in the physical component of fighting power, understood as the means to fight, comprising: people, equipment, collective performance, readiness and sustainability. Clausewitz writes: Today armies are so much alike in weapons, training, and equipment that there is little difference in such matters between the best and the worst of them. Education may still make a considerable difference between technical corps, but what it usually comes down to is that one side invents improvements and first puts them into use, and the other side promptly copies them. (Clausewitz 1989: 282)

The impact of technological development on battlefield experience is a prominent theme frequently encountered in the works addressed here. On the one hand, German technological superiority is lauded as a battle-winning phenomenon, characteristic of ascendant German power and industrial age modernity. On the other, instances of technological inferiority offer German soldiers the opportunity to demonstrate what is deemed more important – their moral superiority. While the book is invested in representations of battlefield technology, it also acknowledges that the concept of total mobilization, widely associated with Jünger, also engaged with the physical component in the wider sense, placing particular emphasis on collective coherence and material sustainability, since their lack was widely perceived to be a root cause of defeat in 1918. Every art work or photograph in which German soldiers are depicted using rifles, crewing field guns or repelling enemy tanks is open to meanings inflected by the representation of technological opportunities and constraints, whether it be relative efficacy, the relationship between man and machine, or contribution to battlefield outcomes. It is here that a long view of this field of cultural production reveals the most obvious discontinuities. The Life of Frederick scarcely draws the reader’s attention to technology at all: a level playing field is implied, unconsciously echoing Clausewitz’s point, and reflecting the prevailing technological climate. In contrast, histories of the Franco-Prussian War are

28

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

unwitting histories of the Industrial Revolution. Significant technological imbalances between protagonists reflect the gathering pace of a quest for an increasingly transient technological advantage in military affairs. The physical component is accorded even greater emphasis in accounts of the First World War. In mainstream accounts of the war of material (Materialschlacht) that evolved on the Western Front after 1916, the image of the British tank is routinely deployed to exemplify the notion that the German army had been overwhelmed by technologically endowed masses, rather than defeated ‘fairly’ – on morally equivalent terms. Jünger’s vision of a disciplined social order configured to exploit the transformative potential of the machine in both peace and war emerged out of this dynamic. Yet Jünger in particular never accords primacy to technology; he does not appeal to the prospect of wonder weapons, but argues for a reordering of the relationship between the physical and moral components of fighting power in the context of the Machine Age. His selection of photographs of mechanized military capabilities reproduced in The Transformed World generate powerful thematic continuities with those representing interactions between man and machine in earlier histories of the Franco-Prussian War, and are understood here as programmatic attempts at restructuring the conceptual component of military power, conceived of as the ‘German way’. The notion of a German way of war dominated by an ineluctable will to battle is upheld in multiple visual accounts in which the conceptual and physical components of fighting power remain subordinate to the moral. The former categories merely provide contexts in which German minds and bodies are depicted in action. Were it otherwise, patriotic histories would contain annotated campaign maps, technical drawings of equipment and charts depicting the allocation of German combat units to fighting formations. But, as the exceptions discussed here demonstrate, they rarely do. Such material is the stuff of dispassionate official histories written by academic historians for use by professional soldiers. This category of military history lies beyond the scope of this book, which is not to say that official histories downplay the moral component, only that the conceptual and physical loom larger in dispassionate accounts concerned with the planning of operations and their subsequent execution. In the context of popular histories in particular, however, representations of will are often explicitly linked to underlying physical and conceptual components, but moral qualities are always privileged as a metaphysical, German, essence fundamental to performing excellence. Finally, while official histories are typically dispassionate in tone, less academic accounts mount a strong appeal to the emotions of the viewer.

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

29

Nietzschean will Any account of visual representations of the will to battle during this period in Germany must acknowledge the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche’s assertion that deepest reality lies in the hidden but eternal will to power that animates all things. In The Worker (Der Arbeiter) (1932), Jünger makes his most fully developed case for a disciplined authoritarian society, in which solder-workers sublimate their desires in order to meet the demands of the state. He argues, after Nietzsche, that Machine Age work is no less than human cosmic energy, and the harnessing of powerful technologies, the defining characteristic of the age, is to be understood as a modern manifestation of the will to global domination. According to Jünger, underlying human motivation is irrational, and is therefore best apprehended via an address to the senses, rather than through rational inquiry. Looking back in 1934, he considered that in 1914 Germany was beset by: a mixture of false romanticism and inadequate liberalism … the ruling classes’ inadequate relationship both to the masses and to profounder forces revealed itself. … Germany was incapable of convincingly taking on the [true] spirit of the age … of proposing to itself or to the world, a valid principle superior to that spirit [of civilisation]. … It is not sufficient to assure utmost devotion to the advance of men and machines – something that a fearful battle against a world demands. In this light we must struggle all the more to recognise … our elemental substance, the deep, primordial strength of the Volk. (Wolin 1991: 132–3)

Herf writes: ‘From Nietzsche to Jünger … the modernist credo was the triumph of spirit and will over reason and the subsequent fusion of this will to an aesthetic mode’ (Herf 1998: 12). Nietzsche’s celebration of the free spirit at war with bourgeois values finds its equivalent expression in representations of the will to battle, where its moral quality assumes a political character. Nietzsche asks: ‘How does it happen that the state will do a host of things that the individual would never countenance? – Through division of responsibility, of command, and of execution. Through the interposition of the virtues of obedience, duty, patriotism, and loyalty’. Manifestations of performing excellence on military operations exemplify this vision. Whether or not one was inclined to metaphysical explanations, Wilhelmine nationalists and postwar reactionary modernists were likely to agree with Nietzsche’s assertion that ‘a society that definitively and instinctively gives up war and conquest is in decline: it is ripe for democracy and the rule of shopkeepers– In most cases, to

30

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

be sure, assurances of peace are merely narcotics’ (Nietzsche 1968: 382–3). In the context of either victory or defeat, visual accounts of the will to battle were calculated to affirm belief in Germany’s claim to the status of a great European power, guaranteed by the quality of its soldiers made manifest by the army’s ethos. The consequences of this disposition to regard will as a metaphysical force to be reckoned with are twofold. Karl Heinz Bohrer suggests that Jünger’s The Worker is not to be understood as a factual account of Machine Age society. Instead, the image of the soldier-worker conforms to the conventions of a literary concept of style, a descriptive phenomenology whose symbols rehearse an irrational manifestation of the eternal will to power (Zimmerman 1990: 64). Jünger’s Gestalt is to be understood as a creative force that refutes abstract reasoning; a human manifestation of cosmic energy, of a deeper reality that animates the world and impels people to act positively in confusing and frightening circumstances – like soldiers on a battlefield. Nevin suggests a further literary association linking The Worker to the illustrated popular histories discussed here, when he argues that ‘it can be construed as a kind of adventure, a campaign through a cosmic marsh vivid with danger’ (Nevin 1997: 119). A second implication concerns the aesthetics of horror and its association with technology and invocations of the sublime. Jünger’s Battle as Inner Experience (Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis) (1922), Copse 125 (Das Wäldchen 125) (1925) and On Pain (Über den Schmerz) (1934) are predicated on his experience as an infantry officer on the Western Front. Jünger’s battlefield is typically described as hauntingly beautiful, a quality which, he argues, reveals the elemental forces at play beneath surface events, inspiring feelings of awe and wonder. Similarly, in The Worker and the associated photobooks, The Dangerous Moment and The Transformed World, manifestations of encounters with technological modernity are presented as often terrifying experiences, stimulating an emotional response aligned with the values of the newly industrialized sublime. Combat is presented on similar terms. Zimmerman argues that, for Jünger, courage in war (or perhaps the experience of adrenaline-fuelled combat) was ‘an ecstatic, erotic experience’ (Zimmerman 1990: 53). In Jünger’s works manifestations of will are held to connote an underlying Nietzschean compulsion beyond rational explanation. That said, battlefield performance is also to be understood as a manifestation of the psychological qualities that underpin the moral component of fighting power. As such, they may be subjected to philosophical inquiry, after Clausewitz. A nuanced address to Jünger’s work and its antecedents must acknowledge both irrational and more prosaic causal influences.

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

31

Jünger figures combat as an intense aesthetic experience, which he is impelled to share with reader-viewers, including veterans. Both his textual and visual accounts of battle are contrived to appeal to their emotions. Zimmerman places horror at the centre of this impulse, citing Karl Heinz Bohrer at length: In The Aesthetic of Horror … Bohrer has argued that Jünger was one of the last representatives of an aesthetic tradition initiated by Edgar Allan Poe and furthered by late nineteenth-century aesthetes, decadents and dandies such as Baudelaire, Wilde, and Beardsley. Poe’s aesthetic of the thrill of horror, which made him appear to be promoting amoral attitudes, was altered by Wilde and others to evoke a calculated sensational effect in readers bored by Victorian society. For Wilde, art revealed the dark mystery of the soul, full of secret longings and dreadful passions. … Wilde helped develop the idea of the nonordinary temporality that became so important for twentieth-century literature: the ‘epiphany’ that enables one to see through the veil of everyday life into the unfathomable, eternal, arational and amoral mystery lurking beneath. Many German writers, including Paul Tillich and Heidegger, spoke of the epiphany as the ‘moment of truth’ (Augenblick) in which the banality of everyday life was transformed by a profound shift of temporality that disclosed the situation in a radically new way. Such a radical transformation called for a ‘decision’ which could itself not be justified by existing political or social structures, since the epiphany revealed the groundlessness of those structures. (Zimmerman 1990: 53)

To talk exclusively of the ‘aesthetics of horror’ is perhaps to miss the central issue in the context of popular images of German soldiers at war. The core issue is combat, which presupposes the mastery of the self in the face of extreme danger and in which a higher truth is revealed. The will to battle manifested in images representing German performing excellence at war is always more than the means to an end or the transcendence of horror: it is a definitive national good in its own right, never expressed more clearly than in the context of the military sublime. Affective responses to images of combat were calculated to inspire awe and not-so-secret longings for a mode of wartime existence in which reawakened passions would again affirm the pre-eminence of the German soldier, the army and the state. Writing about The Worker, Nevin argues that ‘Jünger’s notion of work is nothing other than Nietzsche’s Will to Power’. Further: Jünger holds that living at the convergence of necessity and freedom begets ‘heroic realism’. It is heroic as it admits, affirms, and endures anarchy; it is realism as it embraces the elementary forces of life, not least the most violent and destructive, as complements of a cosmic whole. (Nevin 1997: 122)

32

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

Jünger’s realism is located in the experience of war conceived as an instrumental manifestation of a cosmic order, found in the realization of the commander’s aims via the ruthless execution of tactical solutions and the violent application of battlefield technologies. His own experience at war was formative, but this outlook also reflects the legacy of Wilhelmine illustrated accounts of conflict in which victory is achieved through a judicious combination of the components of fighting power, as a result of which the will to battle is channelled to decisive effect towards the teleological ‘revelation’ of a transformed political order in Europe. The notion of the free spirit at war, the celebration of the drive to action, surrender to a fate beyond one’s control and self-sacrifice in pursuit of the higher demands of the state are symptomatic of the darker aspects of deep-seated romantic tendencies in German culture. In his response to War and Warrior, a collection of essays edited by Jünger celebrating the experience of combat, Walter Benjamin quotes Florens Christian Rang, summing up how these values inspired: The demonic belief in fate, that human virtue is superfluous … this horrible world view of world-death instead of world life, whose horror is made lighter in the philosophy of German Idealism by the notion that behind the clouds there is after all a starry sky … to be able to throw [life] away when it doesn’t cost anything, in the moment of intoxication … with this short-lived sacrifice surrounded by an eternal halo. (Benjamin 1979: 124)

Benjamin famously asserted that the cultic celebration of war as a transcendent experience amounts to nothing less than ‘an uninhibited translation of the principles of l’art pour l’art to war itself ’ (Benjamin 1979: 122). Herf considers that this Nietzschean credo upheld the belief that ‘if aesthetic experience alone justifies life, morality is suspended and desire has no limits. … As aesthetic standards replaced moral norms, modernism indulged a fascination for horror and violence as a welcome relief to bourgeois boredom and decadence’ (Herf 1998: 12). Reactionary Modernists may have indulged didactically in the aesthetic of horror and violence, but more mainstream popular accounts of armed conflict site the moral component of fighting power in more prosaic contexts in which the conceptual and the physical were fundamental to meaning production, too. Jünger’s autobiographical Storm of Steel and Copse 125 are more closely aligned with the narrative style of popular histories than with the metaphysics of War and Warrior. Jünger makes much of the affective content of the experience, and these texts do indeed immerse the reader in the adrenaline-fuelled psychic state

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

33

that attends the ‘active assertion of self ’ in the face of forces beyond one’s control, but Jünger’s accounts are always located within tactical contexts (Herf 1998: 77).7 Meaning is always grounded in the interplay between the components of fighting power, just as it is in conservative illustrated histories. However, the will to battle is more clearly contextualized, more instrumentally circumscribed in these histories than it is in his modernist works. In the histories, manifestations of will occur within the context of a battle plan, of tactical norms and of technological constraints. Were it otherwise, representations of a vitalist flight into sensuous self-gratification promised scenes of chaos, ill-discipline and operational failure. As any reader-viewer who had served in the army knew, the moral imperative to conform to expected modes of behaviour in respect of one’s comrades and the unit’s mission was an article of faith, a factor that must be taken into account when considering the production and reception of visual accounts of combat now distanced from their original cultural context. Benjamin is indeed careful to qualify his point, quoted above. He notes that the contributors to War and Warrior are uninhibited in their attempts to turn war into a cultural object that moves the soul. The late-nineteenth-century representations of combat discussed here suggest that there was nothing new in Jünger’s celebration of war as a collective experience imagined as the highest manifestation of the German nation, or even as a victory of form and beauty. But in War and Warrior Jünger and his co-authors take it to another level. The tone of Wilhelmine illustrated histories of the Franco-Prussian War may be more measured, but they too demonstrate the aestheticizing tendency that Benjamin describes. Representations of soldiers rehearsing German military virtues stir the emotions of the viewer even as they embed visual accounts of historical wartime events within a wider narrative of nationhood and state power. Clifford Geertz points out that ‘ideologies transform sentiment into significance and make it socially available’ (Herf 1998: 16). Histories of the First World War written in the face of defeat and the demise of the Wilhelmine army might adopt a different response from that offered by histories of the Franco-Prussian War, but in every case culture, German history and contemporary politics converge in the act of reading and viewing.

Truth telling and the ethics of attention Military virtues and the tenets of warfighting doctrine were deeply embedded in German society. The practice of universal male conscription in peacetime and

34

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

the recent experience of armed conflict in 1870–1 and 1914–18 created social conditions in which generations of former servicemen could relate to their own experience when making meaning from images of military activity. At a superficial level this might involve judging whether a work ‘truthfully’ depicted a place or event the viewer had witnessed, or recognizably depicted a specific tactical drill, or piece of equipment. Nor was this limited to veterans, or just to men: all reader-viewers in a society that privileged militarism encountered idealized representations of positive interactions between men – and occasionally women - at war. Art historian Alois Riegl’s address to the aesthetics of reception in his 1905 The Group Portraiture of Holland (Das holländische Gruppenporträt) provides a useful way of thinking about images of positive interactions during the act of military command. Margaret Olin’s work on Riegl’s ‘ethics of attention’, in which she explores how ‘he used the literal confrontation of the beholder and the work of art across space as the basis for pictorial analysis’, is particularly pertinent (Olin 1992: 155). This book does not concern itself with the insights that Riegl’s theory might bring to a reading of seventeenth-century Dutch painting, or whether it can, in principle, be applied more broadly. Nor does it attempt to address the nature of the psychological relationship between viewer and artwork on the precise terms that Riegl does. There is, however, a loose fit between Riegl’s nearcontemporary concerns, and images on the subject of recent wars in which mentally alert individuals are depicted acting coherently in a common cause. It takes forward Riegl’s argument that there is an ethical dimension to the quality of attentiveness, and that this perceived quality may be central to the reading of an image. Attentiveness maintained during moments of great stress or danger is fundamental to the internal coherence of many of the works discussed here, because attentiveness is suggestive of the bond of mutual respect that underwrites the will to battle across the mortal and physical components of fighting power. An attentive person, Riegl suggests, defers to others during debate: attention implies both self-awareness and respect for the speaker. Self-awareness is borne of a struggle with the self in the company of others; harmony is preserved when individual characters subordinate their selfish desire. The viewer perceives an ethical moment when members of a group suppress their self-interest in pursuit of a common cause. Olin notes that in the late nineteenth century: Attention played a prominent role in … the growing science of psychology. It served Wilhelm Wundt, for example, to combat ‘mechanistic’ psychologies … that conceived of the mind as a passive slate upon which ‘ideas’ impressed themselves. Wundt singled out the concept of attention to rescue the principle

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

35

of free will. Because of attention’s apparent source in the soul of the attending person, and its exclusively internal nature … he thought it the primary volitional act. Wundt regarded attention as the primary source of self-consciousness … since the sense of self depends on the perception of an ‘other’ that is not the self. Thus self-awareness arises simultaneously with sympathy, and attention acquires an ethical dimension. (Olin 1989: 290)

Addressing the ‘purely psychological intensity’ of Rembrandt’s The Staalmeesters, Riegl describes how all the figures in the painting enjoy a convincing internal coherence because of their subordination to the spokesman. … In a way typical of Holland, this subordination is compensated in that, although the speaker’s colleagues are listening to their spokesman, they also assert their independence from his dominant position by sharing their attention … at the same time. Furthermore, they maintain their autonomy in the face of the potentially dominant role of the [other parties] by revealing a self-awareness that is, however, not of the suffering kind … but more akin to the assertive and confident [kind]. (Riegl 1999: 285)

As a result, ‘The longer we, as viewing subjects, study the image, the more acutely we become aware of the inner tensions reverberating within the minds of these … individuals. That touch of self-esteem in each of the heads shines through the general state of selfless attentiveness’ (Riegl 1999: 286-87). Riegl’s concept of internal coherence and the ethics of attention are here applied in the context of images of both decision-making and combat. Clausewitzian doctrine, advanced by Moltke, upheld the values of freedom of thought and autonomous action that had been a feature of Gerhard von Scharnhorst’s Napoleonic reforms of the Prussian Army. In the context of an army noted for its rigid discipline, the notion that subordination is held in balance by independent thought was significant. The reader-viewer perceives an ethical moment when members of a military team are depicted suppressing their self-interest towards the harmonious pursuit of a common cause. More is at stake than the immediate context presented to the viewer, however. The ethics of attention in the Scharnhorst tradition required that attention endures beyond a moment of decision during planning, or the giving of an order, to encompass an entire operation. The representation of attention takes on particular significance here, where the binding of soldiers and their leaders together over time and space signifies the highest order of integrity. The moral quality of attentiveness is revealed most clearly in visual narratives whereby collective coherence is reinforced, rather than destabilized, by independent thought and

36

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

action. In such circumstances multiple independent actions work to synergistic effect, a condition easier to conceive of than to realize in the fog and friction of war. During moments of decision in images of command and control and less obviously, but equally importantly, in images of combat, representations of an attentive bond successfully maintained in testing circumstances underwrite the moral quality of the collective will to battle.

Romanticism Taking this forward, the images addressed here are regarded as autonomous objects in which modes of thought are embedded. After Riegl, the concept of ‘art as thought’ is understood as being grounded in the inner experience of the viewing subject who brings contemporary preoccupations to bear in the search for meaning. The challenge here is to draw out some of these preoccupations. One way in which the contemporary address to performing excellence at war was rehearsed in popular accounts of recent campaigns was through the pictorial values of German romanticism, invested in the value of individual experience, and the idea of the individual pitted against an environment beyond the control of humankind. In Otto Taubert’s picturesque landscapes of Franco-Prussian War graves in Alsace in Chapter 5, for example, romantic values are benign, provoking a contemplative mode of perception, after Immanuel Kant, for whom: ‘Temperaments that possess a feeling for the sublime are drawn gradually … into high feelings of friendship, of disdain for the world, of eternity. … The sublime moves. … The sublime must always be great’ (Kant 2003: 47–8). More typical, however, is an address to what is here labelled the ‘military sublime’, in which soldiers are depicted fighting among casualties at a moment of high drama, in landscapes turbulent with the effects of gunfire, and in circumstances cloaked in the fog of war. This mode of representation pulls more strongly at the viewer’s emotions, whose response – equivalent to that prompted by a confrontation with the grandeur and violence of nature – tends to awe at the spectacle of men surrendering themselves to a fate beyond their control as they manifest their collective will to battle in the heat of what some regarded as the ultimate authentic experience. Herf observes that Jünger and the legal scholar Carl Schmitt were critical of the influence of romanticism on political activity in Germany. Schmitt’s concept of the political is based on an absolute distinction between friend and enemy. When the political ordering of the state is at stake, discussion and compromise,

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

37

categorized as characteristic of liberal politics, are inadequate to the demands of the situation; it is time to make a rational decision and to act. Political romanticism is problematic, he argues, because it entails the subjectification of life and the collapse of objective standards. The romantic ego basks in a ‘poetic’ engagement with the drama of the moment. The political romantic responds in a manner conditioned by the play of emotions, rather than by a consideration of the moral necessity to act in the world. Effective political action is necessarily unromantic because it is targeted at upholding norms of behaviour beyond the cultivation of an emotional response to events. Political romanticism is dangerous because it neutralizes the will to power: Every political activity – regardless of whether its content is merely the technique of conquest, the claim or the expansion of political power, or whether it rests on a legal or moral decision – conflicts with the essentially aesthetic nature of the romantic. A person of political or moral energy quickly perceives the substitution of the categories and knows how to distinguish the romantic interest in a thing from the thing itself. (Schmitt 1986: 158)

And: No societal order can be established on the basis of the need … to be suspended in the dynamic of an animated conversation. This is because no society can discover an order without a concept of what is normal and what is right. Conceptually, the normal is unromantic because every norm destroys the occasional licence of the romantic. (Schmitt 1986: 161)

Schmitt, like Jünger, considered that political order is ultimately maintained by manifestations of will and decision – privileged subject matter in conservative accounts of conflict, after all, the will to battle is first and foremost a manifestation of the commander’s intent, articulated as a concept of operations. Coherent action is the manifestation of a rational plan carried to its conclusion by a network of leaders dispersed in time and space, empowered to make decisions in extraordinary, unforeseeable circumstances.8 Nevertheless, many works, not least those invoking the military sublime, are calculated to convey a sense of the affective experience of war, and to provoke an equivalent response in the viewer. To underline this point, the rational and irrational typically exist in productive tension in conservative histories of conflict. Especially noteworthy in this respect are Jünger’s autobiographical accounts of warfare on the Western Front, in which he constructs narratives that explain the military dynamics of trench warfare while simultaneously exploring the emotional state of combatants: the notion of the will to battle is simultaneously invested in the rational and the irrational.9

38

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

Myth and identity formation Any inquiry into issues of identity formation demands some preliminary words on collective memory. Maurice Halbwachs was one of the first to observe that the production of memory and its relation to identity is characterized by exclusivity. Only groups, he argues, remember: collective memory is a social fact. One may belong to more than one group, but each group localizes, scrutinizes and controls the terms on which memories are recalled: What makes recent memories hang together is … that they are part of a totality of thoughts common to a group … with whom we have had a relation on the preceding day or days. To recall them it is hence sufficient that we place ourselves in the perspective of this group, that we adopt its interests and follow the slant of its reflections. … It is not because memories resemble each other that several can be called to mind at the same time. It is rather because the same group is interested in them and is able to call them to mind at the same time that they resemble each other. (Halbwachs 1992: 52)

Halbwach’s model is scarcely contentious, but his argument raises a significant issue in relation to continuity. Memories cohere because of the agency of a group – not because they resemble each other. When group dynamics shift, the terms on which an event is remembered are likely to shift accordingly. In some cases, the group and what it is disposed to remember are well established. In the case of histories of the Franco-Prussian War published around 1896, authors and artists were working in an established field of representation that spanned fine and graphic art practices in benign political circumstances. Popular histories of recent armed conflict and the values they expounded did not face a serious challenge; to the extent that the memories they proposed were policed at all, they were contained by a broad national consensus. Social geographer Rachel Woodward has explored how personal photographs may be used by former soldiers to contain memories of military experience.10 Her work addresses three key concepts in relation to memory and identity formation: the idea of images as repositories of memory; the concept of ‘memory work’; and the understanding that memory work seeks to police memories, limit them and make them safe. She writes: The metaphor of containment brings into focus two distinct attributes of the memory work that personal photographs provoke. First, photographs are containers of memory in the sense that they are repositories. The images that photographs depict, quotations from a wider context, are understood as holding

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

39

the past within them, which is accessed through the memory work undertaken in the present … undertaken to confirm and consolidate particular ideas about identity. … Second, photographs contain memory in the sense that they bind memory, set parameters around memory, box memories up and make them safe. … Memory work done around photographs makes the memories that they invoke biddable and liveable. (Woodward 2007: 1)

In respect of memory work, Woodward proposes that: memory is a process, a construct … we recreate our experiences, reconstruct them, and that process draws on emotions and information obtained after the event. … Indeed, we prefer the term ‘memory work’ to capture the idea that memory is something actively constructed in the moment of telling, a narrative situated in the present that constructs an explanation of the past. This research proceeded on the understanding of memory work as always being situated within the activity in which it is taking place. (Woodward 2007: 3)

Her stance reflects Halbwachs’s emphasis on the perspective of a group. The concept of ‘memory work’ is employed here on the same terms, in contexts in which collective memories are formed through private encounters with art works, and images reproduced in newspapers and books circulating in German society. Benedict Anderson argues that the mass-circulation newspaper ‘made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways’. This book makes the case that illustrated popular histories, which became cheaper and easier to produce as a result of advances in photomechanical reproduction in the 1890s, functioned to equivalent social effect. For Anderson, to read an illustrated history, no less than a newspaper, was to engage in a ‘mass ceremony … performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull’ (Anderson 1991: 35). Content aside, a sense of community is derived from tacit recognition that many others are reading or have read the same publication. Advances in print technologies facilitated the creation of a diffuse community whose joint perspective enabled memories to hang together across society. Further, Anderson points to the ‘profound fictiveness’ of the newspaper as a cultural product, whose literary convention, he suggests, is characterized by arbitrary inclusions and juxtapositions which fashions imagined links between often unrelated events (Anderson 1991: 33). Anderson’s argument is applicable in varying degrees to all the illustrated works considered here. With the exception of occasional references to official military histories, the books, posters, postcards, weekly illustrated newspapers

40

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

and art works addressed here were objects intended to circulate widely in culture. Reading a copy War and Victory in the late 1890s, for example, may not have amounted to participation in a ‘mass ceremony’, but such works were consumed widely enough to create a diffuse community of readers whose joint perspective, confirmed through the repeated deployment of a recognizable set of visual tropes, caused memories to hang together and remain active in German culture throughout the period. Woodward’s concept of containment is significant, too. After the First World War, the anti-war movement and Communist critics of both the Wilhelmine and Weimar establishments repudiated works that adopted a positive, or patriotic, stance in relation to the memory of both interstate and counterrevolutionary conflict. To the extent that oppositional movements have attracted a deal of art historical attention, not least in accounts empathizing with so-called ‘progressive’ political and artistic stances, this book develops an understanding of what oppositional movements turned against, typically employing counternarratives that made popular accounts of conflict appear dishonest and selfserving, in order to contain them. The containment at play in this inquiry, however, is that invoked by authors and artists whose aim was to insist on the positive experience of war. The visual representation of performing excellence, advanced through the rhetoric of the will to battle, is characteristically pushed to the fore, in relation to which every other manifestation of war experience is subordinate. Containment on such terms is a salient characteristic of conservative representations of Germans at war. Upholding war as the highest manifestation of the German spirit borne out in accounts of the will to battle was a major preoccupation for conservative cultural producers in Wilhelmine Germany, to the extent that the concept attained nearmythic status. In 1918 it was joined by another, related, mythic imperative calculated, this time, to save face in the aftermath of defeat: the German army had apparently remained undefeated in the field; it had been stabbed in the back by Communists, Jews and war profiteers; and had returned to barracks with its honour intact. Richard Bessel argues that this myth took hold as a result of the reception returning formations received in 1918: Perhaps it would have been impossible to greet the soldiers in any other way than with banners reading ‘the Heimat greets the undefeated heroes’. However, the inability to confront the fact that Germany’s soldiers had been defeated on the battlefield left a damaging political legacy for Germany’s first democracy. For if the soldiers had returned undefeated, who then was to blame for the tribulations of the post-war years? (Bessel 1993: 85–6)11

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

41

Post-war irredentist claims to German borderlands, in turn, spawned anecdotal accounts of imagined scenes of brutality and destruction whose political complexion ensured that they too assumed mythic status. To the extent that this book is therefore about the rehearsal and contestation of myths, some account of what is at stake is required. The will to battle is typically expressed in images of soldiers acting in tumultuous circumstances in the face of death, in a manner calculated to provoke an affective response. Affect was a central concern of George Sorel, writing in 1908, who argued that the positive legacy of a recent socialist general strike, which he considered a warlike act, was its powerful appeal to the emotions. He argued that bourgeois society was weakened by its distance from social myths that functioned as artificial worlds, and whose example might provoke people to heroic acts. In comparison, ‘when the masses are deeply moved it then becomes possible to describe a picture which constitutes a social myth’. Sorel upheld the creation of such myths, which he considered conveyed the power to provoke revolutionary movements. For ‘the revolutionary myths which exist at the present time are almost pure; they allow us to understand the activity, the sentiments and the ideas of the masses as they prepare themselves to enter on a decisive struggle; they are not descriptions of things but expressions of a will to act’. Further, Sorel addresses identity formation when he argues that: ‘a myth … is at bottom, identical to the convictions of a group, being the expression of [their] convictions in the language of movement’ (Sorel 1999: 27–9). Sorel’s elaboration of how myths can foster a sense of political identity, his emphasis on the moral quality of will, and the manner in which accounts of mythic events provide exemplary models of behaviour to be emulated in equivalent circumstances, is perfectly aligned with ideas underpinning the dominant visual tropes of performing excellence that relayed the myth of ‘how Germans fight’, which remained active in German culture at least from 1871 to 1933. A related myth is that of ‘front experience’, (Fronterlebnis), a term in general circulation in the Weimar Republic associated with veterans of the First World War. The Fronterlebnis phenomenon can be understood as a nostalgic response to the irrecoverable loss of a keenly felt wartime reality, validated by its association with abstract virtues, including comradeship, endurance, overcoming and sacrifice. It was commonly deployed to define the identity of veterans who viewed themselves as having lived through a positive experience that transcended everyday civilian life. Many civilians too were inclined to remember the war in positive terms. Martin Travers considers that ‘In spite of their lack of first-hand experience, most conservatives looked back to the war

42

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

in fond remembrance of the sense of unity and national purpose enjoyed by a nation in arms’ (Travers 1982: 19). Bessel notes, however, that ‘the problem with this identity was that … the war had been experienced in many ways by the men who fought it. The idea of a “front generation” is better understood as a myth of the post-war world than an accurate reflection of the experience of the First World War’ (Bessel 1993: 270). Mosse suggests, ‘The reality of the war experience came to be transformed into what one might call the Myth of the War Experience, which looked back at the war as a meaningful and even sacred event. … The Myth of the War Experience was designed to mask war and to legitimize the war experience; it was meant to displace the reality of war’ (Mosse 1990: 7). In the popular histories encountered here, in particular, the myth of a positive collective experience on operations at the Front is rehearsed repeatedly.

Photomechanical reproduction Any analysis of illustrated printed matter spanning this period must take into account the impact of technological advances in photography and photomechanical reproduction. Declarations that photographs advanced the documentary status of illustrated books because the photograph made an indexical claim to unmediated reality were common before and after 1918. Nevertheless, the sometimes opposing meanings assigned to identical photographs reproduced in both pacifist and positive accounts of the war, each with different captions and in different rhetorical contexts, suggests that the authority of the photograph as the document did constrain its malleability. Photographs nevertheless were regarded as less mediated than art works, and after 1918 it was rare to deploy anything but photographs to illustrate popular histories. The photomechanically reproduced drawings and engravings that proliferate in the earlier illustrated histories of the Franco-Prussian War were now anachronistic, and where they occur their use needs to be accounted for. While the book acknowledges that developments in photography were ‘a crucial component of a [modern] cultural economy of value and exchange’ (Crary 1990: 13), this is not the core subject of the book, beyond observations about opportunities and constraints imposed by imaging technologies on subject matter and its representation. Notwithstanding Roland Barthes’s contention that a photograph is, uniquely, a certificate of presence authenticating what has been, art works and photographs functioned equally well in this context as quotations that hold what is accepted as being significant about the past

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

43

within them, whether the experience recalled is that of the reader-viewer, or whether it comprises a received memory, transmitted through the consumption of illustrated texts (Barthes 1981: 85). The book’s three thematic parts together mount an extended argument tackling interwoven themes. Part 1 addresses the act of command. Chapter 2, ‘The rhetoric of command’, is given in two sections. Section 1, ‘Adolph Menzel and the rhetoric of command’, addresses representations of military command published in popular histories of Prussia’s wars of the eighteenth and nineteen centuries. With reference to art practice after unification in 1871 and the earlier wood-engravings Adolph Menzel made for the illustrated history, Life of Frederick, it explores how accounts of recent German warfighting prowess published in illustrated histories after unification in 1871 were rooted in established Prussian traditions of writing, painting and drawing. Specifically, it analyses how group portraits on the subject of German wartime leadership typically give visual expression to the psychological quality of interactions between prominent personalities whose moral meanings are located in the quality of respectful attention their subjects confer on each other. Section 2, ‘Werner outside Paris,’ takes up the Prussian tradition of making images of command in war, mapped out in Section 1, in order to consider Anton von Werner’s Franco-Prussian War painting, Billet Outside Paris, today accorded privileged status in Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie. Billet rehearses the same preoccupations as Werner’s other major works in which William I’s command group is depicted maintaining its collective attentive bond in trying wartime circumstances in 1871. The narrative of performing excellence, understood as a German martial trait and exemplified by the coherence of groups of German soldiers on campaign, celebrates the fighting power of the Prusso-German army. However, Werner’s address to the passage of time challenges any tendency to accede unreflexively to received assumptions about the continuing potency of the German armed forces at the close of the century. The three chapters in Part 2 address representations of combat and its aftermath. Chapter 3, ‘Combat and the politics of border landscapes: soldierfarmers’, addresses the will to combat itself as represented in images of battle, or of former battlefields located in contested border territories, in illustrated histories extending as far back as mid-nineteenth century representations of the wars of Frederick the Great. It considers the extent to which that tradition continued to inform the way border defence was represented even after Germany’s defeat in 1918, when images of post-war border conflict circulated alongside pre-existing representations of imperial military campaigns. Together, these works can be

44

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

understood as components of a sustained address to the experience of conflict that was influential in determining conservative attitudes to German militarism in the Weimar Republic. Chapter 4, ‘Combat and the politics of landscape: trench warfare’, examines how images of trench warfare published after the First World War could no longer assert the moral right to occupied land, since none now existed. Instead, recent combat was represented in a way that staked ownership of something as precious as it was abstract: the memory of a job performed to the highest standards, regardless of tactical outcome or territorial loss. The more traditional illustrated histories published after 1918 still included art works as well as photographs; the more self-consciously popular relied exclusively on photography. Either way, they mounted visual accounts of experience at the Front that emphasized the moral superiority of the German soldier’s will to battle. Germany’s armies may have been overwhelmed in 1918, but, in accordance with the exculpatory myth, they remained undefeated because although they lacked the necessary material, their moral superiority, made manifest in the tenacious execution of sophisticated tactical solutions, remained intact to the end. The chapter contests the argument that First World War battlefields were experienced and represented as exclusively fragmented, alienating places, characterized by the notion of a cold and distant gaze that found its technological equivalence in photography. Instead, as Ernst Jünger argued at the time, illustrated histories emphasized the altogether warmer, lived experience of combat in order to bring the reader-viewer closer to the experience, while nevertheless suggesting that a cold, distant mode of perception was indeed in operation. Chapter 5, ‘Combat and the politics of landscape: aerial photography, maps and the cold gaze’, examines how the combination of aircraft and camera had farreaching implications for the history of perception because aerial photography expanded ways of representing war experience. It argues that the ‘cold’ mode of perception conferred by the lens can today be regarded as problematic only if aerial photographs are addressed in contexts removed from those in which they were originally produced and used. In the circumstances of their production the camera’s coldness was a virtue: it complemented the objectivity necessary for the production of annotated mapping, and of intelligence assessment. But after the war, photography’s inherently cold properties were mediated by the authors of histories who employed captions, associated images and textual accounts to invoke an altogether warmer affective response. The two chapters comprising Part 3 address how representations of battlefield activity negotiated the shifting dynamic between soldiers and modern

Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age

45

technologies. Chapter 6, ‘Technology and combat in the Franco-Prussian War’, addresses the relationship between battlefield technologies and the bodily performance of martial virtues. It traces the development of visual narratives of conflict published between 1871 and 1914 in which images depicting the use of battlefield technologies established both continuities and ruptures. The issues encountered here are not about technology as such. Rather, the chapter considers the way in which German soldiers are represented as interacting with weapons systems and concludes that the physical (technological) component of fighting power is typically subordinated to the moral component, expressed as the will to battle. Chapter 7, ‘Technology and combat in the First World War’, explores how the rhetoric of man-and-machine was transformed after 1916, when the image of the tank epitomized the war of materiel during the second half of the First World War. It draws together many of the long-standing preoccupations addressed in earlier chapters in an analysis of Ernst Jünger’s post-1918 programmatic vision of a social and economic existence adequate to the perceived challenges posed by technological modernity. It suggests that despite Jünger’s modernist credentials, his work, like that of so many of the artists, photographers, authors and editors discussed here, remained fundamentally invested in the values of a militarized mode of representation amounting to a tradition of imagining conflict extending back at least to the mid-nineteenth century.

46

Part One

48

2

Adolph Menzel and the Rhetoric of Command

Representations of military command published in popular histories of Prussia’s wars of the eighteenth and nineteen centuries abounded in Wilhelmine Germany. With reference to art practice after unification in 1871 and the earlier wood-engravings Adolph Menzel made for the illustrated popular history, Life of Frederick, this chapter explores how visual accounts of German warfighting prowess were rooted in established Prussian traditions of writing, painting and drawing. Specifically, it analyses how group portraits on the subject of German wartime leadership typically give visual expression to the psychological dimension of interactions between prominent personalities whose moral meanings are located in the quality of respectful attention their subjects confer on each other. After unification, art works depicting acts of military wartime command were so fundamental to the rhetoric of collective battlefield experience and, by extension, of the new German state that, by 1900, representations of German wartime leaders amounted to a commonplace in German visual culture.1 These images functioned, after Eric Hobsbawm, to suggest three overlapping traditions: those ‘symbolizing social cohesion … those establishing, or legitimizing institutions, status or relations of authority, and … those whose main purpose was … the inculcation of beliefs, value systems and conventions of behaviour’ (Hobsbawm 2007: 9). All three were activated by military art practice, prompting the perception that a disparate population including Saxons, Bavarians, Württembergers and Prussians – states which now furnished components of the German army – were united under Hohenzollern leadership, just as they had been during the Franco-Prussian War. The command genre was so well established in German visual culture by 1914 that it continued to offer a basis for affirming a sense of national cohesion during, and even after, the First World War. In the years after France’s defeat, celebratory narratives of the Wars of Unification waged, successively, against Denmark, Austria and France between 1864 and 1871 were common currency in the federal German state. Prussia’s comprehensive defeat of the Austrian army at Königrätz on 3 July 1866 had

50

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

transformed the balance of power in Europe. Overnight, as Geoffrey Wawro observes, ‘a rather small and manageable neighbour had become an industrial and military colossus. “Germany,” an innocuous land of thinkers, artists, and poets, of dreamy landscapes and romantic oafs like Balzac’s Schmucke, stood on the brink of real unification under a tough, no-nonsense military regime’ (Wawro 2003: 17). Any lingering suspicion that Prussia’s victory was due mainly to Austan incompetence was dispelled by Prussia’s subsequent defeat of France, hitherto regarded as possessing one of Europe’s most experienced armies. The Franco-Prussian War consolidated the reputation of the German army as qualitatively one of the most formidable in Europe and created the political conditions enabling Bismarck to achieve unification. Celebratory post-unification illustrated war histories typically prioritized Prussia’s military past, extending as far back as the mid-eighteenth-century campaigns of Frederick the Great, mapping them onto recent events. The FrancoPrussian War literature spiked around the twenty-fifth anniversary of victory and German unification. Although the war had largely been fought by Prussian troops in pursuit of a Prussian agenda, the participation of troops from other members of the North German Confederation and beyond was typically represented as a quintessential example of pan-German cohesion that naturalized the political legitimacy of the Second Reich. The cover of An Illustrated History of the 1870-1 War (Illustriert Geschichte des Kries, 1870/71), for example, includes an image of a Prussian soldier celebrating victory together with a Bavarian colleague on a battlefield littered with French equipment, including a prized war trophy, the technologically advanced – and greatly feared – Mitrailleuse, or early machine gun (Deutsche 1929).2 Celebratory images of the conflict appeared as commemorative prints, in illustrated magazines and histories, and in state-sponsored history paintings acquired by art museums, including the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Francoise ForsterHahn writes that ‘the Landeskunstkommission and the emperor tried to turn the Nationalgalerie into a Prussian Hall of Fame’. As part of this process, Menzel’s paintings of Friedrich II (Frederick the Great), criticized in the 1850s for their lack of address to ‘world historical moments’, were subjected to a radical reinterpretation, and purchased by the state as part of the project to construct a coherent historical narrative that glorified Prussia’s past (Forster-Hahn 1996: 85). Karen Lang, in her wider analysis of post-1871 visual culture, notes that: ‘The memorial prints, the pictures in magazines, and the national monuments served to symbolise and advertise the unification of the nation, thereby creating and disseminating an image of nation to the widest possible audience’ (Forster-Hahn 1996: 281).

Adolph Menzel and the Rhetoric of Command

51

Repeated exposure to images comparable to those discussed here prompted Germans to regard themselves as inheritors of a shared martial past. In Berlin it was not only the Victory Column, erected in 1873, which propounded the narrative of a just war fought by the entire German people to a triumphant conclusion. The railway station on Potsdamer Platz, for example, carried dioramas by Anton von Werner narrating the defeat of the French army at Sedan on 1 September 1870. By the end of the century two generations of Germans could position the narrative content of images of salient wartime events, such as those around Sedan, within a wider military–historical context. Visual accounts of the Franco-Prussian War remained accessible in museums and in public places until the Second World War, during which much was either destroyed or looted. After the defeat of Nazism such art as had survived was stripped of the vestiges of its original cultural context in a post-war climate in which societies on both sides of the Cold War’s ideological divide looked askance at the twentiethcentury legacy of Prussian militarism. Two images by Anton von Werner depicting the inner circle of strategic decision-makers around Wilhelm I at Versailles in the winter of 1870–1 serve to suggest how the memory of the Franco-Prussian War was employed to advance values associated with a sense of Germanness (Deutschtum) via a narrative of unanimity and selfless commitment to the national cause. Both elide the tensions that had dogged actual deliberations about the conduct of the war as it dragged on into the New Year under the walls of Paris. These works bear an affinity with Menzel’s earlier representations of Frederick the Great and his generals on campaign produced for Francis Kugler’s Life of Frederick the Great, an illustrated history whose authors set out not merely to recycle Frederician myths, but also to exploit authoritative primary sources in pursuit of a claim to historical accuracy. That said, Menzel’s very different approach is less concerned with (mis)representing the cut and thrust of debate within the royal command group, than it is with exemplifying ideal-type hierarchical relationships under an absolutist monarch who not only commanded in the field, but also led from the front in an age when it was still practical to do such a thing to operational effect.

Anton von Werner and the command decision In 1896, Franz Schwechten’s neo-Romanesque Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was dedicated to the memory of Wilhelm I (1797–1888) in a ceremony timed

52

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

to coincide with twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations marking victory over France and German unification.3 Among the surviving works on its internal walls offering visual accounts of the Franco-Prussian War is Taking Counsel at the Map Table, a marble low relief by Adolf Brütt, donated by the parish to mark the silver wedding of Wilhelm’s grandson, Wilhelm II, in 1906 (Figure 1). Four uniformed figures congregate around a map spread on a table: its subject is round-table decision-making. A descriptive label today assists visitors to identify the protagonists in the drama of a command decision. But no such aid was necessary at the time of the unveiling in 1905, because this was a wholly unexceptional choice of subject and composition. On the left Wilhelm sits to receive a wartime report from his chief of the General Staff, General Helmuth von Moltke, standing on the right. Prussia’s war minister, General Albrecht von Roon, leans over the king, looking down at the map. Unlike the figures presented in profile, chancellor of the North German Confederation, Otto von Bismarck, looks directly out of work, implicitly beyond the conduct of the war to a unified German future. Brütt was working in a tradition championed by Anton von Werner, director of the Academy of Art from 1875, a leading exponent of subject

Figure 1  Adolf Brütt, Taking Counsel at the Map Table, stone relief, Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Berlin, 1906. Photograph: author.

Adolph Menzel and the Rhetoric of Command

53

matter proclaiming the military competence of Germany’s armed forces. During the siege of Paris in October 1870 Werner had travelled to the royal headquarters at Versailles to obtain material for a portrait of Moltke commissioned by the Schleswig-Holstein Kunstverein. Werner subsequently capitalized on this opportunity, concentrating on the production of military paintings celebrating Germany’s victory, including scenes depicting roundtable decision-making. His 1885 Surrender Negotiations at Donchery, for example, was one of three works produced for the Sedan Panorama installed at the entrance to the Potsdamer Platz railway station, in which the Prussian and French delegations are pictured discussing surrender terms over a lamplit table at midnight on 1–2 September 1870, hours after the decisive German victory at Sedan. Thematically closer to Brütt’s work is Werner’s 1881 Council of War at Versailles (Kriegsrat in Versailles). Werner depicts one of the series of routine decision-making meetings convened in the presence of Wilhelm I in his capacity as Supreme Commander of the Prussian-led armies during the siege (19 September 1870 to 28 January 1871). A table top provides the customary focal point, conferring compositional stability to the work. To its left Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm (commanding the Third Army besieging Paris from the south) stands next to his seated father. In the right foreground stands Roon, who addresses the room as Moltke, at his side, consults the map. Behind the table, in pictorial depth, stand two senior members of the General Staff: General Eugen Podbielski (right) and Lieutenant General Leonhard Graf von Blumenthal, the crown prince’s chief of staff assigned operational responsibility for the conduct of the siege. Werner depicts neither dramatic action nor strong emotions, the commonplaces of history painting. Rather, the participants share in the act of listening to the speaker. Physiognomy is fundamental to a reading of Council of War, which can be understood as a form of portrait-oriented history painting. Alois Riegl notes, in an analogous context, how ‘the basically portrait-oriented pictorial conception … turns all historical action from a reciprocal transaction between third parties into a subjective act of contemplation, attentiveness, and a mirroring of the viewer’ (Riegl 1999: 252). The meaning of Council of War is located in the quality of the psychological relationships Werner’s work purports to reveal. Margaret Olin writes that ‘the term “attention” had, for Riegl, overtones of paying respect to its object. … Riegl characterised attentiveness as “selfless”, and contrasted it with will and feeling, which suggest power relations’ (Olin 1989: 291). The ethics of selflessness takes on a political aspect in Werner’s

54

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

work, which suggests that mutual respect was preserved in testing operational circumstances, testifying to the moral virtues of Germany’s wartime leaders. Roon’s rhetorical gesture encompasses pictorial space willingly assigned to him by the other members of the command group. His declamatory pose contrasts with the upright yet passive stance of the crown prince, whom he addresses directly, as though responding to a point he has raised. There is a transient quality about the moment of psychological domination. The prince’s pose suggests that he is disposed to respond, and he is not alone in this. The quality of intellectual conception – of attentiveness during the formation of ideas – is located in all the figures to varying degrees, suggesting that they too are disposed to contribute. Riegl identifies this same quality in Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Staalmeesters, whereby each character reveals a self-awareness that suggests at least ‘a hint of active will’ (Riegl 1999: 270). In Werner’s work, only the crown prince gives Roon his unqualified attention, but his sharp glance maintains his autonomy in the face of Roon’s rhetoric. Podbielski adopts a pose similar to the crown prince, at whom he gazes, dividing his attention in order to gauge Friedrich Charles’s reaction to Roon’s words. Like Podbielski, Blumenthal also looks across the table (their gazes intersect, adding compositional balance). But Blumenthal looks at Moltke, who looks down at an unseen document on the table. The king looks up at Roon, but without the same conviction as his son. The document in his left hand suggests that his attention too is divided between the written and spoken word. Recognition that the discussion will momentarily be taken up by any of the characters lies at the core of the work’s meaning. The perception that the viewer’s understanding of the work has less to do with what Roon is saying than the climate in which he says it encourages a search for further hints about the atmosphere of the meeting. The viewer is prompted to ask whether the tenor of the meeting can be categorized as healthy productive tension, or fracture tending towards a loss of coherence. Although Werner’s work provokes our awareness of the possibility of inner tensions within the minds of the characters, it does so only to emphasize the underlying unity, which, he suggests, characterized decision-making at Versailles. Council of War does affirm the right of the Hohenzollern regime to govern unified Germany on the basis of Wilhelm’s wartime leadership and it takes on wider political significance to the extent that it operates as a cipher for the desired values of mutual respect across society in the new empire. Werner’s later works, in particular, mask the enmity that existed within the royal headquarters. Relations between Bismarck and Moltke were so bad that ‘such a council of war would never have taken place at all during the entire campaign,

Adolph Menzel and the Rhetoric of Command

55

because such an embarrassing situation would never have to be faced by the German military leadership’ (Ein derartiger Kriegsrat hätte überhaupt während des ganzen Feldzuges nicht stattgefunden, weil eine solche Verlegenheit niemals an die deutsche Heeresleitung herangetreten wäre) (Bartmann 1993: 297).4 Another work on this subject, Council of War at Versailles (November/December 1870) (Kriegsrat in Versailles [November/Dezember 1870]), was commissioned for the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1900 (Figure 2). This time, Werner adds Bismarck to the composition and, as before, the ethics of attention are conveyed by the representation of psychological subordination achieved without loss of individual identity. The title is tellingly specific about time and place. Paris had been encircled on 19 September, after which three courses of action were available to the leaders of the forces now occupying much of northern France: to mount a deliberate assault and take Paris by storm; to starve the city into submission; or to bombard it in order to precipitate a humanitarian crisis and a catastrophic collapse of morale. An assault against Paris’s modern defences was deemed too costly, yet those who hoped that the city would surrender once food became scarce were to be disappointed (Wawro 2003: 278–82).

Figure 2  Anton von Werner, Council of War at Versailles (November/December 1870), oil on canvas, Hamburger Kunsthalle, 1900. © bpk-Bildagentur, Hamburger Kunsthalle, photograph Elke Walford.

56

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

As the siege dragged on into winter Bismarck pressed for bombardment. Moltke, Blumenthal and the crown prince considered a general bombardment inhumane. Their preferred solution was to ward off sorties and attempts to relieve the city by newly formed provincial French forces, until starvation decided the issue. Bismarck, however, was conscious of bullish public opinion at home, the impact of prolonged mobilization on the economy, and of international diplomatic moves to bring the warring parties to a conference table where Prussia could no longer easily dictate terms. Moltke protested about what he regarded as unwarranted political interference in the conduct of military affairs.5 He pointed to the cost of the undertaking, and made much of the logistic challenge of deploying siege artillery at the end of congested lines of communication stretching back to the Rhine. Bismarck, supported by Roon, complained that Moltke excluded him from operational decision-making, thereby denying the primacy of politics towards the attainment of war aims.6 On 28 October Bismarck wrote to his wife: There hangs over this whole affair an intrigue contrived by women, archbishops and professors. … Meanwhile the men freeze and fall ill, the war is dragging on, the neutrals waste time discussing it with us, while the time passes and France is arming herself. … All this so that certain people may be praised for saving ‘civilisation’. (Howard 1972: 354)

Moltke, incensed by Bismarck’s manipulation of public opinion, did indeed exclude the chancellor from decision-making, including the Council of War on 17 December at which it was finally decided to bombard Paris. Werner’s work probably does allude obliquely to the bombardment controversy: the pro-bombardment lobby on the right faces its opponents across the table. Psychological relationships are established pictorially as in the previous work. Werner’s representation of attentive bonds between characters suggests inner coherence. But Riegl also argues that an impression of disinterested attentiveness can be mounted to cloak true sentiment. With reference to Gerard Terborch’s ‘novella’ works, he identifies psychological ties that ‘seem at first to be none other than the bonds of pure attentiveness. The artist’s subtle interpretation of the figures ultimately destroys the purity of their attentiveness, however, because it supplies each of them with a degree of individualised – and therefore, by definition, selfish – motivation … concealed behind a façade of disinterested attentiveness’ (Riegl 1999: 358). Werner’s decision to revisit this subject suggests residual anxiety over the memory of the enmity that reached crisis point at Versailles.7 Council of War at Versailles glosses a challenge spanning both

Adolph Menzel and the Rhetoric of Command

57

the moral and physical components of fighting power Moltke had previously addressed in his Thoughts on Command (1859–70): The military’s hierarchical organization must assist both subordination and thought. … If one surrounds the supreme commander with a number of independent men, the situation will worsen both as their numbers increase and the more distinguished and intelligent they are. The commander will hear the counsel of one, then the other. He will carry out one proper measure up to a certain point, then a better one in another direction. Then he will recognise the entirely justified objections of a third and the proposals of a fourth advisor. We will wager a hundred to one that with the very best-intentioned measures he will probably lose his campaign. (Hughes 1993: 76)

The nuanced political content of Council of War at Versailles rests on how it simultaneously hints at the grave implications for the strategic direction of future wars posed by the possibility of a reiteration of the disagreement between chancellor and chief of the General Staff at Versailles.

The life of Frederick In Thoughts on Command Moltke rehearses his admiration for the Prussian monarch, Frederick the Great (1712–86): There are supreme commanders who need no counsel, who themselves estimate situations and come to decisions. Their staff merely execute. But these are stars of the first magnitude not found in every century. Among these was Frederick the Great, who never asked advice and who always acted on his own. (Hughes 1993: 76)

Moltke’s opinion reflected the orthodoxy of the era. The General Staff upheld Frederick as a strategic genius, and historians of the Prussian School ‘viewed Frederick as an authentic national hero, a rare creature who combined high abilities in politics, war, and letters’ (Bucholz 1985: 4). Werner’s art works on the subject of consensual decision-making represented a significant departure from received ways of imagining top-level military command in German culture. In Adolph Menzel’s earlier works on the subject of Frederick’s military campaigns, psychological relationships are defined not in terms of consensus but, as Moltke indicates, in a relatively unmediated imposition of the commander’s will.8 Menzel was best known for his works depicting events from the life of Frederick the Great, developed out of his partnership with Franz Kugler, for

58

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

whom he produced some 500 wood-engravings for the hugely successful illustrated popular history, Life of Frederick the Great, first published in 1842. Kugler and Menzel’s book fuses anecdotal detail with meticulously researched historical content, meeting growing demand from an expanding middle-class market to be lifted above the level of folklore by academic standards of research, while still engaging the reader on an emotional level with the human drama of conflict. Menzel was granted considerable editorial freedom when it came to embedding the wood-engravings into the work.9 The resulting illustrations typically occupy no more than half a page; in a book of some 600 pages the reader is usually no more than a turn away from the next engraving. The authors’ didactic intent is established in the introduction: The most scrupulous regard has been paid to the correctness of the likenesses; and the numerous contemporaneous paintings and engravings, with which the royal palaces in and about Berlin abound, have been consulted with care and copied with fidelity. Nor has less attention been bestowed on the faithful portraiture of matters of subordinate historical interest; as for instance, the buildings, furniture, and costumes of the period. All the more interesting localities have been sketched on the spot, expressly for this work; and with reference to the gradual modifications which have taken place in the arming and equipment of the Prussian and other armies, the reader will be able to note each successive change through the medium of the illustrations. (Kugler 1877: vii)

Overall, the book features 35 representations of the act of command, including two of the ten privileged full-page illustrations.10 A close reading of these works suggests the nuanced way Menzel sets up psychological relationships between Frederick, his staff and his immediate subordinates. Campaign Planning with Augustus III, 1742, is compositionally similar to Werner’s work discussed above (Figure 3). The figure group coheres around a table on which a map has been spread. Frederick is depicted acting independently: Menzel provides no space for depicting Prussian courtiers, and the implication is that none was required. Frederick inclines forward, looking directly at the seated Elector, pointing at the map as he urges Augustus to deploy the Saxon army into Moravia as one half of a two-pronged offensive against Austrian forces in Bohemia. Senior members of the Saxon court stand attentively by. Kugler tells us that after Frederick had made his case, Count Brühl, a Saxon minister opposed to the venture, rolled up the map, signalling that the audience was at an end. But Frederick seized the map and unrolled it, regaining the initiative. Saxon courtiers reminded their monarch that he was overdue at the opera, but Frederick turned this gambit on its head, successfully urging Augustus to agree to the campaign

Adolph Menzel and the Rhetoric of Command

59

Figure 3  Adolph Menzel, Campaign Planning with Augustus III, wood-engraving, Life of Frederick the Great (Kugler and Menzel 1877: 192). Digital scan: author.

before departing. There is ambivalence as to whether Menzel presents a moment of attentiveness before Brühl’s intervention, or one immediately prior to the Elector’s decision. Narrative instability is generated by the work’s lack of inner psychological coherence. Further, Campaign Planning offers a gendered psychological account of this contest of wills; Frederick’s dominant presence is underlined by his open, active stance, and emphatic gesturing, in contrast with the reserved, ‘effeminate’ postures of the Saxons, implying the weakness of the Elector’s court.11 As in Werner’s works, the quality of attentiveness conveyed by Menzel’s characters is fundamental to its meaning. The Saxons’ acute self-awareness is manifested in discomfort, which Menzel establishes by deliberately failing to construct internal psychological coherence. As Frederick advances his argument, Austrian courtiers incline towards Augustus, gauging his response. Respect for the speaker, signalled by the intransitive act of selfless attentiveness, is absent. The Elector’s open posture suggests that he is amenable to Frederick’s argument, but he too looks away. Although his face is directed towards the map, his gaze appears unfocused, suggesting that he listens in a state of distraction, caught between irreconcilable poles of opinion. Werner’s later works affirm that the shared quality of disciplined self-esteem can be indicative of productive

60

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

tension in representations of collaborative decision-making. The fractured psychological coherence of Menzel’s work, however, presents a narrative in which Saxon self-esteem is compromised by the breaking of the attentive bond. The absence of mutual respect creates conditions in which the ethical quality of attention is displaced by psychological relations characteristic of adversarial power relations. The Life of Frederick celebrates Frederick’s ability to impose his will on the Saxon court. Frederick’s lauded ability to impose his will manifests in Menzel’s representations of military operations. In Frederick Addressing his Generals before the First Silesian War, a young Frederick addresses sceptical older generals at the outset of the war in 1740 (Figure 4). Their ordered ranks, impassive physiognomy and physical separation from Frederick suggest scepticism in the face of his unproven martial competence.12 There is no sense here of the mutual regard Werner suggests characterized relations at Versailles 130 years later. Although their expressions reveal more than a hint of active will, it is suppressed. They are, in effect, ‘on parade’: military etiquette prevents them from diverting any of their energy. Menzel implies that they are not expected to respond to the

Figure 4  Adolph Menzel, Frederick Addressing his Generals Before the First Silesian War, wood-engraving, Life of Frederick the Great (Kugler and Menzel 1877: 163). Digital scan: author.

Adolph Menzel and the Rhetoric of Command

61

king; their personalities merge into the ranks under the subordinating gaze of their leader. The political meaning of Menzel’s work is diametrically opposed to the democratic spirit Riegl later suggested is central to the meaning of, for example, what he understood to be the earliest Dutch civic guard group portrait: Dirck Jacobsz’s Civic Guards (1529). In this work, ‘none of the figures is acting in a way that would automatically single him out as the captain. … His distinction consists [merely] in the pointing gestures of his four comrades. … He makes no egoistic attempt to set himself apart from his fellows in any way’ (Riegl 1999: 104). In contrast, the moral content of Frederick before the First Silesian War is again located in Frederick’s ability to impose his will – the antithesis of psychological relations held in productive tension. Menzel subsequently devotes a whole page to representing a salient anecdote about the life of Frederick: Frederick the Great’s Address to his Generals Before the Battle of Leuthen (Figure 5). The event was noteworthy because it exemplified the imposition of the commander’s will on the army, resulting in operational success in a moment of existential crisis. In the early winter of 1757 Frederick confronted looming operational failure in Silesia. While the Prussian army was campaigning against France, Austria gained control of the region just as the campaigning season drew to a close. In worsening weather Frederick gambled everything on a final battle against the numerically superior Austrians. His decisive victory at Leuthen on 5 December, Kugler tells us, restored the majority of Silesia to Prussian control by the end of the year.

Figure 5  Adolph Menzel, Frederick the Great’s Address to his Generals Before the Battle of Leuthen, wood-engraving, Life of Frederick the Great (Kugler and Menzel 1877: 349). Digital scan: author.

62

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

Frederick before Leuthen depicts Frederick issuing direction to his generals at Parchnitz, two days before the battle. Menzel again represents the king speaking to an attentive audience. This work, however, is more of a group portrait, as understood by Riegl, than Frederick before the First Silesian War. By this stage in the book, the attentive reader-viewer is able to recognize the short figure of General Zieten, in his distinctive cylindrical hussar headgear and fur collar, standing directly in front of Frederick, and to apprehend that psychological relationships are transformed. Seventeen years after his first campaign, the quality of attentiveness demonstrated by Frederick’s now seasoned generals pays respect to their leader. Their subordination is mediated by Menzel’s construction of a loosely structured figure group that collapses the space between figures. The generals cluster around Frederick informally, returning his determined gaze. Unlike in Werner’s later work, their mode of selfless attention does not, however, function as a mask concealing private passions. All of their energy is directed towards Frederick; there is no inner tension, Menzel suggests, to be discerned in this group of veteran commanders who cohere harmoniously under Frederick’s leadership. The moral content of the work rests in their manifest resolve to carry out their leader’s will. That said, the air of relative informality Menzel represents is scarcely less deceptive than that subsequently conveyed by Werner in his Versailles group portraits. Despite the gathering of the royal command group in a round-tablelike configuration, Frederick does not chair a decision-making meeting. Instead, he delivers a rousing address designed to inform and inspire his commanders. According to Frederician lore, reiterated by Kugler: This address from the monarch penetrated, as we are informed by an eyewitness, to the hearts of his hearers, and fanned anew the fire of enthusiasm into flame. All became inspired with the determination to sacrifice their lives for their great sovereign, who saw with inward satisfaction the ardour he had enkindled. (Kugler 1877: 350)

Frederick is celebrated as an enlightened autocrat. He too, Kugler suggests, is selfaware, but not on terms that require him to adopt a selfless mode of attention; it is sufficient that he perceives others are responding to an exhortation to conform to his will. The reader-viewer here confronts the difference between a decision-making meeting in which opinions are shared, and the giving of orders, in which the results of the planning process – the intellectual manifestation of the commander’s will – are conveyed to those who will execute the resulting operational plan. Kugler’s account assumes a rhapsodic quality as he summarizes Frederick’s achievements at Leuthen:

Adolph Menzel and the Rhetoric of Command

63

Like the musician, who by a slight pressure of the finger brings forth a flood of melody from the pipes of the organ, so had he brought all the movements of his army into one splendid and harmonious combination. It was his spirit which inspired the motions of his troops – which dwelt in their hearts and steeled their strength. (Kugler 1877: 356)

Frederick’s example, popularized in Prussian memory, retained its political force throughout the nineteenth century, not least because the teleological agenda of Prussian School historians inclined them to privilege the wars of the eighteenth century in their accounts of the rise of the German state to pre-eminence in Europe. Their outlook served the interests of Germany’s ruling elite, for, as Bucholz observes, ‘Victory in war sustains the real and symbolic existences of … society and thereby strengthens the readiness to acknowledge the political leaders’ right to rule’ (Bucholz 1985: 2). Kugler and Menzel’s illustrated narrative of Hohenzollern command in war naturalizes the imperative towards deference to a competent and successful monarch. By 1871, however, any account of a contemporary autocratic ruler in full personal control of events on the political–military interface was problematic on two grounds. To the extent that it was ever more than a manifestation of Frederician lore, the style of top-level military decision-making represented in the Life of Frederick was anachronistic, and would appear incongruous in the context of the Franco-Prussian War; in order to be convincing it was now necessary to advance narratives about royal leadership in circumstances in which executive responsibility for the conduct of warlike operations had been delegated – for politicians to oversee, and generals to execute. Secondly, due to the ever-increasing size of modern battlefields and the enhanced lethality of weapons, it was no longer practical or desirable for commanders to make their presence felt by leading from the front at crucial moments during decisive engagements. The problem was that, as Kugler and Menzel demonstrate, Frederick – the quintessential German leader – was represented affirming his moral authority by locating himself at the point of decision in circumstances that exemplified an unshakeable resolve to achieve stated aims, as well as physical bravery. Menzel’s Frederick in Command During the Battle of Chotusitz (1742) conforms to the pictorial values of the established convention for representing command in European academic art practice. The king occupies an elevated position to survey the battle. He is depicted as the principal agent of command, attended by staff whose task is to convey orders to subordinate commanders leading troops including those seen in pictorial depth.

64

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

In Menzel’s full-page Frederick at the Battle of Torgau (1760), however, this compositional framing is subverted (Figure 6). At a critical moment when the outcome of the engagement is in doubt, Kugler tells his reader-viewer, Frederick committed his command team to the forward edge of the battle, where two horses were killed under him. Menzel depicts Frederick striding towards the enemy, leading by personal example. Yet he is scarcely at the centre of an account that invokes the qualities of the military sublime: as his dying horse writhes in the foreground, his staff struggle to control their terrified mounts and provide him with a replacement. Menzel’s narrative of command at its most acute depicts a team of like-minded individuals working coherently to a common aim in nearoverwhelming circumstances. Represented in the German Realist tradition, the viewer here confronts warfare at the far end of the spectrum of experience from that of roundtable decision-making. Here too, however, the viewer is caught up in a web of psychological relationships where the ethics of attention determine the work’s meaning. Menzel depicts multiple selfless acts demanding a strong attentive bond: the infantry in pictorial depth maintain their firing line, despite incurring casualties as they advance under heavy fire, while staff officers communicate with each other over the noise of battle, working to retain the cohesion of the king’s tactical headquarters. Everywhere, men are listening and watching intently, deferring to others, dividing their attention even as they act. Were they not so

Figure 6  Adolph Menzel, Frederick at the Battle of Torgau, wood-engraving, Life of Frederick the Great (Kugler and Menzel 1877: 461). Digital scan: author.

Adolph Menzel and the Rhetoric of Command

65

attentive, Frederick’s intervention would be of negligible value. No less than the characters in Werner’s representations of councils of war, Menzel’s figures establish psychological relationships conditioned by their need to overcome factors including fear, exhaustion, uncertainty, chance and danger, which threaten to deny them their goals. The meaning of Menzel’s work is located in his representation of the quality of conviction, manifested in the maintenance of the inner coherence of an extended figure group, despite the tumult of war. In representations of combat as well as decision-making, the depiction of a strong attentive bond is depicted as indicative of an ineluctable will to battle, understood as a moral quality of the highest order – and as quintessentially Prussian. Every combatant, Menzel suggests, requires an appropriate measure of selfesteem in order to play a constructive role in the depicted event. Too much – or too little – and the integrity of the activity may be compromised. The internal cohesion of Frederick at Torgau resides in the viewer’s perception that, just as in round-table works, the attentive bond is adequate to the demands of the task, conducted in conformity with the leader’s will. The front rank of attacking infantry includes a figure looking back over his right shoulder in the general direction of Frederick. His triple measure of attentiveness – to his task, to events around him and to his leader – compositionally unites the infantry action depicted in pictorial depth with the activities of Frederick and his headquarters. Menzel here subverts another convention: a rearward glance in battle painting most likely suggests a moment of inattentive selfawareness, during which the figure wrestles with the demand placed on him to conform to the leader’s will and fight, or to give way to his desire to seek safety in flight. Menzel turns this established meaning on its head. The soldier’s gaze fuses his will with that of his king, indicating their joint determination to assault the enemy position. Although he looks back, his mind is bent on projecting his activity towards the attainment of the task. No one in Menzel’s pictorial space breaks rank or falters in his task as progress is made towards the enemy. Psychological insight into the battle-winning quality of conviction is a theme running through Menzel’s contribution to the Life of Frederick, forging a link between his art practice and the early-nineteenth-century Berlin Realist tradition, as developed by Johann Schadow and Daniel Chodowiecki. ForsterHahn considers that the Life of Frederick represents ‘a decisive step toward the realisation of an entirely new conception of depicting history’ (Weisberg 1982: 128). She notes that Menzel was influenced by Schadow and Chodowiecki,

66

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

both of whom were concerned with producing truthful representations of the natural world. At the beginning of the century Schadow had rejected idealist art practice, rooted in the attainment of standards of classical beauty, in preference for the ‘characteristic’, an approach whose direct address to the individual and the specific was, by definition, patriotic. Forster-Hahn notes that Chodowiecki was admired for his historical illustrations, which ‘are of convincing documentary character because he depicted his subjects in a telling moment and with such psychological insight that these small prints easily bridged historical distance’ (Weisberg 1982: 127). Menzel’s wood-engravings are located in an established tradition of conveying psychological relationships that dispose the viewer to identify with putative ideal Prussian qualities but, in contrast, Kugler’s text does not shy away from acknowledging human weakness, the reality of frequent failure or the impact of the authoritarian nature of Frederick’s command style. Nor does it fail to acknowledge that harsh discipline contributed to the battlefield performance of Frederick’s armies. Frederick at Torgau provides a clear example of how Kugler and Menzel do, nevertheless, advance an idealist argument that runs as a theme throughout the material addressed in this book: the quality of the Prussian army rests not so much on accounts of its success as on its reputation for performing excellence; a reputation whose moral dimension is underscored in accounts emphasizing the strong attentive bonds at work throughout an army that labours with conviction to enact the commander’s will. The force of Menzel’s representation of quintessentially Prussian martial virtues is bound up in the representational dynamics established between text and image. Kugler’s narrative style reflects that of Prussia’s academic historians, whose typically strategic-level account of events provides little space for articulating the quotidian experience of the rank-and-file. In contrast, junior officers and their soldiers are highly visible in Menzel’s wood-engravings, which provide a counterpoint to Kugler’s academic prose, with its collective nouns and address to abstract virtues that has the effect of masking the affective experience of war. Consider, for instance, their combined description of the rout of the Austrian army at Leuthen. Following a successful Prussian cavalry action, Kugler tells his reader: This was the signal for a general flight. The Austrian army rushed in wild confusion across the Schweidnitz, leaving behind a numerous body of prisoners; when night came on and put an end to the carnage. Sagacity, tact, and courage had, during four short hours, obtained one of the most glorious victories recorded in history, over an immeasurably superior force. (Kugler 1877: 355)

Adolph Menzel and the Rhetoric of Command

67

While Kugler’s prose maintains a detached overview of events, Menzel’s accompanying engraving, Austrian Prisoners after Leuthen, repositions the viewer in the thick of the rout (Figure 7). His representation of bowed figures stumbling into captivity bridges the gap between detached historical commentary and personal experience. The image, no less than the text, assumes a documentary character on the same terms Forster-Hahn employs in the context of Chodowiecki’s historical works. Menzel’s visual account rests on the psychological insight the reader-viewer is able to bring to the image of victorious Prussian cavalrymen and their Austrian prisoners. It reinforces the message reiterated throughout this illustrated history that war at all levels is to be understood as both a contest of wills and a mastery of the self. It naturalizes the perception that the character of the Prussian army is defined by its capacity for performing excellence on the battlefield. Menzel’s focus on peripheral subject matter proved problematic for conservative art critics opposed to the representation of seemingly prosaic moments and the characterization of the individual, in the Realist tradition. Conservative art critic Max Schasler thought that what he called representations of ‘individual and unforeseen incidents’ counted as mere historical genre work because they failed to deal with significant moments in world history

Figure 7  Adolph Menzel, Austrian Prisoners after Leuthen, wood-engraving, Life of Frederick the Great (Kugler and Menzel 1877: 355). Digital scan: author.

68

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

(Forster-Hahn 1977: 260). Mere genre work it might be, but Menzel’s focus on ordinary Prussian soldiers, like those at Leuthen, invests them with virtuous martial attributes – in this case sagacity, tact and courage. Menzel’s convincing representations of psychological relationships prompts the reader-viewer to associate the image of the ordinary Prussian soldier and his leaders with exemplary martial qualities to which the contemporary German army and its conscript soldiers might aspire. Menzel’s art practice consolidated two precedents for depicting royal command in war in the Realist tradition. The moral content of his works on command is located in representations of active engagement with the will of an autocratic commander who inspires unswerving loyalty from a close-knit team of independent-minded subordinates. Secondly, works depicting Frederick as a tactical commander leading from the front during combat emphasize that the highest manifestation of the commander’s will is signalled not necessarily by success, but by performing excellence on the battlefield. This legacy was to pose problems for artists specializing in military subjects after 1871: neither autocratic command techniques nor physical presence in combat were appropriate in the battlefield conditions of 1870. Werner’s round-table works suggest that one of the now limited opportunities for conveying a sense of royal competence in war was in art works that reflected, however disingenuously, the ethics of attention in consensual decision-making contexts. Menzel’s example is telling: as noted in both Frederick at Torgau and Austrian Prisoners, the quality of conviction associated with attentiveness is no less present in Menzel’s works in which junior ranks are the principal actors.

Werner outside Paris Menzel’s wood-engravings for the Life of Frederick the Great, discussed above, offer a context for considering Anton von Werner’s other large-format FrancoPrussian War painting, Billet Outside Paris, now accorded privileged status in the permanent collection at Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie (Figure 8). Billet was commissioned for the Nationalgalerie in Berlin in advance of the twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations. Werner depicts a group of Prussian officers gathered around a piano in the neo-Rococo drawing room of the Château de Brunoy, requisitioned during the early weeks of the siege of Paris. The French housekeeper and her daughter appear in a doorway, drawn to the sound of German music. Orderlies light lamps and tend to the fire as evening approaches. The first two

Adolph Menzel and the Rhetoric of Command

69

Figure 8  Anton von Werner, Billet Outside Paris, oil on canvas, Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 1894. © bpk-Bildagentur, Nationalgalerie, SMB, photograph Jörg P. Anders.

lines of By the Sea, a Heinrich Heine poem set to music by Franz Schubert, is inscribed on the picture frame; the officers, as though attending a salon, listen to a performance of one of fourteen songs published under the title Swan Song (Schwanengesang) shortly after Schubert’s death in 1829.13 Schwanengesang, which traces a cycle of romantic love, from aspiration, through passion, to disillusion and loss, remained popular throughout the nineteenth century. If this is war art, it is no battle painting; neither is it a landscape depicting battlefield topography; nor a panorama providing an insight into troop dispositions and tactics. Werner does not even tackle a well-known incident drawn from the mythology of the war, as Menzel had previously done. At first glance it appears unrelated; but it too is a round-table work whose meaning is ultimately located in the expression of superior German will to battle. In a monograph published at the time of the painting’s public presentation in 1895, art historian Adolf Rosenberg comments that Werner represents the off-duty moment ‘with delightful humour, with genuine Prussian “incisiveness”’ [‘mit köstlichem Humor, mit echt preußischem Schneid’] (Rosenberg 1895: 13). His inclination to find it amusing suggests how far removed it is from the dominant

70

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

rhetoric of military painting. Yet his comments suggest that (reader) viewers of Werner’s work familiar with the Schubert were equipped to respond to the fusion of image, text and sound in a way that is not easily accessible today. One way of doing so is to consider how Billet relates to the established framework for representing command in war discussed above. Werner typically made anecdotal battle paintings for military and civic clients. Assault on the Spicherer Berg (1880), for example, commissioned for the Town Hall in Saarbrücken, depicts a well-known command anecdote from an early Franco-Prussian War battle. In August 1870, pinned down by rifle fire, General Francois is depicted attempting to breathe life into the assault by placing himself, in Frederician style, at the head of his infantrymen, in order to motivate them to follow him onto the French position. According to the post-war myth, Francois rose to his feet, shouted ‘Forwards my courageous 39th!’ – and was immediately cut down by French rifle fire (Bartmann 1985: 59). Werner’s battle painting exemplifies the link between the commander’s will and its manifestation in a collective expression of the will to battle: a fusion of the moral and physical components of fighting power. Compared with this work, Billet scarcely seems to proffer a narrative about combat operations at all. Yet both paintings depict junior officers reacting to a verbal exhortation; and, like Menzel’s Frederick at Torgau, their meaning is established with reference to the ethics of attention. Billet can therefore also be aligned with Werner’s works in which William I’s command group maintains its collective attentive bond in trying circumstances. In an equivalent, and implicitly associated way, Billet proclaims the ascendancy of German culture at large by rehearsing the ethics of round-table attention in the context of the performing arts. A piano now replaces the table as the object around which relationships are physically framed. Werner achieves inner coherence by subordinating listeners to performers, although not everyone is entitled to give themselves over to the impromptu recital. The orderlies to the right are on duty; they ignore it. Behind them, the French housekeeper and a Prussian lancer channel some of their energies towards each other, exchanging remarks from the periphery. These varying degrees of distraction throw into relief the concentrated attentiveness of the six figures forming a half circle around the piano. The pairing of housekeeper and lancer echoes that of singer and pianist, whose self-awareness is bound up in the psychological intensity of performance. In Werner’s councils of war, sharp glances connote the expression of active wills among the listeners. Billet, however, is characterized by the absence of such expressions. Werner suppresses the gaze of the central characters, establishing a strong causal relationship

Adolph Menzel and the Rhetoric of Command

71

between the sound of Schubert’s Lied and their acute self-absorption. Their attentiveness conveys an emotion shared unproblematically, compared with the decision-makers grouped around the William I at Versailles. Inner tension is noticeable here, nevertheless; not between conflicting opinions, but between the objective reality of this shared moment on campaign in France and an invocation of German culture and, by association, the homeland. Billet’s psychological narrative is complemented by Werner’s characteristic address to material detail, after the Realist tradition advanced by Menzel, whose faithful representation of clothing and artefacts drawn from life reinforced his claim to historical veracity. The sketches Werner had made in his capacity as official war artist in France conferred on him the status of eyewitness. The result is a form of exaggerated naturalism; the work’s psychological content vies with its apparently objective qualities, qualities that were valued in a culture where military painting was typically judged not only by its artistic merits, but also by whether, in the opinion of veterans, the artist had faithfully represented the event as they chose to remember it.14 In the context of claims to objective reality, the implications of Kugler’s remark that Menzel had achieved a form of ‘daguerrotypical’ reality provide a point from which to consider the impact of photography on Werner’s art practice and its reception. War photography was valued because its indexical qualities appeared to close the experiential gap between combatants and the non-veteran population on more objective terms than art. Photographers travelling with the armies in 1870–1 were limited by wet plate negative technology, which necessitated the use of a mobile dark room, the entire image-making process taking up to twenty minutes to complete. The ability to convey the experience of war was therefore still limited to static compositions beyond weapon range. The resulting output necessarily made a virtue of relatively mundane subject matter; The Crown Prince’s Headquarters at Versailles (Stabswache des Kronprinzen in Versailles), for example is an album photograph of the crown prince’s headquarters staff, taken in the winter of 1870–1 by the Royal Prussian Field photography Detachment, an image that falls into Schasler’s ‘historical genre’ category because it does not represent defining events or heroic actions. Staff officers stand assembled informally in a line outside their headquarters. The image conveys nothing about the process of command, battlefield events, life at Versailles or the overall conduct of the war; nor do their studied poses convey psychological content. The self-consciousness conjured by the need to acknowledge the camera and hold a pose for the length of the exposure militates against building the internal coherence of the figure group on anything more than the most contrived of

72

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

terms. The solution was to provide an accompanying textual narrative, as Alexander Gardner had recently done, for example, in his two-album set of American Civil War photographs published in 1866. Alan Trachtenberg suggests that when viewed without accompanying text, photographs like The Crown Prince’s Headquarters at Versailles nevertheless operate as what he calls ‘tokens of spent violence’: that which could not be photographed, whether it was the experience of combat or the wider sweep of experience on campaign, is implied by association (Trachtenberg 1990: 72). Billet’s off-duty subject matter can also be labelled ‘daguerrotypical’: it is photograph-like to the extent that it functioned as a ‘token of spent violence’, drawing its force from recognition that the event depicted, however inconsequential, was located within a wider narrative of violence. This opens up the possibility that Billet can after all be associated with the rhetoric of performing excellence on the battlefield. However, without the benefit of a supporting text, Billet’s possible meaning nevertheless risks being less secure than that of Menzel’s work. Indeed, Claude Keisch, writing for the exhibition catalogue accompany the Spirit of an Age exhibition in London’s National Gallery in 2001, describes Billet as ‘cheerfully innocuous’ (Forster-Hahn 2001: 140). This reading is surely problematic. If it is innocuous, what is to be made of the incisive quality that Rosenberg associated with it; and what about Billet’s evident compositional and rhetorical affinities with Menzel’s representations of officers listening actively to each other as they either plan or execute combat operations? Theodor Fontane’s 1883 short novel, A Man of Honour provides a context for examining how Billet was open to a wider range of possible meanings in 1894, and to develop the view that a token of spent violence is scarcely innocuous. Some of these meanings are aligned with the triumphalist rhetoric of German militarism. But Billet also prompts awareness of the passage of time and the implications of the long years of peace for military preparedness in Germany. Uncertainties about the conduct of future conflict appear even more alarming when juxtaposed with accounts of past competence. These tensions can be explored by focusing on Fontane’s treatment of historical time and his reference to visual representations of conflict, mapping them onto Billet. Werner’s representation of an intimate musical performance suggests that Billet’s contemporary relevance was located as much in its address to the psychology of salon culture as it was to that of military operations. In this light, close scrutiny of Man of Honour reveals a strong thematic affinity with Billet.15 The novel is set in the historical context of the year leading up to Prussia’s defeat by Napoleon at Jena in 1806. Victoire, the daughter of a society hostess, becomes

Adolph Menzel and the Rhetoric of Command

73

pregnant after a brief liaison with the central character, Cavalry Captain von Schach, who thereby compromises his military career. Ordered by the king to marry Victoire against his inclination, and faced with the prospect of an inglorious life on his provincial estate, von Schach takes his own life. Months later, after war has been declared, his death is presented as symptomatic of the social and military malaise that had overtaken Prussia in the long years of peace since the glory days of Frederick, foreshadowing defeat at Jena the following year. The mordant repartee of the salon gives way to epistolary reflection as Fontane’s characters take stock of the suicide. Von Bülow, a progressive advocate of military reform, writes that the Schach case is interesting because he is undone by the misfortune to have lived at a low point in the political–military history of Prussia: precisely because of its implications as a symptom … a perfect sign of the times … it could only have occurred at the seat of His Royal Majesty of Prussia’s capital and court and, if beyond it, only within the ranks of our latter-day Frederician army, an army in which honour has abdicated in favour of conceit and its soul, in favour of clockwork. … All this also reflected … in Schach himself, who for all his faults, was nevertheless one of the best [yet was] thrown into a panic by a phantom, a pea-sized bubble. (Fontane 1982: 128–9)

Fontane rehearses the cyclical experience of peace and war, victory and defeat, life and death, and exposes the dangers of complacency. Germany in 1883, Fontane implies, bore a strong affinity to Prussia in 1805. The relationship between Billet and cyclical time can be further developed by calling attention to how Fontane points to Frederician works of art, not to affirm but to challenge the teleological account of the triumphant rise of the German state. Schach decides his fate after two confrontations with art. In his housekeeper’s cottage he observes: two small pictures … each illustrating an anecdote from the life of Frederick the Great. ‘Come, come’, reads the legend underneath one of them and that underneath the other: ‘Bon soir, messieurs’. The little pictures … were framed by two heavy garlands of immortelles … attached to them. (Fontane 1982: 96)16

Later, Schach tours his family home: looking at the portraits of all the Schachs hanging … on the walls. All of them had occupied positions of high rank in the army. … . That one was the general who had captured the big fortress near Malplaquet and this one was the portrait of his own grandfather the colonel … who had held the Hochkirch churchyard for an hour with four hundred men. (Fontane 1982: 98)

74

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

The rhetoric of honour and will generates unbearable tension between Schach the landowner and Schach the military leader, precipitating his suicide. Fontane draws on late-nineteenth-century historical consciousness with reference to images quoted in the context of 1805, but which the reader might most readily associate with the Life of Frederick, published in 1842, in which Menzel also garlands a portrait of Frederick with immortelles in precisely the manner described by Fontane. And he also illustrates Bon soir, messieurs!, the well-known anecdote about Frederick’s personal leadership and surprise entry into the Austrian-held chateau at Lissa the night after Leuthen. Similarly, Schach’s encounter with the portrait of his grandfather who had been killed in action at Hochkirch provides the reader with the prompt to recall Menzel’s illustration depicting Frederick riding behind Prussian infantry as they strive in vain to defeat the surprise Austrian attack on the village, as well as with Menzel’s 1856 large-format oil painting of the event. Frederician narratives of conflict alluded to in the 1880s, but recalled with oblique reference to art objects produced around 1840, underpin the allegorical content of the novel by disrupting linear historical time, thereby comparing both 1805 and 1883 unfavourably with the Frederician past. Billet too engages with contemporary preoccupations, particularly with reference to the cycle of military experience. In the decades after 1870 the army was held in high esteem and it functioned as a symbol of the power of the Second Reich. However, Arden Bucholz observes that historians have noted what he calls ‘a curious malaise in Germany in the decades before World War I, calling it cultural or economic despair, or an ideological crisis’ (Bucholz 1985: 1). As Fontane implies, the 1880s was a decade of acute anxiety about German military effectiveness. Unprecedented criticism of the army by politicians on the left was matched by military pessimism because analysis of recent conflicts demonstrated the greatly enhanced lethality of the latest weapons technologies.17 Anxieties about the nature of future conflict were projected onto an army whose public image rested on the tradition of performing excellence, exemplified most recently in 1870–1. Harsh reality was problematic, for what Albert Solnit calls ‘a useful and self-respecting past’ can only operate if a sense of one’s own history does not ‘dominate, overburden or destroy’ (Lowenthal 1985: xxix). Ever since 1871 Germany’s useful military past had been upheld employing hyperbole that overburdened expectations at a time when the army confronted unprecedented challenges to its professional standing. Werner captures the prevailing pessimistic mood. The rhetorical force of Billet is shaped by the Heine-Schubert quotation in the context of a salon

Adolph Menzel and the Rhetoric of Command

75

performance. The late-nineteenth-century Prussian salon functioned as a space in which identities were negotiated, not least through the production and consumption of music including popular Lieder, in an era of social instability catalysed by industrial modernity. The sense of mutual surveillance, affirmation and renegotiation that lay at the heart of salon culture is relevant to a reading of Billet. In this context, Billet functioned, after Fontane, as a perfect sign of its times: a time of social and military anxiety. The audience in the Château de Brunoy experiences a nostalgic response to the sound of a canonical German song about lost love, rather than an exchange about the conduct of the war. By the Sea conjures a state of being at the nadir of human fulfilment. Past and present merge; the pain of severance endures in a state of all-consuming longing. The plaintive tone of Schubert’s song can be mapped onto the history of the Franco-Prussian War itself. In the summer of 1870 the diplomatic crisis over the Hohenzollern candidature for the Spanish throne played into Chancellor Bismarck’s hands (Howard 1972: 48–51). Politically outmanoeuvred, France declared war on Prussia on 17 July. During the first phase of the campaign in August Prussia and its allies fought a series of brutal break-in battles, including the action on the Spicherer Berg; pinned a sizeable portion of the French field army under the walls of the fortress of Metz; then famously destroyed much of the remainder at Sedan. Thereafter, during the war’s second phase, Prussia occupied a large tract of northern France and besieged Paris in pursuit of a favourable political outcome. As the war dragged on into winter Prussia and its allies found themselves overextended at the end of vulnerable lines of communication. The besiegers faced the possibility of significant tactical reversals at the hands of the Paris garrison, as well as from newly constituted French forces beyond Paris, although victory was never in doubt. Werner’s arrival in France in October coincided with operations to consolidate the 50-mile circumvallation of Paris. His later decision to foreground this particular moment is noteworthy because it marks the outset of the second phase of the campaign. In Clausewitz’s terms, by late October Prussia had passed the ‘culminating point’ of the campaign, after which its military effectiveness, relative to the French army, began to decline. Clausewitz argues that relative superiority is always transient. As an invading army’s campaign evolves its relative strength declines because fortresses must be besieged; enemy territory is inherently hostile; sources of supply become more distant; sympathy for the defender’s plight is likely to attract allies; and the defender redoubles his efforts. All these factors were experienced by the German armies in the winter of 1870–1 (Clausewitz 1989: 566–7).

76

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

Billet’s salon moment sits just over the cusp of the first, heroic, phase of the war marked by large-scale battles and rapid manoeuvre. Werner signals this by drawing attention to external events. The presence of the fully attired lancer in the open doorway, the ruddy, tanned faces of the officers, their boots caked in the chalky soil of the Ile de France, suggest ongoing Prussian operations to dominate the battlefield. The representation of officers close to the high water mark of military endeavour promotes nostalgia for a war that confirmed the German army’s pre-eminent status in Europe. But Schubert’s song prompts a contemplative response from soldiers on campaign who yearn for a homeland they may not live to see again. The viewer in 1894 reciprocates, ‘look[ing] backward and yearn[ing] for the particular’ located in this narrative of Prussia’s military history, leading inexorably to German unification (Boym 2002: 11). Billet offers a glimpse of a seemingly exemplary past stripped of complexity and ambivalence. However, if, as David Lowenthal suggests, ‘nostalgia is memory with the pain removed’, then it is fraught with danger when deployed in the context of triumphalist accounts of war (Lowenthal 1985: 8). Elisions in historical narratives create tension, and rhetorical voids are ripe for appropriation because they resonate in the present and prompt questions about the future. Werner’s elegiac narrative begs questions about whether the circumstances that brought these men so quickly to a requisitioned chateau outside Paris on an autumn day could ever be recreated, and if so, at what cost. For a nostalgic seeking security in the past, resting on a historical culminating point is as comforting as it gets. But Billet challenges the tendency to seek refuge in a reassuring moment.18 The desire to accede unreflexively to assumptions about the ascendant power of the German state is further confounded by a close reading of Billet alongside Schubert’s pessimistic address to cyclical time. Werner points to the transience of the historical moment. Alongside the hussar with his back to the fire a soldier stokes the fire while his colleague tends an oil lamp as evening draws on. The viewer’s attention is drawn to the burning wicks and, between them, the clock surmounted by the allegorical figure of Time. The nostalgic impulse to linger at a particularly satisfying moment in the past is checked by the suggestion of temporal instability, and the consequent recognition that the campaign against France was entering its more problematic phase. Considered on these terms, Keisch’s opinion that Billet amounts to no more than a ‘dispassionate, factual representation of what was there to be seen’ surely refuses the rhetorical complexity of this war painting (Forster-Hahn 2001: 140).19 Werner falls far short of suggesting criticism of the conduct of the campaign. Nevertheless, his representation of ‘the ranks of our latter-day Frederician

Adolph Menzel and the Rhetoric of Command

77

army’ is problematic precisely because it celebrates performing excellence, since he simultaneously signals the prospect of decline and fall, perceived as a real possibility in the 1890s. Werner suggests that military history is particularly resistant to a linear structuring of historical time, not least when the ascendancy of the German state appeared less assured.20 For viewers who harboured anxieties about contemporary German society and its readiness for war, relocating oneself alongside a group of homesick officers in France back in 1870 provided a standpoint from which to think critically about the present: by delaying the return home, by lingering in France in the imagination, it is possible to be, as Svetlana Boym puts it, ‘homesick and sick of home at once’ (Boym 2002: 50). At a superficial level Billet can be read as yet another triumphalist account of the Franco-Prussian War. But Werner eschewed both battle painting and the well-worn anecdote. Instead, he produced a work that engaged with the tradition of representing military command that Menzel had already invested with so much significance. Billet also speaks to Menzel’s ‘daguerrotypical’ scenes depicting ordinary soldiers, and thereby with mid-nineteenth-century photographs of the quotidian experience of war. Further, its overt reference to salon culture infuses it with affective content after the manner of contemporary historical fiction. It afforded the contemporary viewer the opportunity to smile at French bourgeois culture, and to associate it with martial incompetence. But its humour is perhaps brittle, if not quite ironic. The tone of its nostalgic address to the Franco-Prussian War throws Germany’s military present into relief. The narrative of performing excellence, understood as a German martial trait and exemplified by the coherence of groups of German soldiers on campaign, celebrates the conviction that the fighting power of the Prusso-German army had recently been unrivalled in Europe. Werner’s token of spent violence also implies that political–military circumstances might yet succeed in emptying out the Frederician tradition – as had happened in 1806. In the face of perceived challenges to its national interest and anxiety about military supremacy, Germany might again suffer the indignity of defeat.

78

Part Two

80

3

Combat and the Politics of Border Landscapes: Soldier-Farmers

Looking back: Germany’s eastern border and the legacy of the Franco-Prussian War after 1918 In his autobiographical memoir former counterrevolutionary soldier Ernst Salomon writes: Where was Germany? In Weimar, in Berlin? Once it had been at the front, but the front had crumbled. Then it was supposed to be at home, but home had failed them. Was it where the German people were? But they were screaming for food and thinking of their stomachs. Was it the state? But the state was fussing about its constitutional form. Germany survived in venturesome minds. Germany was where swords were unsheathed for her; she was there where armed bands were threatening her existence; she shone resplendent where those who were informed by her spirit wagered all they possessed for her sake. Germany was at her frontiers! (Salomon 1931: 58)

This sentiment, expressed retrospectively, had found its early visual expression in the pages of one of Germany’s leading satirical magazines, Simplicissimus. Three months after the November 1918 Armistice the magazine published Ernst Schilling’s Where is the Germans’ fatherland? Two men stride through a desolate, snow-covered landscape towards a distant provincial town (Figure 9). Their tunics and high boots suggest these itinerant characters are former soldiers. The caption declares: ‘I’m volunteering for the Border Police. There must still be a Germany somewhere or other’ (‘Ich melde mich zum Grenzschutz. Irgendwo muß es doch noch ein Deutschland geben’) (Simplicissimus 23.47 1919: 592). The cohesion of the German army had been dissolving since the Armistice. Soldiers returning from every front were being demobilized as rapidly as possible, but many of them did not wait to complete the bureaucratic niceties; once they had reached German soil they simply drifted away. Not all of them,

82

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

Figure 9  Ernst Schilling, Where is the Germans’ Fatherland?, Simplicissimus 23, no. 47 (18 February 1919), p. 592, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. © bpkBildagentur, Kunstbibliothek, SMB, photograph Dietmar Katz.

however, turned their backs on military life. Salomon’s autobiography makes a case for the motivation of those who opted to remain in uniform and play an active role in confronting perceived threats to national cohesion.1 In early 1919 the National Assembly’s most pressing internal task was the suppression of the Bolshevik revolution in Germany’s conurbations as well as multiple irredentist claims to Germany’s border territories. During the Versailles conference the new Polish state pressed its right to lands still within Germany, even as armed Polish nationalists attempted to dominate the terrain itself in order to pre-empt the verdicts of border commissions. Germany’s new socialist government faced the prospect of small border conflicts that might nevertheless destabilize plans to restore Germany to a peacetime footing. As the German army in the east struggled to withdraw from territory that was now Polish, the League for the Defence against Bolshevism and the Central Office for Domestic Propaganda mounted campaigns calling for volunteers to serve in new military

Combat and the Politics of Border Landscapes: Soldier-Farmers

83

formations whose role was to guarantee border integrity. In the late winter and early spring of 1919 representations of Germany’s border territories abounded in visual culture.2 This chapter tackles a dominant tradition of representing border zones and border conflict rehearsed in illustrated histories extending as far back as Kugler and Menzel’s history of the wars of Frederick the Great. It assesses the extent to which that tradition continued to inform the way border defence was represented after Germany’s defeat in 1918, and will suggest that, in the summer of 1914, established conventions for representing Germany’s border territories won by right of conquest were reactivated, in which the actions of soldiers and farmers together staked a moral claim to German ownership of territory represented as hallowed ground. This claim was typically grounded in the visual rhetoric of performing excellence in battlefield circumstances so tumultuous as to carry the values of the military sublime. Four years later authors of popular histories clung to the values of the Wilhelmine combat vignette, after Menzel. In the light of Germany’s defeat, however, the rhetoric of performing excellence was no longer presented as a guarantee of territorial integrity and a manifestation of German virtues, but as a definitive good in its own right, regardless of battlefield outcomes. Border imagery frequently appealed to a rational understanding of tactical context while simultaneously engaging the viewer’s emotions, in the manner described in Chapter 1. After 1918 images of post-war border conflicts circulated alongside pre-existing representations of earlier military campaigns. Together, they can be understood as components of a sustained address to the experience of conflict that was influential in determining attitudes to German militarism and to militarized landscapes during the Weimar Republic. Posters produced to encourage men to volunteer for general military service after the Armistice also served the wider aim of eliciting support for border security operations in the east. Neither aim was without precedent. The unanimous decision by the owners of the leading satirical magazines in 1914 to suspend criticism of the political establishment and support the war effort led to a shift in representation calculated to advance positive responses to wartime experience.3 Simplicissimus, the more conservative Kladderadatsch and the right-wing Ulk offered readers a regular diet of graphic art that advanced well-rehearsed tropes relating to the defence of the nation’s borderlands. Examples of these works are here examined alongside earlier equivalents found in histories of the FrancoPrussian War, including War and Victory, and Otto Taubert’s portfolio of prints, The Battlefields Around Metz. Taubert’s landscape art is especially noteworthy because of its focus on terrain, and because, like Pflugk-Harttung, he chose to

84

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

concentrate on the major engagement at Vionville to the west of Metz, which had occurred on 16 August 1870.4 The Vionville battle was a defining event in the Franco-Prussian War. Significantly, the post-war settlement ceding Alsace-Lorraine to Germany now placed the former battlefield in Germany, but close to the revised international boundary. Germans who visited Vionville during the Second Reich undertook a pilgrimage to a hallowed place: conquered territory on the outer edge of a politically sensitive border zone.5 The memorials they encountered, like the illustrated histories they looked at and read, underwrote the dominant narrative of exemplary collective performance at war. For reader-viewers who were inspired by these illustrated histories to uphold the exploits of the generation of 1870 – and that was their authors’ intent – Germany did indeed shine resplendent at her frontiers; the nation was literally where swords had been unsheathed for her. To engage with such a history, and/or to visit a battlefield site and gaze at the many monuments and memorials, was to confront irredentism and affirm an acute sense of Deutschtum at the outer periphery of hard-won border territory.6 All of these themes were reactivated in visual representations of Germany’s eastern border in the illustrated press and in propaganda posters in 1919. Post-war posters appealing for volunteers to serve on border operations were influenced by those produced for the propaganda effort targeted at the German home front after 1916, which had prompted a contemporary debate about their artistic value. Artists, art critics and members of the advertising industry questioned whether propaganda posters should be labelled art or kitsch. Simmons notes that van Santen, whose work in propaganda had raised the question, suggested that ‘What for us is kitsch, sham, false, crude sensation, for hundreds of thousands of viewers is a beautiful image, by which they are truly moved, because it releases feelings of compassion and sentimentality’ (Simmons 1998: 27).7 Van Santen’s belief that a direct appeal to the emotions validated graphic art work is significant, because images in Wilhelmine illustrated histories were also calculated to prompt an affective response, including feelings of fear and awe, and to foster a strong emotional attachment to the nation’s borders. Whether art or kitsch, W. J. T. Mitchell considers landscape art to be ‘a medium, a vast network of cultural codes, rather than a specialised genre of painting’ (Mitchel 2002: 13). Popular landscape representations of Germany’s border territories, activated via an appeal to the emotions, were codified as symbols of the nation itself. Schilling, for example, appeals to an established mode of imagining border terrain, but only obliquely. The two figures in Where is the Germans’ Fatherland? traverse the frozen heartland of Germany denoting

Combat and the Politics of Border Landscapes: Soldier-Farmers

85

a nation seasonally drained of energy. The borderland they imagine in affective terms lies literally over the horizon, but metaphorically, that longed-for terrain is nothing less than the Nation under their feet, reborn. Thomas Theodor Heine’s New Year’s Wish 1915, published in Simplicissimus on 29 December 1914, offers an insight into how representations of Germany’s borderlands were codified in a manner that, through frequent use, naturalized the terms on which they were imagined in German culture (Figure 10). The mailed left arm of an otherwise unseen Teutonic knight extends across the foreground,

Figure 10  Thomas Theodor Heine, New Year’s Wish 1915, lithograph, Simplicissimus 19, no. 39 (29 December 1914), p. 511, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. © bpk-Bildagentur, Kunstbibliothek, SMB, photograph Dietmar Katz.

86

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

holding aside a curtain to reveal a pastoral Germany. Against a backdrop of pine-clad hills, fields and archaicizing farm buildings, a farmer works a plough pulled by two horses. The caption reads: In peace secure the plough may work the land And the sun, which shone on heroes’ graves, May confer thereon its richest blessings In the recently-victorious free Fatherland!8

The reality of contemporary conflict is alluded to and simultaneously displaced: only the text locates the reader-viewer in the present. The armoured limb locates this drawing in a tradition that is the subject of Allen Frantzen’s research addressing how nineteenth-century iconography of medieval chivalry was invoked during the Great War to promote values including duty and selfsacrifice.9 As in Where is the Germans’ Fatherland? the viewer stands behind a soldier cast in the role of a protector of the nation who gazes at the fatherland from the periphery. Heine’s work qualifies Raymond Williams’ remark that ‘a working country is hardly ever a landscape’ (Mitchell 2002: viii). Heine depicts a working landscape tilled by Germans behind a German shield. Values associated with conquest, defence, surveillance, tillage and long-term settlement cohere in a representation of combined military and civilian labour that is definitively representative of the dominant way in which Germany’s borderlands were continuously represented in popular visual culture, at least from 1871. Heinrich Zille’s East Prussians! (Ostpreußen!), published when fear of invading Russian armies fuelled the popular imagination, conforms to this paradigm (Figure 11). The inscription reads: The wave of Huns [invaders from the east] is smashed, The German soil is free! The man in the field, the woman in the field – Their plough horse lengthens its stride!!10

Zille invokes an established borderland trope. A robust female figure turns towards the sun on the distant horizon as she ploughs the land. Her rearward glance suggests the projection of thoughts about her absent husband, for the word ‘field’ (Feld) in the text functions as a pun in both English and German, where it can be read as ‘agricultural field’ and ‘on military operations’ (i.e., ‘in the field’). The partially ploughed field curving gently into pictorial depth dominates pictorial space. The linear quality of the furrows contrasts with the tangled profusion of stalks growing on the undisturbed land under the horse’s

Combat and the Politics of Border Landscapes: Soldier-Farmers

87

hooves. German soil (German by dint of long-term occupation) is rescued from the threat of encroachment, set free by the annual act of turning-in the weeds that threaten to spill onto the latest furrow. Ploughing-in also functions as a metaphor for the near-complete destruction of two Russian armies advancing into East Prussia during the first weeks of the war.11 Hardy East Prussian values

Figure 11  Heinrich Zille, East Prussians!, lithograph, Ulk 43, no. 37 (11 September 1914), p. 8, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. © bpk-Bildagentur, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.

88

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

are asserted by this sensuous address to landscape. The woman, her fiery horse and absent husband – located, like Heine’s ploughman, under the rays of the sun – signify German communities imagined as engaged in hard physical labour in German’s agrarian borderlands, resisting both nature’s incursions and Slavic predation.12 The poignant connotations of Zille’s worked landscape are fundamental to the meaning of the work. In a different but related context, Martin Warnke has suggested that the development of ‘atmospheric landscape’ art in sixteenthcentury Venice – of landscape art that elicited an emotional response – ‘made it possible not only to construe, but to experience the meaning of a picture’, and that this made possible ‘the politicization of landscape moods’, particularly when internal contrasts were present (Warnke 1994: 116–17). In Zille’s work a simultaneous address to peace and war is operative. The ambiguity as to whether Zille represents dawn or dusk is telling because, in the context of the putative harmonious relationship between East Prussian society and nature, his address to the daily rhythm of rural life suggests seasonal, annual and historical cycles of experience certifying a long-established right to ownership. Presuming a cyclical model of historical development, Warnke points out that ‘there is hardly any political situation that cannot be elucidated by comparisons with the sun’ (Warnke 1994: 121), but the text accompanying the Heine employs a commonplace interpretation of representations of sunlight that is linear in its trajectory. Sunlight falls on all Germans, connoting an imagined community past, present and future, that is the nation, not least heroes in their borderland graves. Zille’s pun on ‘field’, referring to sites of both agricultural and military action, suggests that both farming and warfighting enact spatial legislation, determine rights and divide up terrain. In an agrarian context, however, the narrative does not take the form of a linear travel story. Zille’s rising/setting sun, the turning-in of last year’s weeds and the projected act of turning round in the unseen headland suggested by the weeds against the picture plane all offer a narrative tightly bound to the specificities of place and the repetition of seasonal tasks. The spatial vectors that trace this rural place are those of the German Volk. Their cyclical actions, repeated over centuries of occupation, are the essence of a story-spirit that legislates the moral right to ownership. Their dwellings – also depicted in Thomas Theodor Heine’s New Year’s Wish – function here as equivalents to memorials in representations of conflict, and the turned earth suggests the figure of soldiers’ graves. The woman’s rearward gaze towards the sunlit horizon, over which her husband serves as a reservist with the army,

Combat and the Politics of Border Landscapes: Soldier-Farmers

89

conflates an implied high-tempo, linear travel story of war and an account of settlement defined by the slow turning of the seasons over generations. The two are inextricably intertwined. The invocation of forebears whose conduct is worthy of emulation advances the case for continuity: self-sacrifice on behalf of the homeland implicates the landscape in human affairs and in the maintenance of hard-won border territory. Zille’s narrative extends spatially and temporally beyond the depicted scene, in which the experiential distance between peace and war is collapsed through the emotive recognition that in Germany’s eastern borderlands both entail existential struggle. He suggests that an ever-present warlike condition prevails in East Prussia, serving as a just cause for going to war in defence of those who enact their sense of Deutschtum daily, in harmony with nature. Zille and Heine both naturalize a moral claim to German ownership. The determinants of this claim can be summarized as: contested terrain won by military conquest and defended against irredentist claims; land worked in a traditional manner by hardy German communities; a politicized visual space in which soldiers and farmers (soldierfarmers too) work in partnership to maintain the region’s political identity. In 1919, through a process of continuous recycling, visual representations of border territories were symbolic of nothing less than German identity itself. Karl Hachez, The Homeland is in Danger! (Die Heimat ist in Gefahr!), a poster produced by the post-war League for the Defence against Bolshevism, works out of this established borderland trope. An ape-like monster advances over the horizon towards the viewer. Its leading foot crushes a village set in a lightly sketched landscape across which diminutive figures flee. The motif of the colossus was widely employed during the First World War. In the early months of the war it was occasionally associated with the notion of inexorable German progress, but more commonly it represented the Allied threat. In a wider European context, Warnke has noted with reference to examples back to 1767 how: ‘tradition and previous example … prompt[ed] the setting up of a giant figure to dominate the landscape when an irrefutable message is to be conveyed to a country and its inhabitants’ (Warnke 1994: 95). Until the latenineteenth century the colossus generally functioned as a figure designed to welcome the viewer and propagate positive values, but in the Life of Frederick, Menzel nevertheless represents the threat of domination by a foreign power as a colossus defiling a landscape. Kugler’s title page for Chapter XXIII, ‘Political relations previous to the Seven Years’ War’, features a wood-engraving of a colossus in antique armour striding frontally towards the viewer, mouth open, with a flaming brand in one

90

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

hand and a scourge in the other. Set against a highly abstracted background of low hills on a distant horizon and viewed from a low angle, Menzel’s muscular allegory of incipient war towers over the viewer (Figure 12). What differentiate the Menzel from Hachez’s work most significantly are the terms on which the colossus is depicted in relation to the landscape. Menzel’s abstracted landscape suggests that the deleterious impact of war is a universal experience, in his context applicable to all those caught up in the Seven Years’ War. The appeal of this image is conditioned by the fact that it relates to events that had occurred beyond living memory: the harsh reality of conflict visited on people and their property is called to mind vicariously from the viewer’s chair. In contrast, however, Hachez threatens a vision of a near future in a specific time and place. Like the arm of Zille’s knight, the colossus on the horizon is suggestive of an event that might yet be experienced any time soon in Germany’s borderlands.13 Although Hachez too presents a sketchy landscape, it is far less abstracted than Menzel’s, and functions as a convincing space from which the victims of war extricate themselves. The large number of contemporary representations of German borderlands provided contemporary viewers with a coherent set of visual prompts that together reinforced their shared meaning. Hachez’s colossus does not embody universal qualities or abstracted ideals. It stamps on hallowed ground – Germany’s eastern borderlands, secured by military conquest, long-

Figure 12 Adolph Menzel, Allegory of War (Colossus), wood-engraving, Life of Frederick the Great (Kugler and Menzel 1877: 281). Digital scan: author.

Combat and the Politics of Border Landscapes: Soldier-Farmers

91

defended against irredentist claims and worked for generations by German agrarian communities. In the act of ranging unchecked over this landscape, Hachez suggests, the monster defiles the entire nation. The borderland trope features frequently in posters urging men to volunteer for military service immediately after the First World War, even when the units concerned were not intended for border duties. Impekoven’s 1919 Assault Battalion Schmidt (Sturmbataillon Schmidt), for example, appeals for recruits to serve with the Horse Guards Division (Garde-Kavallerie Schützen Division), a Berlin-based formation raised in December 1918 to counter the threat posed by the communist Spartacist movement. Despite the Division’s orientation towards Germany’s urban conurbations, the poster’s appeal is grounded in the pictorial rhetoric of borderland security. The head and shoulders of a soldier in steel helmet and greatcoat dominate the picture plane. Behind his massive outline a sketchy landscape containing both agricultural and industrial motifs extends to a low horizon.14 This military colossus offers an implied comparison with representations of contemporary Slavic/Bolshevik monsters of the type depicted in The Homeland is in Danger! The stasis of the figure contrasts with the mobility of monsters striding malevolently into German territory. The would-be recruit, who recently looked up at Hachez’s threatening colossus, now gazes directly at the volunteer soldier’s determined face: he too can metaphorically assume gigantic form by becoming a member of a large and powerful organization, if he enlists. The soldier’s bulk implicitly checks the active colossus who aspires to the terrain seen in depth; over his martial shoulders a coveted landscape lies secure.

Alsace-Lorraine Germany’s eastern border received considerable artistic attention in the years between 1914 and 1920 because this was the border that had appeared most vulnerable at the outbreak of war, and which was actively contested in the months following the Armistice.15 In the years after unification in 1871, however, it was Germany’s western border with France that received equivalent attention. Between 1871 and 1914 landscape representations of sites in the annexed territories of Alsace-Lorraine resonated strongly in both French and German culture. Images of former battlefields in the pages of illustrated histories of the Franco-Prussian War remained instrumental in determining how Germany’s eastern borderlands were imagined after the First World War, not least because representations of the very recent First World War battlefields could

92

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

not provide a useable resource in this regard because: the First World War had been fought abroad; Germany had withdrawn behind national boundaries; and modern artillery created physical conditions unlike those in which post-war border operations were conducted. As the subsequent chapter will argue, this is not to say that the conditions in which the First World War was fought were so extraordinary that they compelled a clean break with the past, but for the moment it will suffice to note that while conditions on the Western Front, in particular, themselves constituted a wartime border zone without precedent, it was a border zone that bore little relation to the experience of pre- and post-First World War border conflicts. Many of the militarily significant events of the opening phase of the FrancoPrussian War took place on French territory subsequently ceded to Germany, a political reality that shaped the content of popular histories in which Germany’s new western borderlands are represented as hard-won landscapes maintained behind a military shield. In post-1918 images of Germany’s eastern borders, the subject of military conquest, defence and surveillance is commonly subordinated to that of tillage and an established German way of life. In representations of Germany’s borderlands in Alsace-Lorraine after 1871, however, these values are reversed: representations of agricultural labour are subordinated to those of recent military action. Certeau’s often-rehearsed theorization of ‘spatial stories’ provides a vehicle for exploring the implications of this reordering of military and agrarian values. Certeau writes: ‘stories … traverse and organise places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories’ (Certeau 1988: 115). Certeau argues that all stories are travel stories because they present narratives in which characters transit from place to place – either literally, or in their imagination or memory. The spatial trajectories ascribed to actors are to be understood as geographies of actions, defined by the relationship between ‘place’ and ‘space’: Place … is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. … A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. [Space exists] ‘when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it … space is a practiced place. [The ‘being-there’ of place and the activities that condition space are intertwined in] ‘stories [that] carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places’. (Certeau 1988: 116–18)

Combat and the Politics of Border Landscapes: Soldier-Farmers

93

Certeau’s interpolation of space and place provides the means to construct a typology of images of combat in border territories, determined by the way places are defined and spaces actualized, and how the two categories interrelate, beginning with vignettes drawn from the Life of Frederick and War and Victory. Volume 1 of Pflugk-Harttung’s illustrated history of the Franco-Prussian War addresses military culture and specialist capabilities; Volume 2 is a linear history of the war. Like the Kugler–Menzel, whose text-image dynamic it emulates, virtually every double page includes either a drawing, an engraving or, occasionally, a photomechanically reproduced photograph. Subject matter includes portraits of commanders; details of uniforms and equipment; allegorical motifs; vignettes representing incidents described in the adjacent textual narrative; landscape views of battlefield terrain and memorials; technical drawings of fortifications and military equipment; battle scenes (including academic history paintings in reproduction); and annotated maps. Volume 2 is structured chronologically, beginning with the political origins of the war and ending with victory parades and the triumphant return of heroes to their proud families. Pflugk-Harttung’s account of the battle at Vionville on 16 August 1870 is allocated a generous 25 pages in Volume 2, reflecting its overall significance to the outcome of the campaign.16 The choice of supporting images is typical of the book: two studies of helmets; four portraits of generals; one memorial (to the 5th Division); four battle paintings; three half-page line drawings depicting battle scenes; five vignettes depicting tactical combat events; and three landscape views of battlefield terrain.17 The vignettes bear a close formal affinity to Menzel’s wood-engravings in the Life of Frederick, and they function in a similar manner, enlivening the textual description of a particular event. Figure 13, Menzel’s Incident from the Battle of Torgau, for example, accompanies Kugler’s account of combat itself: A part of the Prussian army was obliged to march on the skirt of the wood, but the enemy’s cannon penetrated even thither. The trees fell shattered on all sides, crushing all beneath them. A huge oak bough gave way immediately above the king’s head, killing two men in front of him. The king was obliged to dismount, and lead his troops on foot into the plain. (Kugler 1877: 459)

Menzel assigns the reader-viewer the king’s viewpoint, standing in the wood, where a shattered bough pins two soldiers to the ground as others take flight from falling branches. An equivalent drama is enacted in War and Victory. Ernst Zimmer’s Four Riflemen Near Vionville depicts four Prussian infantrymen standing their ground in front of a splintered tree in the face of French artillery

94

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

Figure 13  Adolph Menzel, Incident from the Battle of Torgau, wood-engraving, Life of Frederick the Great (Kugler and Menzel 1877: 459). Digital scan: author.

fire (Figure 14). Like Menzel, Zimmer locates the reader-viewer alongside the combatants. His representation of the moral transcendence of an explosive moment of pure violence represents the experience of combat at its most intense. Both works invoke the emotional appeal of the military sublime.18 Menzel and Zimmer’s works share a spatial syntax characterized by the absence of referents to specific places, which is not to say, however, that they are totally detached from a sense of location. A glance at the contents pages of these two histories demonstrates how closely the overall structure of the typical popular military history is bound up in the framework of place. Book III of the Kugler–Menzel, for example, which deals with the history of the Seven Years’ War, demonstrates how accounts of military campaigns are typically structured around significant engagements. Chapters are categorized by year, followed by the place name of the most significant engagement. For example: ‘Chapter XXX. Continuation of the Campaign of 1758 – Zorndorf ’, and ‘Chapter XXXI. Conclusion of the Campaign of 1758 – Hochkirch’ (Kugler 1877). Pflugk-Harttung signposts the campaign of 1870–1 in a similar manner: Chapter II is titled ‘From Spicheren to Vionville’ and its successor ‘St Privat-la-Montagne and Metz’ (Pflugk-Harttung 1896: x). The high tempo that characterized the opening phase of the war translates into a catalogue of linked places (from … to/and), which, when cited, mark out

Combat and the Politics of Border Landscapes: Soldier-Farmers

95

Figure 14  Ernst Zimmer, Four Riflemen Near Vionville, in War and Victory, 1870-71 (Pflugk-Harttung 1896a: 143). Digital scan: author.

the spatial trajectory of a military travel story. Within a wider context that privileges landmark events occurring in particular places, these two popular histories represent the actions of soldiers in a manner that promotes the affective experience of combat. The text informs the reader that one is ‘near Torgau’, the other ‘near Vionville’, but the images themselves are nevertheless devoid of specific landscape referents; the reader-viewer’s attention is focused on the actions of soldiers operating in conditions of acute danger. The physical boundaries established by text, page and binding, generate a compression that heightens the viewer’s emotional response to the lived intensity of the sublime moment. This approach to place and space characterizes Menzel’s entire contribution to the Life of Frederick; with the exception of the royal palaces to which he, and many of the authors’ intended reader-viewers, had access,

96

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

Menzel seldom claims to depict the actual features of a place where the events narrated had occurred. Kugler and Menzel worked out of Prussia’s state archive in order to elevate the popular memory of Frederick beyond received anecdotes about his life. In Menzel’s case this necessitated paying close attention to the many surviving artefacts in the royal palaces. The outcome is an illustrated travel story whose spatial trajectory frames a textual narrative offering a detailed exposition of the complex issues informing Frederician decision-making. Menzel’s woodengravings, on the other hand, function as a counterpoint to Kugler’s text; they retain an anecdotal quality because of their absence of external referents, their representation of spatializing actions performed in compressed places, and their appeal to the emotions. Representations of well-known Frederician anecdotes – such as Menzel’s Bon soir, Messieurs!, discussed in Chapter 2 – are woven into a wider fabric of anecdotal vignettes that satisfy on two counts: they permit the reader-viewer to engage at an affective level with imagined moments of varying degrees of military significance; and they punctuate a text devoid of maps, diagrams or landscape views which might locate them in specific topographical contexts, even though Kugler’s travel story is studded with place names and descriptions of topography and climate. In the context of a typography of illustrated military histories, what is significant about this influential example is that the text alone carries out the labour of conveying the reader from place to place. The spatial trajectories it describes are unsupported by a comprehensive, still less a unifying, address to visual representations of terrain, such as a series of accompanying campaign maps would provide. The Life of Frederick is a complex benchmark work against which to examine what came later. Not all Menzel’s wood-engravings can be described as vignettes, for example. The full-page illustrations and some of the larger wood-engravings set into the text are more ambitious projects that reflect the compositional strategies of history painting, including multiple figure groups, a clearly delineated border, and spatial complexity into illusionistic depth. This combination of image types is also a feature of War and Victory, in which vignettes and half-page drawings abound, some of which establish a connection with history painting. The two popular histories, one dealing with the wars of the previous century, the other a recent conflict, are nevertheless visually distinct in significant ways. War and Victory parades its investment in the latest technologies of photomechanical reproduction to include line blocks of battle paintings in oil by high-profile painters, including Knötel, who responded to the demand for battle painting in both France and Germany after 1871. Overall,

Combat and the Politics of Border Landscapes: Soldier-Farmers

97

art works and illustrated popular books, including War and Victory, furnished accessible memories of recent borderland conflict. The reproduction of battle paintings in War and Victory is just one of the features distinguishing it from the Life of Frederick. In particular, the representation of territory recently ceded to Germany extended the rhetorical opportunities available to Pflugk-Harttung. The Battlefield Seen from the South (a contemporary sketch by W. Emelé) (Die Schlacht von Süden gesehen (Gleichzeitige Skizze von W. Emelé)) is one of a pair of sketches by Wilhelm Emelé depicting the terrain on which the engagement at Vionville began on the morning of 16 August 1870 (Figure 15).19 Emelé presents a naturalistic view of the lie of the land as seen from the forward edge of the German position early in the battle, offering visual access to a part of the battlefield that was strongly contested.20 The detritus of war litters the foreground, testifying to an intensely fought engagement. Emelé’s address to place is rigorously observed: the settlements in their agricultural setting today appear to a visitor on foot very much as they did when Emelé sketched them. His naturalism is significant because, unlike the accounts of battle in the Kugler–Menzel, which provide schematic summaries of tactical actions, War and Victory sets up the spatial trajectories of the participants in acute geographical detail. Pflugk-Harttung’s overall approach transforms the terrain around Vionville into a theatrical space in which the spatializing actions of the protagonists are shaped by physical geography. The momentum of the overall travel story of the campaign is temporarily suspended in order to immerse the reader-viewer in the intricate spatializing minutiae of a complex and sustained action over a

Figure 15  Wilhelm Emelé, The Battlefield Seen from the South, (a contemporary sketch by W. Emelé), in War and Victory, 1870-71 (Pflugk-Harttung 1896a: 132). Digital scan: author.

98

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

large battlefield. Emelé’s naturalistic representation of the open, gently rolling terrain presents this border landscape as an acutely practised place in which the opportunities and constraints afforded by subtle shifts in visual perspective, apprehended first by combatants and then by the reader-viewer, are integral to the account. By implicating the reader-viewer in its address to physical geography, War and Victory collapses the distance between the remote act of reading/viewing/imagining and the specificities of historical activity on the terrain itself. Battle vignettes and sketches typically depict actions that propel the trajectory of the battlefield narrative towards a local conclusion embedded within the wider overall travel story. In a weak sense, Emelé’s landscape sketch does so too, tracing the distance between historical actor and reader-viewer through its address to historical time. In the right foreground a mounted soldier rides purposefully in the direction of the distant horizon. But the sense of momentum the figure conveys is notable by its absence in the remainder of the work; close scrutiny reveals that the fields are studded with crosses marking mass graves. Time has elapsed since the battle but not much, for abandoned weapons and equipment still lie where they were dropped. Together, they function synecdochically to remind the reader of the human cost of combat, and also forge a visual link to the detailed representations of uniforms and equipment in the accompanying vignettes, prompting the viewer to recall the spatializing representations of combat. Emelé’s depiction of the fields south of Vionville includes a further group of actors in the landscape: a pair of figures stand on the track in front of the horseman and, silhouetted on the near horizon to left of centre, are three diminutive forms, one of whom traverses the terrain. While the spatial trajectory of the horseman propels the reader forward towards that portion of the overall narrative that lies beyond the battle at Vionville, the orientation of the standing figures holds the reader-viewer in check: the near stasis of the figures adjacent to the discarded equipment and graves provokes a return to place. Emelé’s landscapes play a pivotal role in a chapter that affirms Certeau’s dictum that stories carry out a labour that continuously transforms places into spaces or spaces into places. And, because they recall sublime military events, they function to suggest that the terrain around Vionville, now on the periphery of the Reich’s recently acquired western borderlands, is hallowed ground. Emelé’s works depict territory hard-won on terms described in the accompanying text. Emelé’s address to time is fundamental to the rhetorical appeal of his sketches. The Battlefield Seen from the South straddles an imagined recent

Combat and the Politics of Border Landscapes: Soldier-Farmers

99

past and a pictorial present. The notion of a ‘contemporary’ (wartime) sketch, proposed by the Emelé, is rendered ambiguous because it simultaneously deals with the ‘now’ of the turn-of-the-century. Reader-viewers were prompted to respond emotionally to this sensuous representation of a battlefield in which they are located simultaneously in the present, and in the moment of the events described. His combined address to an imagined past and a pictorial present prompts the realization that simultaneity may be multifaceted. The figures depicted on the recent battlefield are, like the reader-viewer, rehearsing the memory of a landmark event from the recent past by traversing the hallowed ground on which it occurred. The figures’ spatializing actions, shaped like those of combatants, by the terrain, may be perceived as exemplary. Their presence, motivated by the desire to ‘see where it happened’ serves as a model of behaviour associated with a memorializing practice that might today be referred to as a battlefield tour. The last of Emelé’s three Vionville landscapes, The Gully of the Alzon at Marsla-Tour (Die Alzonschlucht bei Mars-la-Tour), depicts ‘A valley gorge, both of whose slopes have been turned into fields, with meadows, through which a small (mostly dry) beck flows’ (Ein Thalgrund, dessen Sohle, von einen kleinen (meist trockenen) Bache durchflossen, mit Wiesen, dessen beiderseitigen Abhänge mit Ackerfeld bestellt sind). Although Emelé claims that this landscape too is based on a wartime sketch, he depicts a post-war scene. In the right foreground two German soldiers on horseback, neither of whom is equipped for combat operations, survey the terrain. One points to the ground on which, the readerviewer learns, a large-scale cavalry action occurred. To their left a farmer ploughs an adjacent field. Narratives of past war and present tillage behind a military shield are condensed into a single composition in which neither set of spatializing actions is privileged. Together, they affirm the moral right to German occupancy of this borderland.

Otto Taubert’s landscape prints Otto Taubert’s portfolio of landscape views and maps, which occupies a different category in the typology of illustrated histories of the FrancoPrussian War, further develops the relationship between an imaginative return to place offered by illustrated accounts of the Franco-Prussian War, and the notion of the battlefield tour. The Metz Battlefields addresses the series of engagements around the city in August 1870 that led to the encirclement

100

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

of a French army on France’s eastern border. Like Pflugk-Harttung, Taubert narrates the history of the action via a combination of text and image. Unlike War and Victory, however, The Metz Battlefields privileges the visual. A short textual summary of events is followed by a series of large-format prints, some of which depict the same terrain Emelé represents and, by way of contrast, usefully expose how most – but not all – images in War and Victory position the viewer in the ‘now’ of combat in compressed, generic contexts similar to Menzel’s vignettes. War and Victory provides a point of entry to Taubert’s invitation to regard battlefield sites as locations to be visited, if only in the imagination. PflugkHarttung’s Vionville chapter concludes with a print depicting one of the most distinctive – and most illustrated – of German Franco-Prussian War memorials in the territories annexed in 1871: The 5th Division Memorial at Flavigny (Denkmal der 5. Division bei Flavigny), today stripped of its sculpture and other metallic components, which once comprised a Prussian eagle, wings outstretched in an aggressive pose, perched on a pyramid of roughly hewn blocks of stone located on a low mound (Figure 16). Attached to the stones and the surrounding wrought-iron fencework were plaques commemorating the 5th Division units which had participated in the battle. The memorial, in itself and in representation, was intended to function as a focal point for physical and intellectual acts of remembrance. The positioning of this image at the end of the Vionville chapter punctuates the overall narrative. It prompts the viewer to pause and follow the example set by Emelé’s figures scrutinizing the battlefield, before turning away and re-engaging with the campaign narrative. At the chapter’s end, the reader-viewer is simultaneously located in the battle, its immediate aftermath and the post-war present. Taubert, on the other hand, plants his viewer emphatically in Germany’s western borderlands in his present day. Unlike War and Victory’s occasional retrospective excursions, the profusion of memorials depicted in Taubert’s frontispiece, and the maturity of their attending foliage, dates the making of The Metz Battlefields to the late-nineteenth century present. The frontispiece takes the form of a commemorative print in which 32 battlefield memorials are represented within a heavy rectangular border garlanded with laurel. A hierarchy of value is suggested: the memorial to the 5th Division at Vionville, viewed from the same angle as the image in War and Victory, occupies one of the four privileged corner sites. Taubert typically positions the memorials themselves close to the picture plane and includes the surrounding vegetation as a component of the memorializing aesthetic – as intended. His angle of vision

Combat and the Politics of Border Landscapes: Soldier-Farmers

101

Figure 16  Wilhelm Emelé, The 5th Division Memorial at Flavigny, War and Victory (Pflugk-Harttung 1896a: 149). Digital scan: author.

offers a naturalistic perspective, as if viewing the memorials from ground level. Vegetation functions to demonstrate that the monuments depicted in the corner illustrations are, in reality, larger, and so, compositionally, the viewer looks up at them. The overall visual effect suggests the plan view of a fortress with corner towers, in which case Elsass, represented metonymically by the memorials in representation, functions as a military bastion providing the first line of defence against French irredentism, each individual memorial within it functioning as a metaphorical border stone demarcating the boundaries of the Reich. Images in The Metz Battlefields are more independent of wider context than the tightly circumscribed interweaving of text and image in War and Victory. Taubert offers the viewer greater pictorial and emotional latitude for personal contemplation, analogous to that prompted by a battlefield tour. Socially, the

102

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

terrain around Metz provided easy-reach opportunities for the transmission of founding myths of nationhood through commemorative visits, not least by its substantial veteran population.21 Technologically, illustrated histories now benefited from the ease with which illustrations could now be reproduced using halftone and photogravure technologies, in addition to the established woodengraving tradition. Economically, the railway infrastructure, developed to meet anticipated defensive requirements, facilitated access. The battlefield pilgrimage, from home to hallowed ground and back, rehearsed spatializing actions that echoed those of the war itself, as established in the travel stories of illustrated histories in which landscape images allowed reader-viewer-pilgrims to engage imaginatively with place and space. The 5th Division memorial is depicted in two of Taubert’s Vionville landscapes. In The Vionville Battlefield (Das Schlachtfeld von Vionville) the viewer stands behind the structure, looking down from the crest of the hill over which 5th Division attacked (Figure 17). The primacy of the memorial is unchallenged: Taubert does not allow the viewer’s gaze to usurp that of the eagle, or offer the same unimpeded visual access to the terrain.22 The Vionville Battlefield is accompanied by an annotated sketch: View of the Vionville Battlefield (Blick auf d. Schlachtfeld v. Vionville) outlines the salient terrain and aids the readerviewer’s orientation. Like Emelé’s The Battlefield Seen from the South, Taubert’s The Vionville Battlefield offers a naturalistic representation easily reconciled with the terrain. But while Emelé’s work transports the viewer back to the days

Figure 17  Otto Taubert, The Vionville Battlefield, engraving, The Metz Battlefields, 1894–1901, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. © bpk-Bildagentur, Staatsbibli­ othek zu Berlin.

Combat and the Politics of Border Landscapes: Soldier-Farmers

103

after the engagement, the presence of the memorial in Taubert’s work asserts the viewer’s temporal distance from wartime events; Taubert’s concern is not with the minutiae of what had occurred, but what the viewer will see and experience there today. What unites all these landscape works, however, is their address to war graves.

War graves In Emelé’s landscape the mounds topped by crosses compete for the viewer’s attention; in the Taubert their presence is definitive. The hollow contours of View of the Vionville Battlefield function as a frame on which Taubert locates and inscribes battlefield memorials, and is supported by a chart listing the combat units that made up the German Order of Battle at Vionville.23 Taubert incorporates techniques associated with the academic landscape genre. Gently rising terrain is bathed in sunlight under a bank of white clouds, while the textured surfaces of backlit trees accentuate recession into pictorial space. Taubert’s invocation of picturesque aesthetics confers an air of reflective tranquillity under the aggressive pose of a watchful German eagle. However The Vionville Battlefield is not exclusively concerned with the memorialization in a weak or generic sense: the 5th Division memorial dominating the foreground merely provides a contextualizing point of entry for encountering the will to battle of the German soldier. This otherwise unremarkable landscape extending to the tree-lined Metz-Verdun road in the distance is thickly studded with grave markers that reactivate the spatializing actions of the battle. The transaction between place and space is activated by Taubert in a way that stimulates the viewer to respond interrogatively via a visual encounter that recalls, locates and relates the dynamics of the past battle within the framework provided by local monuments. The readerviewer, prompted by Taubert’s landscapes into conducting a battlefield tour in the imagination, navigates a landscape ‘haunted by the story-spirit’ (Certeau 1988: 125). The Avenue of Death (Die Todtenallee) is representative of the content of the final section of Taubert’s portfolio in which he extends the pictorial values of the picturesque to develop the metaphysical dimension of a haunted storyspirit (Figure 18). The viewer is located close to a bend in a tree-lined track from which a fragment of a former battlefield is visible, shorn of visual clues offering spatializing context. Natural phenomena determine the viewer’s mode

104

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

Figure 18  Otto Taubert, The Avenue of Death, engraving, The Metz Battlefields, 1894– 1901, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. © bpk-Bildagentur, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.

of perception. During a cloud break mass graves are momentarily glimpsed in an adjoining field bathed in the light of a full moon. The graves, shorn of the framework provided in the commemorative battlefield landscapes discussed above, lie in a landscape in which nature assumes the guise of higher authority. The graves, and the terrain in which they lie, are offered as worthy subject matter for the landscape artist, and as national sites of profound significance to be venerated by the battlefield tourist. Graves here function as pictorial equivalents to the memorials depicted in Taubert’s wide-format landscapes. They demarcate a place in Germany’s western borderlands, ‘specific in its location and history, scarred and traced by spatial vectors and movements across its face’.24 In addition to providing positional prompts about the spatializing course of a historical event, they suggest a heightened emotional response to the memory of the exemplary commitment of German men who went forward in the face of the fog and friction of combat against near-overwhelming odds, forging a link between the ‘then’ of the military sublime and its retrospective invocation in the ‘now’ of the picturesque. Taubert’s portfolio of landscapes depicting borderland terrain enriches the story-spirit by appealing strongly to the viewer’s emotions.

Combat and the Politics of Border Landscapes: Soldier-Farmers

105

Certeau’s determination that stories ‘determine rights and divide up lands by “acts” or discourses about actions’ and enact ‘spatial legislation’ (Certeau 1988: 122) is both politically and geographically pertinent in the case of German popular histories of conquest and annexation as a result of the Franco-Prussian War. To invest in them emotionally or intellectually in late-nineteenth-century Germany was to rehearse the moral validity of the post-war border settlement. Taubert’s address to the romantic values of place in The Avenue of Death suggests that spatial legislation is never stronger than when it comes with a deep-rooted emotional attachment. In contrast to the Kugler–Menzel, which sets out to establish a deep-rooted attachment to Frederick, popular illustrated accounts of the Franco-Prussian War foster an emotional attachment to Germany’s new borderlands. This representative sample of representations of the Vionville battlefield suggest how spatializing accounts of decisions, actions, causes and effects provided a phenomenological context that overburdened the values assigned to representations of specific places. Together, these illustrated accounts of wartime events affirmed Germany’s entitlement to the terrain to the west of Metz, represented as hallowed ground on which German heroes had fought and died. Over 130 years later, all these illustrated accounts still function as they did when published – as surrogate, or armchair, battlefield tours. Taubert’s and Emelé’s works can still be used as aides to physical, narratological and psychological orientation on terrain that remains largely unchanged.25 Their art works, viewed in conjunction with accompanying narratives and surviving memorials, suggest a rational address to battlefield dynamics understood as a manifestation of the physical and conceptual components of fighting power, and, above all, prompt an affective response to the moral component: the human experience of campaigning.26 Illustrated histories of the FrancoPrussian War functioned in Wilhelmine culture as compendia of some of the most politically significant geographies in the Reich. Whether they offered fluid narratives that provoked a vicarious response to the imagined experience of combat at its most sublime, as in the case of War and Victory, or whether they encouraged reflective memory prompted by a romantic address to landscapes studded with graves, as with The Metz Battlefields, they did so with due regard to the specificity of practised places activated by accounts of recent military action. For German visitors after 1871 they reaffirmed legitimate ownership of precious borderlands. Whether Germans merely read/viewed a history, or also took the trip, they embarked on a travel story in which historical spatial trajectories inscribed on contemporary German places fuelled an emotional commitment to the post-war settlement.

4

Combat and the Politics of Landscape: Trench Warfare

Illustrated histories of the Franco-Prussian War were instrumental in determining how the coming conflict was imagined in German culture at the outset of the First World War. In August 1914 optimistic representations of the anticipated new conflict abounded. The double-sized 21 August edition of the conservative satirical magazine Ulk, for example, includes Halke’s The Cheers of the Fathers (Das Hurrah der Väter) (Figure 19). In the lower half of the drawing closed ranks of contemporary soldiers advance into battle. Above them a Baroque Host, the generation of 1870, gazes down from a turbulent firmament, furnishing its own example by way of encouragement. Like their decedents below they surge forward, active poses replaying spatializing actions during the Franco-Prussian War. Halke works out of representations of conflict presented as exemplary in popular histories including War and Victory, foregrounding the moral qualities of the German soldier. His exposure to academic military painting and to illustrated histories is evident in the way the sons advance in an attack formation commonly depicted in Franco-Prussian War battle painting.1 Halke’s address to place and space activates the rhetorical content. The soldiers’ trajectory propels them past named locations haunted in the German imagination by the story-spirit of the Franco-Prussian War. In the left foreground he conflates the twin markers of hallowed ground: the war grave and the memorial. Above a series of graves he erects four oversized markers inscribed with the names of landmark battles, conferring on them the attributes of memorials, three of which relate to territory ceded to Germany in 1871.2 The cloud on which the veterans stand rises from this hallowed ground, embodying the spirit of 1870–1 and the moral qualities of the German soldier. Halke’s spatializing syntax simultaneously launches the viewer forward over the line of departure of a travel story that has yet to be told, and back to the founding myths of the Reich. The pivot around which his soldiers manoeuvre is the gravememorial named Mars-la-Tour/Vionville.

Combat and the Politics of Landscape: Trench Warfare

107

Figure 19  D Halke, Cheers of the Fathers, lithograph, Das Hurrah der Väter, Ulk 43, no. 34 (21 August 1914), p. 8, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. © bpkBildagentur, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.

Zille’s East Prussians, discussed in Chapter 3 (Figure 11), also suggests how the visual rhetoric of illustrated popular histories of the last war informed early representations of conflict on the Eastern Front, where the threat posed by Russia’s vast military resources provoked acute anxiety in August 1914. So too does Heine’s New Year’s Wish (Figure 10), which activates the trope of a German agrarian tradition conducted behind a military shield in war as well as peace, recalling Emelé’s work some twenty years earlier (Figures 15 and 16). The viewer who projects a wish for the future and sees it manifested in a worked landscape, does so explicitly, in Heine’s case, from behind the continuing presence of the

108

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

Teutonic knight, whose active gaze asserts the need to maintain a watchful presence in the light of historical experience.3. Schilling’s Where is the Germans’ Fatherland? (Figure 9), also discussed in the previous chapter, can now be revisited in this context, noting that its meaning is rooted in what the former soldiers have self-consciously left behind: wartime frontline experience. The caption proclaims a strong emotional attachment to a place to be understood as ‘Germany’, and also, by association with their trajectory, as ‘frontline’, or ‘borderland’ – the two are synonymous. The snowcovered wasteland connotes the husk of Wilhelmine Germany: it has nothing to offer veterans looking to affirm their sense of national integrity; the core of the nation exists only as a transit route, shorn of meaning or value. Like bridging narratives linking noteworthy events in the trajectory of an illustrated history, their journey links significant experience in two symbolic places ahead of and behind them. Only there, they suggest, in a practised place defined by the operational rhythms of life at the Front, can Germany be properly defined, in accordance with the values rehearsed in pre-war illustrated histories of the Franco-Prussian War. The links drawn between illustrated popular histories of 1870–1 and images relating to border security circulating in German culture after the First World War are no less rooted in claims to territorial rights made operational by representations of the spatializing actions of soldiers and farmers. And, as Schilling suggests, an equivalent claim can be made in relation to the First World War, despite the fact that popular accounts of trench warfare could not assert a moral entitlement to occupied land, since none existed anymore. Instead, the right claimed by First World War veterans after 1918 was to the memory of a job performed to the highest tactical standards, regardless of strategic outcome or territorial loss. While illustrated accounts of the Great War might acknowledge the heavy cost and unfortunate outcome for Germany, they nevertheless advance the values of Fronterlebnis: team work, danger confronted, fear conquered, collective experience and the satisfaction of a job executed selflessly to the best of one’s ability. The values of Fronterlebnis were antithetical to the notion of defeat. Many veterans, including the army’s leadership, were anxious to deflect the blame by demonstrating that they had acquitted themselves honourably, not least because, as The Cheers of the Fathers demonstrates precisely, they were burdened with vestiges of the expectation voiced in August 1914 that they would match the performance of an earlier generation. The allocation of blame assumed a political dimension. The army and other Wilhelmine institutions committed to

Combat and the Politics of Landscape: Trench Warfare

109

maintaining their power base in the new post-war democracy aligned themselves with exculpatory myths then in general circulation: if the army had not been victorious, this was not its fault, for neither tenacity nor tactical skill could hold back the materially well-endowed Allied armies which had subjected it to overwhelming pressure in 1918. The myth drew the sting of defeat for veterans and civilians alike across the political spectrum. For pacifists, Communists and those drawn to the extreme left wing of the Social Democratic movement, however, it amounted to a transparent excuse that confirmed the need to challenge the legitimacy of institutions complicit in the conduct of the war.4 Two prominent illustrated histories were published around the tenth anniversary of the Armistice: Schauwecker’s Thus was the War (So war der Krieg) (1927), and The Face of the World War (Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges) (1930), edited by Jünger. Schauwecker is less analytical, more populist than Jünger, but their accounts are similarly structured. Schauwecker does not offer a chronology of the war at all, while Jünger shunts a sparse tabular summary of key events to the rear of his text. Both opt for a thematic approach. Jünger’s chapters include ‘Tanks and the Cambrai Offensive’, ‘What the airman saw of the war’ and ‘A day in an artillery position’, while Schauwecker elects for ‘Battlefield terrain’, ‘Assault troops, attack and defence’ and ‘Tanks and flamethrowers’. Both are based on veterans’ accounts, partially relayed in the first person. The authors assert that what they identify as most significant about the First World War is to be found in sensuous accounts of episodic events experienced either at the minor unit (team) level, or by individuals, in an equivalent manner to visual anecdotes furnished by vignettes in the Life of Frederick and War and Victory, upholding the putative will to battle of ordinary soldiers. These broadly positive illustrated histories were calculated to appeal to veterans, but it was also necessary to enlist the empathetic engagement of non-veterans in order to validate wartime Front activity more fundamentally in German society.5 A thematic approach permitted these authors to elide the inevitable conclusion of linear accounts of the First World War, which comprised a German travel story whose offensive spatial trajectory had rapidly ground to a halt as trench warfare set in on the Western Front during the autumn of 1914. Instead, the thematic approach prevented the Weimar reader from having to confront the fact that the war had not ended as it had in 1871: at the apogee of a spatial trajectory marked by victory parades in the heart of the enemy’s capital, followed by triumphant homecoming. The thematic approach was not unprecedented: Pflugk-Harttung had employed it in Volume 1 of War and Victory, which offers a functional breakdown: ‘Battle’ and ‘Siege Warfare’ are analysed under separate headings, for example

110

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

and, under ‘Campaigning’, every component of military capability is treated exhaustively.6 Nevertheless, a marked typological shift towards the thematic is evident in Weimar histories of the Great War. Another observable shift is evident in the way Schauwecker and Jünger rely almost exclusively on captioned photographs for their illustration.7 Schauwecker’s less intellectually challenging work conveniently marshals same-subject images behind the relevant text. For example, his four-page account of the destructive power of modern artillery, ‘The landscape of the war’, is followed by twelve pages of photographs of heavy weaponry and their effect on terrain, including one depicting Fort Douamont at Verdun. The prints are typically densely arranged, sometimes overlapping, in a manner reminiscent of contemporary illustrated newspapers (Figure 20). Schauwecker is aware that he is working in a tradition of illustrated war histories when he writes: The book represents two books in one: the memory-book of front fighters in words and pictures. Both parts merge into a single entity, something unheard of up to now in memory books. The 200 photographs that are included in the work were chosen from 25,000 photographs that former combatants had made available. (Schauwecker 1928: 1)8

What makes his work remarkable, he asserts, is his apparently unprecedented ability to combine simple textual narratives with short photo-essays.9 Jünger handles photography in a less structured manner in his more ambitious The Face of the World War. His well-known introductory essay, ‘War and Photography’, is followed by thematic chapters intersected by eight-page blocks of photographs positioned at regular intervals throughout the text. The correlation between text and image is looser than that in the Schauwecker; photographs are offered as independent sources, bridging disparate strands of the narrative rather than punctuating a particular theme. As two pages devoted to tanks show, Jünger eschews the journalistic style Schauwecker favours (Figure 21). Usually two to a page, the photographs with their terse factual captions are centred on the vertical axis of the page, and are reproduced with wide margins, inviting unimpeded scrutiny of each image on its own terms. The restrained presentation advances his regard for their documentary value as historically important source material offering access to the reality of Front experience (Jünger 1930: 246–7).10 Bernd Hüppauf considers that despite the constraints imposed on photography by battlefield conditions: ‘there was no real competition between photography and the traditional visual arts. The dominant position of photography in relation to actuality and reliability was now unquestioned, and paintings, etchings, and

Combat and the Politics of Landscape: Trench Warfare

111

Figure 20 Franz Schauwecker, Fort Douamont page layout, Thus Was The War (Schauwecker 1928: 76). Digital scan: author.

112

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

Figure 21  Sample page depicting tanks, The Face of The World War (Jünger 1930: 247). Digital scan: author.

drawings often imitated the accuracy and realism of photography’ (Hüppauf 1993: 78). In the context of the First World War, Hüppauf makes three claims about the relationship between war and photography, all of which are tested in the context of the images addressed here. First, during the Great War, he claims, a crisis of representation developed. Secondly, it came about because the large

Combat and the Politics of Landscape: Trench Warfare

113

body of ‘archaic images of individual suffering and heroism’ that circulated in the combatant nations bore no relation to ‘the abstract and mediated reality of modern warfare, itself a product and reflection of the structures of modern and rational society, [that tended to] reduce soldiers to appendages of anonymous, huge structures’. Thirdly, Hüppauf argues that the combination of aircraft and camera facilitated ‘a complete system of surveillance’ that had ‘far reaching implications for the history of perception’; battlefield terrain photographed from the air was ‘emptied of its traditional points of orientation and its potential for experience visibly reduced to barren functional space’. The eye of the observer became ‘hard and distanced’ as a result. Hüppauf alludes to the military sublime when he suggests that such scenes ‘no longer aroused feelings of empathy, pity, or sorrow’. The result, he argues, was that ‘photography helped establish a tension between collective memory and the structure of modern warfare, conceived of as disjointed, abstract and complex’ (Hüppauf 1993: 50–6). Hüppauf ’s ambitious claims problematically conflate multiple viewer types, including veterans, photographers, filmmakers, aerial observers, pilots and photographic interpreters. This is significant because Hüppauf tacitly endorses (naturalizes) the view that encounters with images of suffering humanity ‘obviously’ provoke a ‘correct’ moral aversion to war, synonymous with the first signs of a crisis of representation: The degree to which modern reality has succumbed to science and technology, and has become disjointed, opaque, and characterised by abstract mediation, the relationship between pictorial representation and linguistic accounts has become highly problematic. It is the abstract nature of modernity which seems to require conceptual modes of representation rather than a pictorial duplication of visible reality. (Hüppauf 1993: 45)

His analysis does not account for the narrative context shaping the perception of people viewing images of the Great War, not least, in this present context, the viewer of images frequently encountered in illustrated popular histories, for whom war is presented as neither disjointed nor abstracted, and for whom empathy, pity and sorrow are but part of a range of affective responses, extending even to Rausch: excitement, intoxication and ecstasy. The notion that a twentieth-century crisis of representation unambiguously manifested itself in European culture as a result of the war is thrown into doubt by a close analysis of Jünger and Schauwecker’s illustrated histories, for example, which do mount plausible accounts of the experience of modern warfare in text and image.

114

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

Weimar culture produced a body of works about the Great War that forge a relationship between pictorial and textual content, in which the images were understood as presenting visual evidence of a reality that amounted to truthful representation of wartime experience. Ultimately, these histories succeeded in being legible, credible and appealing not least because they worked out of the dominant precedent established in histories of the Franco-Prussian War. The concept of a second, ‘colder’ consciousness adapted to the exigencies of Machine Age life was nevertheless a matter of central importance to Jünger at the time when he was editing The Face of the World War. Jünger finds a visual equivalent in photography: ‘The act of taking a photograph stands outside the field of sentiment … one realizes that the event is seen by an impervious and invulnerable eye’ (Werneburg and Phillips 1992: 53). Surveying selected illustrated histories through the filter of Hüppauf ’s claims suggests the extent to which the notion of ‘technological perception’ registered in visual culture, and the role it played in shaping illustrated accounts of what it had been like to serve at the Front. Hüppauf claims that the large body of ‘archaic images of individual suffering and heroism’ circulating in the combatant nations bore no relation to the reality of experience at the Front. If a large body of images depicting soldiers fighting gloriously or dying nobly did exist, they are poorly represented in both Schauwecker’s and Jünger’s photographic accounts. This is unsurprising since only a limited number of photographs of close combat had emerged from the trenches. Any attempt to fabricate heroic scenes by fusing selected images in the darkroom would have been unthinkable, because such practices associated with pre-war Pictorialism would discredit histories whose authority rested on the authority of unmediated veteran testimony and the documentary quality of the photography image. But hand-drawn images of heroic figures invested in the realities of trench warfare did circulate after 1918 in popular histories upholding the memory of the armies of the Kaiserreich. Graf ’s Hand Grenade Throwers on the Kemmel (Handgranatenwerfer auf dem Kemmel) reflects tactical reality to the extent that grenades were thrown in front of entrenched positions during close combat more or less in the manner depicted (Figure 22). Upright poses and steadfast expressions assert moral qualities fundamental to its intended meaning. Graf ’s depiction of soldiers demonstrating their collective will to battle bears rhetorical affinity to Menzel’s vignettes of combat, and to equivalents published in illustrated histories of the Franco-Prussian War. Rather than asserting that the structure of modern battlefield experience was to be understood as any more disjointed, abstract or complex than previous conflicts, Graf worked out of

Combat and the Politics of Landscape: Trench Warfare

115

Figure 22  D Graf, Hand Grenade Throwers on the Kemmel, in Memorial to the German Army and Navy, 1871-1918, (Eisenhart-Rothe after 1918: 416). Digital scan: author.

established tropes of individual heroism in near-overwhelming circumstances, that manifestly continued to resonate. Graf shares with Schauwecker and Jünger the conviction that what was significant about Front Experience could be communicated via positive representations of typical episodic events represented in a manner calculated to appeal to the emotions. Jünger argues explicitly that what was ultimately significant about Front Experience was located precisely in the apperception of ‘great deeds and great suffering’ in all their emotional intensity and their military effectiveness. In order to sense the quality of this experience, Jünger argues, the reader must be ready to respond imaginatively: To sense the spirit of great deeds and great suffering behind the images of a lost world, behind its ruins, that is the task which every document demands of the attentive viewer; so it is with the photographs of zones of former battlefields. (Jünger 1930: 11)

Herf observes that ‘some of Jünger’s more perceptive critics have noticed [a] parallel between a celebration of total calculation and functionality with its apparent opposite, adventure and dynamism’ (Herf 1998: 74).11 This dual outlook in Jünger’s work around 1930 is evident in The Face of the World War, where it

116

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

informs his choice of photographic subject matter judged to inspire an affective address to the experience of combat, after the manner of pre-war graphic images rehearsing the values of the military sublime, drawing the reader-viewer closer to the spirit of great deeds and great suffering. On the other hand, Jünger also wished also to advance an understanding of what was unprecedented about war fought on an industrial scale: the unseen enemy held at arm’s length by modern technologies of surveillance and destruction, and the cold, distant mode of perception such technologies engendered. Schauwecker and Jünger both advanced the view that veteran testimony offered the most authentic address to the imagination of the reader, and that the photograph provided the visual equivalent. Jünger establishes a phenomenology of experience in order to shape his account of positional warfare. The reader-viewer is led to engage empathetically with soldiers’ experience: at rest; in reserve and in the line; with weapons technologies; with the destruction of the landscape, of the built environment, of bodies and of cultural objects. That is, with the ‘face of the battlefield’ during both routine and intensive periods of combat activity. Hüppauf ’s contention that a large body of images that failed to convey the reality of war circulated in German society after the war is not borne out by this reading of Jünger or Schauwecker. For their patriotically minded readers the imagined reality of German heroism and sacrifice was made plausible by veterans’ accounts of personal experience, advanced with the use of photographs whose objective properties seemingly brought the viewer as close to the reality of frontline service as it was possible to get. Hand Grenade Throwers on the Kemmel illuminates a further point Jünger makes in relation to photographic claims to documentary reality and the memory of Front Experience. The true face of the battlefield Jünger offers his reader-viewers is discernible either from the air, the trench or from the crater field. The authenticity of an image taken at the Front could be reckoned by its angle of vision. In combat conditions shaped by intensive surveillance, the ubiquitous presence of snipers and of ‘on call’ artillery, the photographer had few opportunities to work in a standing position at ground level. The ‘authentic’ terrestrial image of attacking troops, for example, would of necessity convey the photographer’s position of relative safety below the lip of trench or shell hole, the camera inclined upwards in the direction of the soldier moving out onto exposed terrain.12 Graf ’s composition suggests a sensitivity to the authority of this angle of vision, which he exploits in order to accentuate the heroic profile of his figures against the lightly sketched ground.

Combat and the Politics of Landscape: Trench Warfare

117

Hüppauf describes how professional photographers were frustrated by their inability to convert their own experience of the extensive, troglodyte world of the Front into knowledge by realizing satisfactory representations of infantry combat.13 But for Jünger, the very arbitrariness of what he calls ‘accidental shots’ taken by frontline soldiers testifies to their status as optical documents that captured more of the essence of lived experience at the Front than the hand of the artist could. A comparison between the two histories suggests that Jünger policed his selection of images more closely than Schauwecker in pursuit of documentary rigour. German Assault Troops Reach the Wire Entanglement depicts a section of heavily laden storm troopers advancing from shell hole to shell hole towards a barbed-wire obstacle (Figure 23). The angle of vision suggests that the photographer has risen briefly from such a hole in order to snatch a photograph before resuming the assault.14 Very little is seen of the terrain; the photograph conforms to the view of the ground-hugging soldier. His immediate destination may be a breech in the wire obstacle, but his – and the viewer’s – immediate points of reference are the bodies of his comrades as they execute a tactical drill (the conceptual component of fighting power), working together towards their common goal. Like Zimmer’s Four Riflemen Near Vionville (Figure 14), the photograph invokes the intense physical experience of combat: bodies straining under the weight of weapons and ammunition; the material texture of the shelled terrain; the physical and mental effort required to break cover in a coordinated manoeuvre with team members; the imminent

Figure 23 Unknown photographer, German Assault Troops Reach the Wire Entanglement (Jünger, 1930: 101). Digital scan: author.

118

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

possibility of death or injury. For Jünger – the self-styled storm trooper – photographs such as this recalled the intoxicating, adrenaline-fuelled ‘equipoise of horror and exhilaration’ he had experienced at the Front, which he conveys in his autobiographical Storm of Steel (Nevin 1997: 50). A typical account of battle by Jünger presents a highly compressed experience occurring alternately just below and above ground level: Everyone threw themselves to the ground. Next to me on the left knelt Lieutenant Ehlert. … Next to him was an NCO, lying down, peering into the distance. The force of the barrage was terrific. … Whole fields of rubble took off, revolved in the air and smashed to the ground with an infernal racket. In response to a yell from Ehlert, I looked right. He raised his left hand, gestured to people behind him, and leapt up. I got to my feet cumbersomely, and took off after him. … I had covered barely twenty yards before, cresting a shell crater, I was dazzled by a flaring shrapnel that exploded less than ten paces away from me. … I felt two blows against my chest and shoulder. I let go of my rifle and staggered backwards, before rolling into the crater. I could dimly hear Ehlert calling out as he rushed past: ‘He’s hit!’ (Jünger, 2003: 176–7)

The ethics of attention explored in Chapter 2 are here rehearsed in both text and image. Jünger privileges selfless attentiveness in pursuit of coherent activity in the face of the military sublime. The moral force of his testimony rests on a demonstrable commitment to performing excellence, manifest in the collective will to battle in near-overwhelming circumstances. In comparison, the angle of vision in Schauwecker’s Firing Line Advances dilutes the photograph’s claim to documentary veracity (Figure 24). The photograph depicts a line of skirmishing infantry advancing across a grassy plain. The elevated position of the camera constitutes grounds for

Figure 24  Unknown photographer, Firing Line Advances, (Schauwecker 1927: 49). Digital scan: author.

Combat and the Politics of Landscape: Trench Warfare

119

suspecting that this was not taken in the heat of battle. The absence of battlefield phenomena, including trenches, obstacles or shell holes, suggests a photograph taken during a wartime training exercise: It does not convey the affective values of either Four Riflemen Near Vionville or German Assault Troops Reach the Wire Entanglement.15 The view is more expansive, individual figures less prominent. The reader-viewer is too far removed from the figures to discern individual actions and minor unit teamwork. The image is ‘cooler’: it does not convey the same commitment to the will to battle. Taken in isolation, photographs of combat depicting small groups of men manoeuvring over ground in a chaotic landscape devoid of wider context appear to endorse Hüppauf ’s view that battlefield experience in the Great War was typically fragmented. But this was not an unprecedented mode of representation, any more than it was encountered independently of wider-framed narratives. Jünger employs combat photography in an equivalent manner to the vignettes in the Life of Frederick and War and Victory; and Schauwecker does too, but with less rigour. In neither case, however, do the photographs, and the textual accounts of combat they accompany, bear any relation to the reality of experience at the Front. Nor is the ‘heroic’ will to battle they depict presented in an anachronistic manner. Their illustrated histories of the Great War were located in a tradition of representation that made convincing claims about the enduring qualities of the German soldier at war, even as they traced the shifting dynamics of combat over time. Nor was an affective mode of representation confined to authors advancing positive accounts of the war: an equivalent strategy is adopted by Ernst Friedrich, for example, in his pacifist work War Against War! (Friedrich 1987). Photographs of small groups of men in combat were not the only type of image to emerge from the Front, but they were chosen because, in the opinion of an editor-veteran like Jünger concerned with the production of a thematic history, they represented past experience remembered as a series of fragmented events occurring within a wider context, unified and rendered coherent by the textual exposition of tactical context (the conceptual component of fighting power), and by aesthetic/rhetorical precedent. The second point of contention relates to Hüppauf ’s claim that the fragmentary experience of Great War battlefields was determined by the synergy of state-of-the-art surveillance, communications and long-range weapons systems. As a result, soldiers were, by his reckoning, reduced to appendages of anonymous, huge structures. A close reading of illustrated histories extending as far back as the Life of Frederick, no matter whether they describe a linear

120

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

trajectory or adopt a thematic approach, or however they dispose of the dynamic relationship between space and place, suggests that campaigning has always been experienced by participants in fragmentary terms and subsequently represented accordingly. Furthermore, military tactics and training evolved in ways designed to compensate for this phenomenon and to render it less alienating. This has implications for the content of illustrated histories, which, like military doctrine itself, had to acknowledge and address the fog and friction of war and demonstrate how coherence is sustained (or lost) in the face of fragmentation. Central to both tactical doctrine and the patriotic history is the determination that soldiers are not appendages of anonymous, huge structures, but active participants whose diffuse actions in the fog of war contribute to the overall coherence of the enterprise. Like the soldier on campaign, authors of military histories had to chart a path through chaos and coherence unless, as Schauwecker does, they took a highly reductive approach. Advancing a comprehensive campaign narrative was a complex undertaking. Thematic histories, for example, had to fuse accounts of the various military functions, or capabilities, which had operated more or less synergistically in order to deliver effective capability in the field. Teleological accounts, on the other hand, had to sustain accounts of the various geographically dispersed strands of a travel story extending over the theatre of operations.16 Popular German military histories are calculated to appeal to the emotions while simultaneously making demands of the reader-viewer’s intellect through a narrative form that holds simultaneous events in play, takes unexpected detours but impels the reader-viewer towards a complete understanding of events leading to a foregone conclusion. Their dramatic quality is fundamental to the expression of German martial virtues, and is commonly located in events mired in the friction and/or fog of war. The reader’s pulse may quicken when presented, for example, with General von Alvensleben’s decision to launch his Corps against the French at Vionville in 1870 – not least if the author has disclosed in advance that Alvensleben faces not, as he thinks, the rearguard of the retreating French army, but the main body; meanwhile, the supporting German corps to his flank is still hours away from the action. Alternatively, the author may elect to build the tension gradually by permitting the reader slowly to come to understand, as Alvensleben did at the time, that he confronts a French force with the potential to destroy his entire formation, and that his open flank is vulnerable to counterattack. The complexity of the tactical situation, the fragility of Alvensleben’s decision made with the partial insight that characterizes Clausewitzian fog, can be

Combat and the Politics of Landscape: Trench Warfare

121

accounted for only in the textual component of an illustrated history, where the moral quality of his decision-making is asserted – or contested – by his capacity to make decisions under extreme pressure. His experience that day find its direct equivalence in Zimmer’s work depicting infantrymen fighting cohesively without detailed knowledge of the context in which this encounter battle is developing. Discipline and the will to battle based on confidence in their leaders, Zimmer implies, hold them to the task despite the fog that characterizes the situation in which they find themselves, and the friction that holds back the flanking formation who would otherwise provide flank protection. Similarly, in the context of the First World War, the photographs of combat selected by Jünger can be interpreted as evidence supporting Hüppauf ’s contention that there is a fragmented quality to modern military reality that leads soldiers to view themselves as alienated appendages. But to accede to this interpretation is to fail to acknowledge the military context, both given and implied, in which Jünger positions such images. Wider factors also conditioned contemporary perception, beyond the explanatory role of accompanying text. Both Schauwecker and Jünger make claims as veterans, on behalf of the veteran population.17 The fact that so many veterans identified positively with the values propounded by Fronterlebnis suggests that they did not regard themselves as having been alienated appendages of military institutions. On the contrary, the dominant narrative rehearsed at events organized by veterans’ associations and beyond, including the reading of popular histories, suggests that they viewed themselves not as appendages, but as core enablers of military capability, and as moral victors. Their demonstrable ability successfully to execute the German army’s tactical drills, based on the team training they received behind the Front, under the leadership of their officers, enabled them to present themselves as active agents on historical battlefields. German Assault Troops provides visual access to the performance of tactical drills, the recognition of which played a role in shaping the memory of veterans, and provided a platform on which the ‘overwhelmed but not defeated’ myth was constructed. A section of soldiers is attacking, but the tactical context in which they operate cannot be determined from the photograph.18 However, no combat veteran would need visible evidence of coherence beyond that offered by the actions of the immediate members of his immediate unit. Viewed in the context of offensive operations, the soldiers’ actions in German Assault Troops conform to tactical norms associated with the fluid, loosely structured assault tactics developed during the First World War.

122

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

In the context of defensive operations, on the other hand, the photograph can be understood with reference to Martin Samuels’s analysis of how German defensive doctrine evolved on the Western Front. Experience on the Somme in the summer of 1916 led to the implementation of ‘elastic defence in depth’, controversial tactics that were to prove capable of absorbing and defeating Entente offensive operations. Instead of manning highly visible trenches whose garrisons were increasingly vulnerable to heavy artillery fire as the war took on its industrial character, the defence was organized in accordance with the principles of ‘depth (Flächenverteidigung), invisibility (die Leere des Gefechtefeldes), and immediate responsiveness (Schlagfertigkeit)’ (Samuels 1995: 180). In late 1916, German divisions in the line on the Western Front were ordered to create a series of three zones, echeloned one behind the other, to a combined depth of some 8000 metres.19 Many trenches were to be dug, but few were to be held in strength, if at all. Within each zone a series of concealed strongpoints and rallying points comprised the core of the defensive framework. Rather than resisting the chaos and fog of war, infantry divisions were trained to exploit the fractured quality of the immense crater field and render it more chaotic, more lethal, to the enemy. Units were to cease maintaining neat trenches. Instead, they were to melt into the visual chaos of the terrain in order to problematize enemy target acquisition, compel the speculative expenditure of large quantities of artillery ammunition on largely empty terrain and create the conditions for achieving local surprise when attacks occurred. The daily challenge was to remain hidden from aerial observation: to be spotted was to guarantee the attention of heavy artillery. When a significant attack developed surviving strongpoints were to hold firm, even when surrounded. Other troops in the line were permitted to use their initiative and manoeuvre away from intensively shelled localities in order to reduce casualties. In a break with long-standing Prussian practice, attacking troops were allowed to penetrate the German defensive zone, dissipating their strength and cohesion as they fought through the crater field in the teeth of sustained defensive fire directed from strongpoints all around them. Decentralized command and thorough training were required to realize this defensive doctrine because its success rested on the ability of small infantry units to exploit the enemy’s weakness on their own initiative. Local commanders were trained to counter-attack immediately without waiting for further orders.20 German divisions were put through their paces on training areas constructed behind the Front to ensure that every soldier understood the role he was expected to play in the overall defensive scheme. Infantry divisions were thus

Combat and the Politics of Landscape: Trench Warfare

123

prepared to exploit the chaos of war in an aggressive manner that offered the enemy no respite as their assault passed its culminating point.21 It was held as a German article of faith that positions that held out when bypassed would be relieved by counter-attack. Doubts as to whether junior non-commissioned officers and their soldiers who made up the now all-important nine-man section would find the resolve to counter-attack when beyond the immediate control of their officers were to prove unfounded. The history of defensive operations in the second half of the war demonstrates that German formations were capable of executing elastic defence in depth with a high degree of proficiency. Many thousands of men experienced the training regime that enabled this tactical doctrine. In battle schools and at the Front, 12,500-strong divisions were brought to believe that they were far from being the appendages of anonymous, huge structures (Beach 2008: 34–5). Rather, the logic of elastic defence in depth dictated that the actions of every soldier counted – not just those of the infantry and artillery. Troops in combat support functions, including signallers, drivers, cooks and engineers, were encouraged to view themselves as essential members of a team whose synergy was all about delivering combat capability at a higher tempo and with greater lethality than their opponents. Evidence that the memory of this defensive doctrine was embedded in accounts of Fronterlebnis prevails in post-war literary accounts of the conflict. Karl Bröger’s 1929 novel Pillbox 17 provides a clear example. Bröger’s wartime service features prominently in his post-war work, where it is cast in a positive light. From 1924 he contributed to Der Reichsbanner, newspaper of the eponymous veterans’ association aligned with Germany’s ruling Social Democratic Party.22 The socialist content of his novel is manifest, but the values of Fronterlebnis he propounds transcend its political tone. In Pillbox 17, Bröger’s authority as a veteran-author is grounded in his laboured exposition of the doctrine of elastic defence in depth: the occupants of a concrete bunker, or pillbox, take every precaution to conceal their presence from enemy surveillance; they are logistically sustained despite the enemy’s harassing fire; all ranks understand the overall battle plan; when their sector is attacked and the enemy surrounds them they hold firm; they read the battle and respond proactively, applying the rules of engagement to deadly effect without giving away their position. The fragmented quality of Bröger’s battlefield experience is neither anxiety inducing nor disempowering. On the contrary, it creates the conditions for success. When the anticipated German counter-attack rolls in from the rear of the battle zone they support it by executing a local assault on an enemy machine gun position (‘everything depended on the suddenness of the surprise’) and

124

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

the frontline is restored. A subsequent visit to the captain on duty in Sector Headquarters – ‘a model of composure … the headpiece of the telephone over his ears’ – presents the reader with a textbook example of decentralized command (Bröger 1930: 116 and 152). Officers coordinate the battle competently; soldiers execute it with skill and conviction. Like authors of conservative military histories, Bröger handles complexity in a manner that presents a memory of wartime experience in which soldiers are active agents in a coherent plan that transcends Clausewitzian fog and friction, and is reminiscent of Menzel’s representation of teamwork in Frederick at Torgau (Figure 6), which upholds the values of selfless attentiveness and its contribution to battle-winning team working. Bröger’s novel provides an example of how popular histories of the Great War existed within a wider context in which the memory of the war and its meaning were negotiated in German culture, a context which inflects the moral meaning of German Assault Troops in the context of Jünger’s wider narrative. Zimmer’s contribution to War and Victory offered late-nineteenth-century readers the example of discipline and coherence in circumstances in which the fog of war prevailed. Jünger and Schauwecker return to this theme, creating associations between photographs of minor team tactics and modern tactical solutions that not only transcended the chaos of war, but also actively exploited it to German advantage. All these images emphasize the moral superiority of the German soldier’s will to battle. Germany’s armies may have been overwhelmed in 1918, but – in accordance with the exculpatory myth – they remained undefeated because, although they lacked the necessary materiel, their moral superiority – manifest in the tenacious execution of sophisticated tactical solutions – remained intact to the end.

5

Combat and the Politics of Landscape: Aerial Photography, Maps and the Cold Gaze

Schauwecker and Jünger employed photographs of combat activity taken at ground level that established rhetorical continuity with pre-existing sketches foregrounding the moral qualities of the German soldier. They, like the authors of many Great War illustrated histories, also made use of aerial photography that, it has been claimed, paradoxically has the effect of distancing the reader-viewer from accounts of, for example, performing excellence in combat, refusing the possibility of an affective response. The notion of mechanical human perception characterized by the psychology of a cold and distant gaze that seemingly found its technological equivalence in photography, is today influential in academic discourse to the extent that it is privileged as a defining manifestation of twentieth-century modernity. Paul Virilio’s War and Cinema is an influential example. He argues that the development of aerial photography on a massive scale during the First World War ‘laid the grounds for a veritable logistics of military perception’; the camera’s lens ‘prefigured a symptomatic shift in targetlocation [techniques] and a growing derealisation of military engagement’ (Virilio 2000: 1). For Virilio, this tendency towards what he identifies as the dominant mode of perception serving the most modern means of destruction, was so fundamental that: ‘Battle is now nothing more than the autonomy, or automation, of the war machine … the history of battle is primarily the history of radically changing fields of perception’ (Virilio 2000: 7). ‘Direct vision was now a thing of the past: in the space of a hundred and fifty years, the target area had become a cinema “location”, the battlefield a film set out of bounds to civilians’ (Virilio 2000: 7). With hindsight, Virilio’s argument that the history of armed conflict can be reduced to a teleology culminating in the history of space-based target acquisition systems enabling the use of long-range precision weapons is revealing of Western preoccupations attending the military–industrial climate at the dawn of the digital revolution during the closing decade of the Cold War. At most, the

126

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

derealization of military engagement can today be understood as has having only partially occurred, and then only in the context of air campaigns in which strategic outcomes have been sought via the application of force by precision bombing and the use of uninhabited air vehicles (drones) alone. Yet the notion that twentieth-century armed conflict can be adequately understood through an address to the logistics of military perception persists. Hüppauf, like Virilio, deliberately locates himself at the limits of modern surveillance capabilities in order to view the battlefield in a manner that supports his wider view of modernity; he too considers that the cold and distant airborne lens prompts the viewer of aerial images of First World War battlefields to adopt a similarly detached mode of address, symptomatic of the abstracted conditions in which the war was apparently fought. This coldest of viewing positions does not, however, reflect a necessity borne of military reality, but a deliberate rhetorical, or methodological, choice. From this Olympian viewpoint a detached mode of address is unavoidable. The elisions in Hüppauf ’s argument are revealing. Like Virilio, he does not allow that multiple modes of perception might simultaneously coexist. Jünger adopts a more nuanced position, arguing that an address to the lived experience of combat is necessary in order to bring the reader closer to the experience, while also suggesting that a cold, distant mode of perception was no less a characteristic of First World War experience. The combination of aircraft and camera did have far-reaching implications for the history of perception. Not because: ‘aerial photography then, creating a metalevel of artificiality, further abstracted from the “reality” of this artificial landscape’, but because aerial photography expanded – added to – ways of representing war experience (Hüppauf 1993: 57). When Hüppauf talks of distance from traditional points of orientation, he does not refer to forms of cultural production in which attempts are made to close the gap between established and unprecedented modes of representation, as in the illustrated histories discussed earlier. Instead, he draws a comparison between aerial photography and academic battle painting, which is to conflate two inimical categories. Aerial photography was produced to facilitate the production of mapping and intelligence, oil painting to rhetorical effect in the context of a fine art tradition. They were produced and consumed in contexts that relate to each other in only the most tangential of ways, until reinterpreted alongside each other as reproductions in illustrated accounts, in pursuit of new meanings. Hüppauf ’s critique, after Virilio, is problematic on three counts: the identity of his viewer is ambiguous; he conflates a variety of types of aerial image and he ignores the context provided by inclusive narratives of events, including

Combat and the Politics of Landscape

127

illustrated histories, without which aerial photography produced for military purposes cannot function to rhetorical effect in the public domain. Schauwecker and Jünger each employs examples of the two generic types of aerial photograph: the oblique and the vertical. Schauwecker includes two oblique photographs (Figure 25). Drumfire on the Chemin des Dames (top) provides the reader-viewer with a high-oblique image of multiple shell bursts in wooded terrain. Below, German Fire on an Enemy Position on the Aisne offers an oblique view of a similar event in which individual trees and trenches can be made out. On the opposite page the reader-viewer is presented with photographs of similar events taken at ground level. None of the five photographs employs the traditional point of orientation found in the context of Franco-Prussian War history painting or book illustration, or features recognizable tactical formations, regimental affiliations or an episode drawn from a landmark event in the history of the war. The human figure is absent, but on the right-hand page in particular, this has less to do with the distance of the camera from the ground or the resolution of the lens, than with the impact of the lethality of modern weapon systems. In all of them the potential for experience is located

Figure 25  Unknown photographer, Drumfire on the Chemin des Dames and German Fire on an Enemy Position on the Aisne (Schauwecker 1927: 34). Digital scan: author.

128

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

not in barren space, but in terrain that bears the traces of unseen occupancy in the presence of danger. Schauwecker selects oblique aerial photographs that the reader-viewer can assimilate into a wider narrative about the experience of artillery fire at the front, because he conflates two modes of perception: trench photography depicts nearby shell bursts, while the aerial views convey a panoramic sense of the extent of an artillery barrage. By juxtaposing ‘cold’ aerial and ‘warm’ ground photography the potential for eliciting an affective response to the experience of trench warfare is enhanced – not reduced. Jünger also includes oblique aerial photography. The Face of the World War contains photographs that convey the viewpoint of the crew of an airborne observation post. In Polish Village Photographed from an Aircraft the camera conforms to the angle of vision of an observer who watches for the fall of shot in the vicinity of a nominated location and communicates adjustments to the guns until rounds are falling where required (Figure 26). Below the aircraft’s wing, which fills the lower left corner of the frame, trees, hedges and the side elevations of thatched buildings stand out in snow-covered terrain. What make this photograph especially noteworthy are its annotations. Four crosses have been added to identify linear features that look like tracks. The caption informs us that: ‘x = trenches’: the photograph has been subjected to systematic

Figure 26 Unknown photographer, Polish Village Photographed from an Aircraft (Jünger 1930: 297). Digital scan: author.

Combat and the Politics of Landscape

129

interpretation. The lens’s ‘cold’ mode of perception is thereby mediated twice over: by the reader-viewer’s awareness of the act of collection by an aircraft over enemy territory and by the photographic interpreter, who identifies enemy fieldworks. The ‘cold’ mode of perception conferred by the lens is problematic only if aerial photographs are divorced from contexts in which they were originally employed. In the context in which they were produced, the camera’s coldness was a virtue: it complemented the objectivity necessary for the production of annotated mapping, and of intelligence assessment. But after the war, authors mediated photography’s inherently cold properties, employing captions, associated images and textual accounts to invoke an affective response to such photographs. Hüppauf writes: Aerial shots do not represent sensuous or moral experiences of space, nor is the prescription for or analysis of military movements part of their iconic content. Without careful analysis they are silent, manifestations of a new mode of mediated perception and organisation of battlefields[.] Aerial photography then, creating a metalevel of artificiality, further abstracted from the ‘reality’ of this artificial landscape. (Hüppauf 1993: 57)

But aerial photographs were subjected to careful analysis calculated to overturn the metalevel of artificiality of the shell-damaged terrain – first by military analysts, and then by post-war authors who set out to convey a sense of the conditions shaping the human experience of the war. Only with difficulty, or as a result of a wilful refusal to consider the military context in which they were produced and used, can it be argued that their iconic content rests neither in the prescription for nor analysis of military activity. On the contrary, oblique aerial photographs furnished an unprecedented opportunity to open up accounts of battlefield experience. If oblique aerial photography proved less than cold and distant in the hands of Schauwecker and Jünger, can the same be said of the vertical image? As described earlier, a complex tactical dynamic developed in the crater field. The planning and execution of large-scale operations was impossible without up-todate mapping, together with continuous assessment of enemy dispositions, capabilities and intentions. Photographic interpretation facilitated these intelligence needs, and the destructive potential of modern artillery could not be realized without it. Systematic photographic reconnaissance operations were a ubiquitous feature of the war. Flying officers on specialist photoreconnaissance missions produced a series of contiguous vertical photographs employing

130

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

cameras clamped vertically in a frame on the fuselage.1 Jünger selected a few heavily cropped examples, including Craterfield in Flanders (Figure 27). There is a highly abstracted quality about the ensuing landscape image, which lacks any sense of scale or perspective. Shorn of referents revealing the context of the image-making act, the mode of perception is indeed cold and distant: general features aside, nothing can be discerned. Only a specialist interpreter provided with collateral intelligence, a near-contemporary map of the area, and appropriate aids to magnification would be equipped to reveal that which either lies concealed, or otherwise appears insignificant. In the absence of analysis identifying and interpreting signs of human activity the image lacks both

Figure 27  Unknown photographer, Craterfield in Flanders (Jünger 1930: 298). Digital scan: author.

Combat and the Politics of Landscape

131

moral and affective coordinates. That said, the high resolution of Craterfield in Flanders does allow a degree of affective engagement with the properties of the waterlogged terrain; it too can be categorized as a ‘token of spent violence’, after Trachtenberg. The utility of a vertical aerial photograph, both at the time of production and subsequently as an image in an illustrated history, rested on the manner in which it was employed explicitly to unmask Hüppauf ’s ‘invisible structure of the landscape of destruction’. Hermann Fricke’s chapter on artillery aviation in The Face of the World War emphasizes the importance of photography to the conduct of operations: ‘We flew at around 1800 metres. The weather was beautifully clear, the exposure time happened to be right – I still had no experience. … The photographs were not exactly perfect, but they were still just about useable. Now one saw, for the first time, the layout of the positions in front’ (Jünger 1930: 152).2 Yet neither Jünger nor Schauwecker address the production of imagery intelligence or mapping in their functional accounts of the war; nor do they include many vertical aerial photographs in their histories. The contents of Fritz Heigl’s 1926 Pocketbook of Tanks: Form, Recognition and Combat suggest that the omission of such photography from these illustrated histories reflects authorial choices rather than the absence of suitable material. Heigl privileges the tank, the aircraft and the camera in his account of technological military modernity. The pocketbook’s section on tank recognition includes a photomosaic on which the interpreter annotated a concentration of tanks and their tracks, which reveal that they were recently driven over adjacent fields. Poor resolution and small scale make it impossible to resolve the human forms that may be present. Nor does the activity revealed by the analyst offer a coherent account of a battlefield event: the image lacks moral and emotional content. Despite interpretation, vertical photographs of this type were ill suited to Jünger’s project. Hüppauf ’s claim holds true in this context: despite photographic interpretation, the image produced by the high-flying lens prompts a cold, detached mode of perception. Given that photoreconnaissance, like the tank, was emblematic of military modernity, it is noteworthy that Jünger, in particular, appeared to be uninterested in the subject, perhaps because he chose not to construct a chronology impelling the German reader towards defeat: it is the compartmented structure of his thematic history, rather than his use of aerial photographs, that assumes a fragmented quality. The reader-viewer is presented with accounts of tactical actions, rather than on an ever-expanding account of the trajectory of the war rooted in the progression of its geographical and technological coordinates. His account of activity associated with specific military capabilities focuses on

132

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

attitude and performance alone, in which case the oblique aerial photograph is more useful because it readily suggests battlefield experience. It is noteworthy that the clipped view of the aircraft wing in Polish Village functions metonymically for the aircraft itself; the photograph’s other – arguably primary – subject is the relationship between pilot, observer, airframe and camera – just another environment in which the war is remembered or imagined with reference to team work, performance and the handling of modern technology. Only the cold, distant qualities of the vertical photograph, shorn of referents to the manner of its production, are resistant to Jünger’s project.

Mapping Although Jünger was disinclined to include vertical photography taken for cartographic purposes in his illustrated histories, he did include maps: the camera–equipped aircraft was not the first military application of technology to have implications for the history of perception. By 1870 military decisionmakers were accustomed to planning and executing military operations with the aid of accurate two-dimensional representations of the earth’s surface. Mapping is characterized by an even higher degree of abstraction than that achieved by survey photography from which, by 1918, much of the necessary data were extrapolated. If such photography is cool and distant, then the map is positively cold, formulaic and objective. Viewed this way, the appearance of the airborne military camera did not herald a cooling of perception, but its opposite. Craterfield in Flanders suggests that limited sensuous engagement with the vertical photograph is possible after all, but no such engagement is possible with a map, no matter how adept the user might be at formulating a visual impression of the terrain from a reading of its conventional signs. On Hüppauf ’s terms, the seeming impossibility of moral engagement is to be deplored. But in military hands, and in those of authors mounting conservative accounts of conflict, the objectivity of the map was a virtue. Mapping and map-like sketches provide a platform on which to inscribe accounts of spatializing actions that articulate moral dominance of the battlefield in a dissimilar, but not wholly unrelated, manner to that employed by Jünger with German Assault Troops, or Zimmer’s Four Riflemen Near Vionville. War and Victory includes The Battlefields Around Metz, an annotated map depicting the three battles that occurred around the city in August 1870, including the action at Vionville, which compresses all the relevant terrain onto a single,

Combat and the Politics of Landscape

133

small-scale, foldout page (Figure 28). Although no marginal information is provided, roads, railways, towns, villages, woods and steep ground are included using the mapping conventions of the age. German (blue) and French (red) units are represented by overprinted conventional military symbols. Captions inform the reader of the time at which each battle is depicted: for Vionville, ‘the

Figure 28  Unknown cartographer(s), The Battlefields Around Metz (Pflugk-Harttung 1896a: 152). Digital scan: author.

134

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

position during the night 16–17 August’. The Battlefields Around Metz mimics the aesthetic of a military campaign map of the type found in official histories produced by the General Staff, to be scrutinized while reading the accompanying textual account. The overlaid annotations throw into stark relief the structural logic of the Prussian concept of operations that first fixed the French army in the vicinity of the city, and then enveloped it from the south. It asserts the qualitative overmatch of the Prussian-led armies: specifically, superior decision-making, structural coherence, flexibility and the ability to operate at a higher tempo than their opponents: it presents a cool, rational lesson in how to exploit and dominate terrain, and thereby psychologically dominate the opponent. As such, it acts as the polar equivalent of the sensuous vignette, exemplified by Zimmer’s Four Riflemen Near Vionville. The reader-viewer who minutes earlier encountered a representation of the military sublime, now engages with the cold logic of a map offering full visibility and total perceptual control, as though embarked dispassionately on a peacetime desktop exercise in a military academy. Maps are a salient feature of illustrated Franco-Prussian War histories. Taubert, for example, includes Battle at Vionville (5 p.m.) in his portfolio. He offers his reader-viewer a large-scale map of the battle, broadly similar, but richer in detail, than The Battlefields Around Metz in War and Victory. Its surface texture is similar to his representation of moonlit graves in The Avenue of Death. Despite this aestheticizing quality, its abstract logic denies the reader-viewer access to the affective experience of battle. The ideal annotated map is one which is pared down to the minimum detail required to support an account that is never emotive and always about spatializing actions in the pursuit of battlefield dominance. The inclusion of mapping is indicative of the general level of education and the degree to which map culture had permeated society. Wawro suggests that mandatory primary education in Prussia generated a qualitative advantage in 1870–1; unlike France’s largely illiterate and innumerate professional army, Prussia’s conscripts ‘could be shown models, drawings, and maps, and involved in complex tactical exercises’ (Wawro 2003: 43). The positive implications of enhanced situational awareness, independent problem-solving and better communication are self-evident. This battlefield phenomenon is reflected in the content of illustrated histories. The Life of Frederick includes multiple woodengravings depicting senior officers consulting maps, such as Menzel’s, Campaign Planning with Augustus III (Figure 3). But there are no maps for the viewer; mapping, Kugler suggests, is for professional soldiers alone. In War and Victory, however, mapping is embedded in the structure of the work. It is presumed not

Combat and the Politics of Landscape

135

only that reader-viewers can read a map but also that they will be stimulated by the act of discerning the tactical significance of the spatializing actions conveyed in abstract form by the military overprint. In the Life of Frederick the viewer is positioned on the margins of events, admiring Frederick’s actions from afar. In contrast, engagement with the annotated mapping in War and Victory and Taubert’s The Battlefields of Metz elevates the viewer’s status to that of the military decision-maker, adding to the satisfaction gained from piecing together components of complex narratives. There are few maps in popular histories of the First World War. Schauwecker employs none. Jünger includes only six: an overview of each front and a final map depicting post-war changes to Germany’s borders. Only the latter, which functions as an end piece to the book, contributes to the work’s political meaning. Both histories are stripped of material a reader could use to piece together a high-level understanding of the operational conduct of the war, suggesting, again, the authors’ refusal to advance linear narratives; they display little interest in positioning tactical events in anything but the most lightly sketched of operational contexts. Just as in Pillbox 17, local experience alone contains all that is deemed significant about Fronterlebnis – not the strategic outcomes of a lost war. In earlier accounts of the Franco-Prussian War the successful imposition of the commander’s will is most commonly expressed in accounts of major successes in battle, the occupation of terrain and the imposition of terms on the enemy. But these outcomes eluded Germany in the First World War. Jünger and Schauwecker mask this unspeakable void, pregnant with the humiliation of defeat, with tactical anecdotes asserting the enduring moral superiority of the German soldier. This tendency to tactical obsession at the deliberate expense of strategic focus is most clearly expressed in an illustrated history that uses annotated mapping to parade a ruthless manifestation of will to secure territory that had already, at the time it was published, been ceded to Poland as part of the post-war settlement. Ernst von Salomon edited The Book of German Freikorps Fighters (Das Buch vom deutschen Freikorpskämpfer), a comprehensive account of post-war internal security operations, which focused on the enduring issue of borders. The book is well illustrated with photographs, sketches and maps; here again almost every page contains at least one image. Annotated terrain graphics are used routinely to demonstrate the disposition and movement of the warring factions. Viktor Scheffel’s account of the Freikorps assault on Polish troops that had illegally occupied a feature known as the Annaberg in early May 1921 employs a narrative technique backed by mapping more commonly associated with official histories to convey a sense of the moral dominance of Freikorps troops.3

136

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

In addition to now commonplace photographs of marching units, commanders and memorials, Scheffel includes a page depicting Roederer’s Battle Sketches on the Progress of the Assault on the Annaberg (Gefechtsskizzen vom fortschreitenden Angriff auf den Annaberg), depicting the Annaberg battle of 21 May 1921 (Figure 29), which function like the annotated map of the three battles around Metz, in War and Victory. But Scheffel aligns his sketches with a facsimile of the two-page Operation Order issued by General Bernhard von Hülsen’s headquarters the day before the assault. The order, an austere piece of staff work originally accompanied by an annotated map, sets out the commander’s intent, summarizes the available intelligence, apportions tasks to Hülsen’s subordinate commanders, describes the scheme of manoeuvre, and outlines the plan for logistic and medical support, deception and communications. Its inclusion is pivotal to Scheffel’s account. Set alongside the battle sketches, the Operation Order advances the notion that the recapture of the Annaberg was an exemplary operation, a flawless example of a perfectly pitched transmission of the commander’s intent into action on the ground, precisely as Clausewitz describes in his doctrinal model of force coherence.4 Where one least expects it – in a consolidated account of minor counter-insurgency campaigns, albeit

Figure 29  Roederer, Battle Sketches of the Progress of the Assault on the Annaberg

(Salomon 1938: 275). Digital scan: author.

Combat and the Politics of Landscape

137

of enormous political significance – Scheffel offers an account of conflict that rehearses the rhetoric of performing excellence in the manner traced here as far back as Menzel’s accounts of Frederician warfare. Salomon constructs a linear narrative, a travel story whose trajectory meanders around Germany, in which visual accounts of the spatializing actions of German soldiers in borderlands under threat bear a closer affinity to those constructed in War and Victory and The Metz Battlefields than those found in the Great War histories of Jünger and Schauwecker.

138

Part Three

6

Technology and Combat in the Franco-Prussian War

This final section of the book examines the relationship between representations of society, the individual soldier, military institutions and battlefield technologies, beginning with illustrated histories published during the Second Reich, when rapid technological developments precipitated acute anxieties about the destructive potential of future wars, and about Germany’s technological preparedness.1 It traces the development of visual narratives of conflict published between 1871 and 1914 in which images depicting the use of battlefield technologies established both continuities and ruptures. The issues encountered here are not about technology as such. Rather, the chapter addresses the way in which German soldiers are represented as interacting with weapons systems, and concludes that the physical (technological) component of fighting power is typically subordinated to the moral component, typically expressed as the will to battle. The chapters address representations of the battlefield use of military technologies: it is not fundamentally concerned with the wider relationship between the Industrial Revolution, the development of capitalism and the drive for enhanced military effectiveness. Nor does it concern itself with the issue of ‘culture lag’, whereby conservative military institutions commonly display the tendency to resist the innovative impulses of the scientific community. Neither does it address accounts of future wars advanced by writers and illustrators of science fiction, a genre that blossomed in late-nineteenth-century European culture in the wake of Jules Verne’s seminal 1863 Five Weeks in a Balloon.2 Unlike science fiction, works addressed here have nothing to do with the quest for wonder weapons of the sort that might magically dominate the battlefield and confer an overwhelming advantage on the owner. Rather, German accounts of recent battlefield events involving technology did not shy away from the reality that technological development was always provisional, or that prototypes were

142

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

less than perfect, and that new weapons systems conferred, at best, a temporary advantage, and a limited one at that. Furthermore, the chapter deals only with representations of ground warfare. The turn-of-the-century naval arms race initiated by Germany attracted extensive coverage in the illustrated press, but it was a peacetime phenomenon and therefore lies beyond the scope of this book. With particular reference to Volume 1 of War and Victory, the chapter explores how artists tackled the technical environment that shaped the tactical dynamics of the FrancoPrussian War: French superiority in the field of rifle technology and Prussia’s advantage in that of artillery. This asymmetry in the field of technological superiority favoured the production of narratives that reinforced the putative moral qualities of the German soldier, relative to his French equivalent. Only in the case of siege warfare is technology accorded a central role in the narrative. Against this background, the chapter briefly considers how war was imagined in the illustrated press in the summer of 1914, noting how the new conflict was imagined as a replay of 1870–1, with technology represented in a subordinate role to the soldier. It explores the moral and conceptual terms on which the reader-viewer is led to understand how technology was exploited by the German army, and threats posed by enemy capabilities countered. The objective capabilities of specific technologies are never the central issue. What is always at stake in representation is the way individuals are depicted as behaving in relation to technology, and the implications of their actions for both military and socio-political outcomes. The impact of contemporary science fiction is nevertheless a factor to be taken into account. Ignatius Clarke considers that a ‘compound of complacency, ignorance, and innocence was the primary condition for the great growth of war fiction during the last quarter of the nineteenth century’ (Clarke 1966: 79). While France imagined ‘the great task of la revanche’, in Germany there was little attempt to indulge in the field of imaginary warfare until after 1895, when the expansion of the imperial navy was accompanied by antagonism towards Britain, its new maritime rival. Significantly, Clarke notes that ‘German writers were far more interested in … turning out very plain pamphlets that were little more than military appreciations for the general public’ (Clarke 1966: 88–9). The dominant German approach to military fiction typically conformed to the pragmatic explanations of military cause and effect as propounded by history of the Franco-Prussian War, rather than to fanciful accounts of wonder weapons. Accounts of technological prowess remained contingent on wider social and military factors.

Technology and Combat in the Franco-Prussian War

143

German illustrated histories published between unification and the First World War furnish ample accounts of the Franco-Prussian War that acknowledge the role technology played in achieving tactical success on the battlefield. In welldeveloped accounts, including War and Victory, the impact of recent incremental changes to the arsenals of both warring factions is clearly articulated, even when they were to Germany’s detriment. Representations of battlefield technology in illustrated historical accounts were as likely to instil unease at the prospect of losing the technological edge as they were to generate unqualified admiration for the efficacy of German-designed weapons systems. Popular military histories function as an antidote to the inclination to indulge in comforting fantasies of futuristic warfare. Even when technology did make a significant difference, as did the Krupp field gun in 1870, its image is commonly deployed in accounts foregrounding the putative moral qualities of German men at war. Bernhard Rieger suggests that, in late-nineteenth-century Germany, ‘the word “modern” captured the widespread conviction that the historical present was first and foremost an era of profound, irreversible, and man-made changes’. Modernity appeared problematic, he argues, because it seemingly generated instability: ‘in order to create the new, the old or traditional had to be displaced and often destroyed’ (Rieger 2005: 10–1). Accounts of the use of modern technology in the Franco-Prussian War fell squarely into the problematic category because they exposed the fragility of technological superiority at any one moment. Significantly, in the context of the rapid tempo of technological development in the late nineteenth century, the technologies depicted in illustrated histories, murals and military paintings on the subject of the Wars of Unification were invariably obsolescent when they were first published or displayed, even though the events themselves had occurred only decades ago, an unprecedented factor visual producers had to contend with. Technological grounds for confidence about the outcome of future conflicts were frequently tentative, at best. The solution for the cultural producers addressed here lay in illustrated accounts that emphasized the moral component of fighting power, embodied in representations of the soldier employing or overcoming technology. These accounts carry the foundations of Jünger’s later argument that the values of bourgeois society, rooted in the Enlightenment address to reason and the rights of the individual, had to be overturned in favour of a ruthless, less selfserving equivalent if Germany was to tackle the enhanced threats to national survival he believed were a consequence of the Machine Age. The dynamic between the impact of battlefield technologies and the transcendent moral force of the soldier embodied in the notion of the will to

144

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

battle, or offensive spirit, developed into a salient feature of professional military discourse about the dynamics between offence and defence, as the Industrial Revolution furnished ever more lethal technologies. Showalter argues that an enduring characteristic of the Prusso-German army was the value it placed on the imperative to concentrate force at a chosen point in order to create the conditions for success. Have done so, the ‘combination of firepower, physical presence and moral superiority’ stood the best possible chance of securing the desired outcome (Showalter 1983: 586). The lesson broadcast by the General Staff with reference to historical examples was unambiguous: an army that failed to go forward – tactically, onto contested terrain and, operationally, towards selected strategic goals – is doomed to failure (Citino 2005: 182–6). But by 1870 it was recognized and understood that to advance without careful preparation into the teeth of modern firepower was to court disaster. As Wawro observes: Essentially, there were two types of officers in Prussia in 1870, and many in between who blended the qualities of both types. One type argued the invincibility of ‘moral’ factors like ‘will’, ‘guts’, and ‘instinct’. … The other type exalted science, manoeuvre, and innovation, to win with a minimum of friction and casualties. (Wawro 2003: 168)

War and Victory includes representations of technology on terms that engage with this debate. Carl Röchling’s Field Artillery Under Fire appears in the first section of Volume 1, an analysis of the experience of the three ‘combat arms’ – cavalry, infantry and artillery – in open battle (Schlacht) (Figure 30).3 A Prussian artillery piece in action occupies the centre of the work. Puffs of smoke and a cloud of debris indicate that the location is under effective counter-battery fire. At first glance it appears that Röchling advances an account of defeat. In the right foreground the body of a Prussian casualty lies facedown. Left of centre, a member of the crew jerks back, struck by shrapnel from the exploding shell. Still further to the left, another member of the crew begins his rearward journey towards medical attention, clutching a wounded arm. It appears that although the gun has not been destroyed, it has, in effect, been ‘neutralized’: rendered combat ineffective by the bombardment. On closer inspection, the figure group to the left is more complex than it first appears. In the space between the two upright casualties two other figures are partially visible. In deep pictorial space the upper body of a soldier advances towards the gun. The forward trajectory of his inclined body counters that of the walking wounded figure, behind which he appears. The legs and lower torso of yet another figure are to be seen in the pictorially complex space immediately

Technology and Combat in the Franco-Prussian War

145

Figure 30 Carl Röchling, Field Artillery Under Fire (Pflugk-Harttung 1896b: 35). Digital scan: author.

behind the figure struck by shrapnel. Again, the forward inclination of his body checks the pictorial rhythm of the wounded bodies inclining towards the left of the work, to significant rhetorical effect. Although concealed, the viewer is able to register that the bombardier standing astride the gun trail is inclined forward because he is aiming the gun, while another team member brings up more ammunition: the gun remains in action during a critical moment characterized by extreme violence. Röchling’s work foregrounds the moral qualities of the men on this gun position. His composition conceals the technical characteristics of the artillery piece that made it an example of state-of-the-art military technology in 1870. Because most of the crew is incapacitated and the compressed, vignettelike, composition offers little tactical context, the work scarcely engages with the conceptual component at all. His account strikes a fine balance between comprehending the rational application of technology in battlefield conditions, and evoking the military sublime, provoking an affective response to his representation of tumultuous conditions, in which the viewer is stirred by the recognition that neither reason nor tactical skill can ultimately guarantee the desired outcome. In such circumstances, the virtuous soldier willingly surrenders himself to fate in pursuit of wider aims. Röchling’s narrative advances the virtues of the will to battle over and above those of mere technical competence.4

146

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

The project Pflugk-Harttung edited is no less invested in Machine Age concerns than the works of Jünger, a quarter of a century later.5 Pflugk-Harttung’s history may be a triumphalist work written from the victor’s perspective, but his account of the campaign does not shy away from tackling the daunting challenges soldiers confronted as a result of technological shortfalls. Maximizing the potential of one’s own technological capabilities while minimizing those of the enemy constitutes an important strand of his account of the war. This theme gains in significance over the course of the period of this project. As the tempo of operations increased and weapon systems became more destructive, a trend towards the fetishizing of weapons technology is discernable. Pflugk-Harttung’s chapter on battle describes an operational environment that has been frequently examined by military historians, because it provides a clear example of the dynamics between technology, warfighting doctrine and the characteristics of military institutions. In terms of military competence the Franco-Prussian War was a war Prussia thoroughly deserved to win. Its army had rapidly incorporated the lessons identified during the recent campaigns against Denmark and Austria, continuously refining its approach to combat in order to maximize its technological strengths while downplaying its weaknesses. In summary, in 1866 the Prussian Dreyse breech-loading rifle known, for technical reasons, as the Needle Gun (Zündnadelgewehr), had proved a decisive factor in the defeat of Austria because it was more accurate and could be fired more rapidly than the Austrian muzzle loader. Austrian ‘shock tactics’ – attacking in massed columns in an attempt to overwhelm Prussian battalions – merely led to mass slaughter. The French observed this outcome and responded by commissioning an unprecedented new rifle, which went into production that same year. The ‘Chassepot’ outclassed the now obsolescent Needle Gun (adopted in 1841) in every important respect: range, lethality and rate of fire. The implications were widely understood at the time, and ‘many nervous Prussian infantrymen … had constantly to be reassured (fraudulently), that “the needle rifle is not outranged by the Chassepot”’ (Wawro 2003: 57). The Prussian General Staff assessed that the short-term solution to this technological shortfall in capability lay with its artillery arm. In 1866 Austrian gunners had lived up to their reputation for aggressive competence, driving their Prussian peers from the battlefield. A subsequent analysis of Prussian injuries demonstrated that the majority had been caused by shell and shrapnel fire: the consequences of technical innovation that would eventually shape the landscapes of the First World War were already being felt in 1866. The German General Staff took precipitate – and effective – action. By 1870, Alfred Krupp’s innovative breech-loading hardened-steel

Technology and Combat in the Franco-Prussian War

147

weapons, such as the one depicted by Röchling, had replaced obsolescent muzzle-loading bronze models, still fielded by France. The Krupp guns had ‘three times the accuracy, twice the rate of fire, a third greater range, and many times the destructiveness of the French guns’ (Wawro 3: 58). Tactics were devised to offset the inadequacies of the obsolescent Needle Gun. The artillery arm was to be used to overcome the correctly anticipated tendency of infantry attacks to stall as men went to ground in the face of effective French rifle fire: the so-called ‘Chassepot effect’. A re-write of artillery tactical doctrine emphasized that the principle role of field artillery was to provide close support to the infantry, enabling them to conduct the battle-winning task of closing with the enemy and occupying ground.6 Between 1866 and 1870, gun batteries were trained to manoeuvre dynamically, coalescing temporarily into artillery concentrations (Artillerie-Massen) wherever they were needed in order to saturate enemy formations in shell and shrapnel, suppressing them until the infantry had manoeuvred close enough to assault the position.7 An offensiveminded Prussian army proved capable of responding to the opportunities and constraints posed by technological modernity. As Showalter observes, ‘The artillery of the German states, equipped and employed on Prussian lines, emerged from the Franco-Prussian War as a shining institutional example of state-of-the-art gunnery.’8 The clash of competing technologies is rehearsed in subsequent history painting. Wilhelm Camphausen’s 1877 King Napoleon III being escorted by Count Bismarck to King William on the morning after the Battle Of Sedan (Kaiser Napoleon III. wird am Morgen nach der Schlacht von Sedan durch den Grafen Bismarck zu König Wilhelm geleitet) depicts Napoleon’s carriage negotiating a tree-lined road littered with battle casualties. A somewhat oversized Chassepot lies in the path of the vehicle, where it appears destined to be trampled under the hooves of Bismarck’s horse. No less theatrically, Werner’s 1873 Moltke and his Staff Outside Paris (Moltke mit seinem Stabe vor Paris) depicts the chief of the General Staff on a hillside outside the city. As with Jean-Louis Meissonier’s 1863 Napoleon III at the Battle of Solferino, 1859, a work which Werner manifestly sought to trump, such are the compositional similarities, Moltke surveys the terrain in the presence of troops deploying into battle. Werner literally foregrounds technological modernity: in the right foreground soldiers are depicted erecting a field telegraph pole as a Krupp field gun passes directly under Moltke’s gaze. Werner continued to exploit every opportunity to celebrate Prussia’s success in harnessing technological modernity in the war against France. As late as 1903,

148

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

his portrait of Constantin von Alvensleben depicts the general who initiated the Vionville battle standing with his back to the action. Behind him, the viewer is presented with an account of the attack on the hamlet of Flavigny. PflugkHarttung’s description of the Prussian attack delivered according to tactical norms is rehearsed in Werner’s visual account. The leading wave of infantry is observed rolling in from the left. In the middle ground, framed by its own gun smoke, the viewer observes a battery in action in the ploughed field that is the subject of Emelé’s The Battlefield Seen from the South (Figure 15), part of an ‘artillery concentration’ whose massed firepower created the conditions in which progress against the Chassepot was rendered possible, albeit at considerable cost. Neither the Chassepot nor Krupp’s steel breech loaders were wonder weapons but they did represent a definitive moment in the evolution of weapons technology, when a sudden step change in effectiveness had a telling effect on the tactical conduct of military operations. What is therefore surprising about how these technologies are represented in illustrated histories is the absence of interest in their technological characteristics. War and Victory, for example, contains no technical drawings of Krupp field artillery, nor does it incorporate artists’ representations of soldiers operating such equipment in a technical sense, such as opening a breech mechanism or fusing the new-style ammunition. Such an absence is to be expected in history painting, where the rhetorical potential of iconic objects assumes the viewer’s familiarity with the wider cultural context of historical events. But illustrated histories require more than oblique references. As noted earlier, the attraction of the popular history lies in the weaving of a narrative that is sufficiently complex to command a degree of concentration, in which the reader’s curiosity and imagination are stimulated by a naturalistic address to detail in both text and image. The absence of interest in technological detail reflects the dominant tendency to represent the German army in popular histories as an institution committed to offensive warfare: on the primacy of the moral component – on going forward as the only route to success. Röchling’s work represents a moment of acute danger during offensive combat operations, allowing him to foreground the moral component of military capability in the context of technological modernity. The Illustrated History of the War, 1870-71 (Illustrierte Geschichte des Krieges, 1870-71), a similar text to War and Victory, contains an equivalent work depicting infantry in defence: Roessler’s The Battle on the Lilaine: Action on the Railway Embankment at Bethoncourt (16 January 1871) (Die Schlacht an der Lilaine: Gefecht am Eisenbahndamme bei Bethoncourt (16. Januar 1871)). Bearded veterans in the closing stages of the war man a firing line behind the embankment to repel

Technology and Combat in the Franco-Prussian War

149

a French attack. Roessler depicts defensive tactics, focusing on the use of the Needle Gun to deliver concentrated fire. Unlike Röchling’s work, which appeals to the emotions via its address to the military sublime, Roessler’s more subdued mode of representation addresses the physical and conceptual components more explicitly. The right foreground features a soldier reloading his Needle Gun revealing, untypically, its technical characteristics. The viewer’s attention is caught between two strands of the narrative. To the right the firing line engages enemy troops seen in the near distance, while in the centre an ammunition party arrives on the position; soldiers are depicted distributing boxes of rifle ammunition, emphasizing the rapid rates of fire that were a defining feature of contemporary military modernity. The second chapter of War and Victory, Volume 1, also emphasizes the technological aspects of war in the context of siege warfare, the mode of warfighting that Prussia sought unsuccessfully to avoid in 1870 because it signalled the end of the aspiration rapidly to achieve decisive victory within weeks by destroying the French army in open battle.9 The narrative of conflict here takes on a different tone, reflecting the prominent role that the application of technology had assumed in the evolution of European siege warfare since the invention of gunpowder. Representations of the human body are replaced by images of heavy artillery pieces, gun positions and destroyed fortifications, all of which foreshadow how the First World War was subsequently represented. Representations of siege technology typically involve a more detailed address to objects in their battlefield surroundings. Brendamour’s 21cm Bronze Mortar, a representation of a heavy siege mortar seen in virtual profile, conveys the form of the machine in an aesthetic manner analogous to a technical drawing (Figure 31). Its sharp outline, brittle clarity and all-over attention to surface detail are the result of artistic decisions made in the process of engraving from a photograph, a routine practice in the mid-1890s, when halftone technology was on the cusp of maturity. As the adjacent reproduction of a photograph of a Prussian 12-pounder demonstrates, the relatively crude first-generation halftone screen fails to preserve the tonal gradations of the original image sufficiently to throw into clear relief the heavy gun’s loading and aiming mechanisms (Figure 32). The textured surfaces and exaggerated address to detail of Brendamour’s engraving aestheticizes the object in a manner that purports to convey something of its mechanical ‘elegance’ to the non-specialist viewer. The suggestively informative properties of the image are illusory: the viewer gains no meaningful technical insights from this encounter. Rather, the effect is to fetishize a product of

150

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

Figure 31  Richard Brend’amour, 21cm Bronze Mortar (1870), engraving, War and Victory (Pflugk-Harttung 1896b: 98). Digital scan: author.

Figure 32 Unknown photographer, Prussian 12-pounder (Pflugk-Harttung 1896b: 101). Digital scan: author.

Technology and Combat in the Franco-Prussian War

151

Figure 33 Hermann von Müller, No. 1 Battery in Front of Neubreifach (PflugkHarttung 1896a: 100). Digital scan: author.

German industrial design in the manner that Francis Picabia later critiqued with his absurd mechanomorphic ‘technical drawings’ produced in the wake of the First World War. An equivalent aesthetic is found in contemporary department store catalogues, such that issued by August Stukenbrok as late as 1912. The aesthetic properties of mechanical consumer items, such as the hunting weapons in Outstanding Quality Precision Double and TripleBarrelled Shotguns (Hervorragende Präzisions-Doppelflinten u. Drillinge), were emphasized by the continued use of engraving as the primary means of reproduction, even after the mature photographic halftone offered a cheaper alternative (Stukenbrok 1912). While images of siege weapons assume the allusory authority of technical drawings in War and Victory, visual accounts of the tactical employment of this technology conform to cartographic conventions. Hermann von Müller’s Batterie I vor Neubreifach is a scale drawing of a four-gun battery position prepared in accordance with doctrinal norms: it is an idealized representation of an ideal position (Figure 33). The annotated plan view is augmented by a vertical elevation and two cross-sections. The textured representation of the material qualities of the position adds to the satisfaction of the reader-viewer who navigates the site in the imagination. Its cartographic values and the exposition of doctrinal norms impose coherence, suggesting control of terrain and events. When subsequently

152

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

looking at photographs of such sites in the heavily shelled terrain around the fortresses of Paris, Metz or Strasburg, the viewer is able to deploy tactical and technological knowledge and conjure order out of sights which otherwise appear chaotic or fragmented in the wake of extreme firepower.10 War and Victory establishes two contrasting modes when accounting for the role of technology on the battlefields of the Franco-Prussian War: one ‘offensive’ mode, privileging the moral component of fighting power over the physical during offensive operations, the other ‘defensive’, emphasizing the physical component during siege warfare. Pflugk-Harttung’s unambiguously celebratory account assigns relative importance to each component of fighting power in recognizably different contexts, thereby avoiding contemporary controversy. However, the relative worth of the moral and physical components in the offence was contested in the decades leading up to the First World War, when enhanced destructive power furnished by technological developments was weighed-up against the transcendent virtues of élan, or Schneid (pluck). Historians have replayed the controversy. Showalter argues that, far from being wedded to outmoded ideas about the primacy of the spirit, the German army recognized the limits of material factors on the modern battlefield and consequently promoted moral factors appropriate to technological modernity. The army reflected … the successful absorption and institutionalization of a major legacy of the French Revolution: the importance of the man behind the gun. As modern weapons rendered the battlefield ever emptier, the modern soldier needed a complex set of moral equipment in order to fight and win. … Above all, the man in the ranks needed to see himself almost in dialectical terms as an autonomous component of a disciplined military community, able to respond individually to complex battlefield challenges while at the same time contributing to a planned result. … It involved the deliberate cultivation of a mental and emotional attitude. (Showalter 1994: 63)

Eric Brose disagrees with this positive analysis of institutional dynamics: I found that the feuding factions in the infantry, cavalry and artillery had fought over the tactical and technological lessons of the Wars of Unification (1866–1870). Those who emphasised the superiority of man and morale over machine and firepower prevailed by the late 1870s – to the army’s detriment. … The offensive combat experience of 1866–1870 was interpreted from the heady, arrogant perspective of overconfident victors. These proud soldiers spawned a persistent tactical-technological tradition. (Brose 2001: 4)

Technology and Combat in the Franco-Prussian War

153

War and Victory nods, gently, in the direction of this debate. Its address to technology is determined by the structure of the narrative, which is itself determined by that of the war. The first phase of the war – up to the walls of Paris – was remembered as the heroic phase, fought aggressively in the Prussian manner. The role of technology in securing victory is acknowledged in both volumes, but is only granted precedence in the context of visual accounts of siege operations, understood as the more problematic phase of the conflict, which receives relatively limited coverage. The dominant emphasis on the moral component of fighting power in War and Victory reveals the didactic nature of Pflugk-Harttung’s project in a nation that practised conscription and recalled its reservists annually to active duty. The majority of images of combat depict infantrymen engaged in offensive operations against an often unseen enemy equipped with superior rifles. Two works on adjacent pages convey the moral implications of working in the face of superior enemy technology. Richard Knötel’s Bavarians in the Attack (Bayern im Angriffe) depicts infantrymen in clothing frayed by weeks of hard campaigning, advancing stolidly through heavy plough (Figure 34). A soldier sinks to the ground, suggesting that they may have come under effective enemy fire. Their dogged passivity suggests a manifestation of the ‘Chassepot effect’: they are still beyond the effective range of their own

Figure 34 Richard Knötel, Bavarians in the Attack (Pflugk-Harttung 1896a: 15). Digital scan: author.

154

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

weapons. Even though a soldier raises his weapon to his shoulder, they have no choice but to hold their fire as they close with the French and accept what comes their way.11 Knötel suggests that Bavarians, no less than Prussians, demonstrated their will to battle in 1870–1. On the opposite page, Advancing in Bounds, (Sprungweises Vorgehen) rehearses a similar account of moral character in the face of superior technology (Figure 35). As Roessler depicts, breech-loading technology allowed riflemen to reload while kneeling or lying on the ground, something hitherto impossible when a lead ball had to be rammed down the length of the barrel with a pole. During a Prussian deliberate attack at Le Bourget (on 30 October to recover an outpost lost to a French sortie during the siege of Paris) units of the Prussian Guard deployed new tactics to enhance their firepower during the assault. The event is described in War and Victory and has hereafter attracted the attention of military historians because it demonstrates a capacity for tactical innovation in the face of technological challenges that prefigures the assault tactics developed during the First World War. Assault troops supported by a

Figure 35 Unknown artist(s), Advancing in Bounds (Pflugk-Harttung 1896a: 14). Digital scan: author.

Technology and Combat in the Franco-Prussian War

155

concentration of artillery were divided into mutually supporting teams; while one team advanced as rapidly as possible, the other hugged the ground and provided covering fire, maximizing the technological potential of the Needle Gun to neutralize French defences, while exposing limited numbers of men to French rifle fire.12 Advancing in Bounds depicts a related tactical manoeuvre. A soldier advances warily towards an unseen feature from which an unseen enemy might open fire. Another lies ready to provide covering fire, supported by a third team member who scans the ground for signs of the enemy. The lowkey narrative celebrates coherent teamwork, the moral determination to move forward and the willingness to contemplate tactical innovation.13 Here too lie the foundations of a narrative that would come to maturity in visual accounts of Materialschlacht on the Western Front.

7

Technology and Combat in the First World War

The First World War is commonly described as the first industrialized war, a war of material (Materialschlacht) in which the experience of conflict, like the landscape in which it occurred, was transformed by the unprecedented use of mass-produced technologies of surveillance and destruction. Vast armies disappeared underground in order to minimize the destructive potential of heavy artillery and intensive surveillance. Killing occurred at long range in a moonscape in which a glimpse of the enemy was a rare event during routine tours of duty in the trenches. For conservative-minded critic Ernst Jünger, who nevertheless embraced modernity, the impact of technological developments on the battlefield was only part of the story. In a body of works published between 1925 and 1933 Jünger advanced the claim that Germany’s humiliating defeat in 1918 was due to a failure to mobilize the entire economic and scientific resources of the nation behind the war effort. The logic of warfare waged on an industrial basis amounted, he argued, to a race to deploy a larger number of more capable weapon systems, and to use them to relatively greater effect for as long as it took to secure victory. If Germany was to win the next war it had to forge a disciplined, cohesive society, one in which soldiers and workers (farmers too) evinced utter conviction in pursuit of the national cause, a pitiless disregard for the self and nerves of steel. His works promoted the virtues of an authoritarian state that created the conditions in which individuals maximized the potential of powerful technologies at their disposal, even as they armoured themselves against the shocks resulting from their use. Jünger’s outlook was shaped by his experience as an infantry officer who had experienced Materialschlacht on the Western Front. Even as he contributed to military histories of the Great War and the 1918–23 counterrevolution in Germany, his foremost concern was to extrapolate lessons and apply them programmatically to his vision of a future society struggling for survival in a dangerous world. Taken in isolation, Jünger’s project today appears startlingly radical, but the military aspects of his project were unprecedented only in terms

Technology and Combat in the First World War

157

of the scope of his ambition. As this book suggests, the relationship between society, the individual soldier, military institutions and battlefield technologies had developed a politically engaged history of its own during the Second Reich, not least in relation to anxiety about rapid technological developments, the destructive potential of future wars, and Germany’s human and technological preparedness. While Jünger’s vision was radical, the burden of his argument advanced in The Dangerous Moment, The Transformed World, Copse 125 and The Worker, rests on his use of images of military technology in contexts that reveal a preoccupation with the will to battle: with the moral, rather than the physical component of fighting power. Jünger’s concerns were therefore not as far removed from those of authors of Wilhelmine illustrated popular histories of the wars of unification as they perhaps appear today, to the extent that they are never about technologies as such, but the way in which German soldiers respond to and exploit material conditions on the battlefield in the Wilhelmine tradition identified here. This chapter addresses representations of ground warfare and aerial reconnaissance, noting that Jünger’s recipe for national survival in the Machine Age centres on land warfare. A close analysis of illustrated accounts of the First World War on land suggests a rupture of sorts in the field of visual representation after all: not as a form of alienation, as Huppauff suggests, but a transformation of the way combat, which had traditionally been depicted as a man-on-man event, was increasingly represented as an encounter between man and machine.1 This chapter explores the implications of this transition and sets it in the context of wider continuities in visual representation. Figure 36 apart, the chapter does not examine how technological developments during the Great War were represented in German culture during the war itself.2 Bearing in mind that the moral component of fighting power was accorded primacy in popular illustrated histories of German victory over France in 1870–1, this chapter explores how the relationship between the conceptual, moral and physical (technological) components was negotiated in equivalent histories of the First World War published between 1918 and 1933, concentrating on representations of a definitive icon of military modernity: the tank. In 1870 German field artillery had proved the closest thing to a wonder weapon. After 1916 technological modernity was similarly connoted by images of the tank, a weapon invented and deployed by Germany’s enemies.3 The chapter explores how the image of the tank came to epitomize Materialschlacht and was co-opted to account for Germany’s defeat without detracting from the apparently enduring moral qualities of the German soldier. Allied tanks on the Western Front were

158

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

commonly depicted as a form of eschatological monster, against which not even the German soldier could prevail. This exculpatory trope only resonated in the context of Materialschlacht. Germany did employ small quantities of the latest technologies in its post-war border conflicts. However quantity alone does not fully explain why popular illustrated accounts of these events typically return to pre-industrial narratives of border conflict in which soldiers are depicted as Teutonic knights whose own brand of armoured technology assisted them in the task of repelling external aggressors, revealing longer term continuity in the field of border representation. The chapter addresses the photobooks, The Dangerous Moment and The Transformed World, analysing how images of the tank and its relationship to the moral component of fighting power was embedded in Jünger’s conception of a social order adequate to the challenges posed by modern technology. As in illustrated histories of the Franco-Prussian War, the objective capabilities of specific technologies are never the central issue in any of the publications examined here; the focus remains fixed on the moral and conceptual values attending representations of German soldiers using battlefield technologies, and the implications of their actions for both military and socio-political outcomes. The pace of military technological development slowed after the midnineteenth-century surge in innovation. In the summer of 1914 accounts of recent combat furnished by histories including War and Victory consequently provided a plausible basis for imagining the tactical–technological dynamics of what lay ahead. The Humour Magazine War Album (Kriegs-Album der Lustigen Blätter) captured this tone at the outbreak of war in August 1914. Reminiscence (Reminiszenz) depicts a mother saying farewell in a Berlin dialect to her mobilized son: ‘So now, Fritze, when you get to Paris, have a local resident show you where your father stood at his post in 1870, and place yourself there again!’ (Nun also, Fritze, wenn de nach Paris kommst, lass dir mal von en Einjebornen zeijen, wo dein Vater anno 1870 Posten jestanded hat, und da stellste dich wider hin!). Behind mother and son a crowd of civilians crowd around a field artillery piece (a weapon that was to prove inadequate to the task when it came to destroying entrenched positions in the coming winter). The loosely sketched uniform and gun gloss the changes in clothing and equipment that had occurred over the intervening decades, collapsing the temporal distance between mobilization in 1870 and 1914.4 Germany’s illustrated general interest weeklies chart the changing nature of the Great War, culminating in the full expression of Materialschlacht in 1918.

Technology and Combat in the First World War

159

The tank in representation had a limited profile during the 1920s, not least because Germany was banned under the terms of the Versailles Treaty from fielding such weapons. Most Germans never saw or heard an actual tank during the Great War itself or during the Weimar years, but newspapers, illustrated magazines, propaganda posters, postcards and popular histories all carried images of tanks from the time they first appeared on the Western Front in 1916.5 Images of British tanks in action featured strongly in post-war narratives that apportioned blame for Germany’s defeat on anyone except the army or the veteran population. In contrast, tanks in wartime German use were so poorly represented as to be virtually invisible. Distling’s 1917 Only if You Stay Calm (Nur die Ruhe Kann Es Machen) is a domestic propaganda poster which sets up an anecdotal account of combat against tanks on terms that were subsequently incorporated into the myth of Fronterlebnis (Figure 36). A British tank bursts into flame immediately in front of a German defended locality. The vehicle is clearly defined, allowing Distling to present facets of its construction in a manner similar to the aesthetic preoccupations of 21cm Bronze Mortar, discussed in Chapter 6. Distling advances a witness claim for a narrative that is less about technology than it is about the tactical skill and tenacity of the German defenders, signing the work in a box in which he certifies that the scene was observed in the field with 4th Rifle Division (z/Zt im Felde 4 J. D.). Two defenders are seen hurling grenade bundles at the vehicle while a machine gun team, which studiously ignores the tank action, scans the terrain for the infantry component of this combined-arms

Figure 36  Distling, Only if You Stay Calm, lithograph, 1917. IWM PST6455, Courtesy of Imperial War Museum, London.

160

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

attack, seen in the distance advancing under bursting shrapnel in a shellscape framed by shattered trees and destroyed buildings. The poster was intended to urge German munition workers not to engage in the industrial disputes that threatened the war economy. Its appeal for discipline and collaborative working practices is located in the moral example of frontline soldiers who stick to their assigned tasks at a moment of extreme pressure. There is deliberate ambiguity about whether the hortatory text flanking the strap line is addressed to workers or soldiers, which reads like the rules of engagement for combined-arms defensive tactics: ‘Steel core ammunition is only for Tommy behind the tanks!’, and ‘The artillery will take care of tanks that have broken in[to the position]’: the artillery will knock out tanks; infantry – do not engage them with rifle or machinegun fire, conserve your ammunition for the accompanying infantry (S. Munition gehört nur dem Tommy hinter den Tanks!, and Durchgefahrene Tanks erledigt die Artillerie!).6 Distling’s representation of technology employed within a recognizable tactical context positions his work within the tradition of Werner’s portrait of Alvensleben at Vionville, and the images depicting technology on the battlefield in War and Victory. His work realizes its task of conveying a message of solidarity directly and with clarity, not least because Distling’s composition has something in common with the so-called Sachplakat, or ‘object poster’ developed by the advertising industry. Frederic Schwartz describes how, in the typical object poster, the rendering of the product … is flat and devoid of distinguishing marks, anonymous and unspecific. The product is differentiated from others of its kind only by the name and the trademark crest of the manufacturer. The representation of the commodity is stripped of ornament, abstracted to what contemporaries called a ‘type’, and the commercial signs are limited to a single mark of origin. The advertisement is reduced to a type and a trademark. (Schwartz 1996: 137)

Distling’s pared-down representation of the tank conforms to the notion of a type. Images of the original British tank design, instantly recognizable by its distinctive rhombic shape, were routinely used after 1916 to exemplify mechanized warfare, even though both Britain and France subsequently fielded a variety of other designs. It signified a form of warfighting that the viewer associates with – is the trademark of – the overwhelming power of the Allies during the closing phase of the war.7 Post-war popular accounts of German prowess in the conduct of Materialschlacht drew heavily on photographic representations of destroyed or abandoned British tanks, in a manner similar to that employed by Distling.

Technology and Combat in the First World War

161

English Tank, included in the 1928 The World War in Pictures (Der Weltkrieg im Bild), depicts the aftermath of the 1917 Battle of Cambrai.8 A tank lies abandoned. The accompanying caption merely gives technical details of its armament and mobility. Shorn of any ongoing tactical context, it functions principally as an object of technological fascination, a potent weapon defeated by a German feat of arms that did not rely on using an equivalent advanced weapons system. Jünger’s The Face of the World War employs photographs of tanks to similar effect. Completely Destroyed English Tank (Vollkommen zestörter englischer Tank) depicts a tank ripped apart by a catastrophic explosion caused by a direct hit on its ammunition racks (Figure 37). The indexical quality of the photograph offers up the inner form of the tank’s industrial design, and provides compelling evidence of the extreme violence that was by then a defining feature of the war. On the same page an aerial photograph, no less emblematic of military modernity, depicts a tank incapable of assisting the manoeuvre of the infantry taking cover behind it, whose attack has lost its tactical coherence in the face of German defensive tactics. Images of tanks did not always connote a spent force. In an illustrated history narrating the Allied experience of the Great War published as a companion piece to Jünger’s The Face of the World War, Richard Junior includes a photograph of a British tank advancing past German soldiers. On an axis of advance. English tanks go forward. German prisoners bring back the wounded (Auf einer Anmarschstrasse. Englische Tanks im Vorgehen. Deutsche Gefangene beim Zurückbringen von Verwundeten) depicts a powerful component of a technologically overwhelming force. This tank poses an active threat. Seen from the rear, it vents gases from its exhaust as it pauses during its progress towards the front. Its bulk dominates the narrative, looming over the figures surrounding it. The English beneficiaries of this technology assume relaxed poses, while German prisoners engaged in manual labour are forced off the road by its presence. In the aftermath of defeat, images of tanks in military histories did more than merely exemplify the vulnerability of this new technology when faced by German troops employing technological countermeasures, including steel core ammunition, in combination with improvised anti-tank tactics. In accounts proposing an honourable road to defeat, tanks represented the burgeoning material superiority of the Allies, in the face of which the finest army in Europe was eventually overwhelmed, underpinning the myth that the army remained undefeated in the field. If Germany’s soldiers had not been victorious it was not their fault, argued patriotic authors: this time, neither sagacity, nor tact,

162

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

Figure 37  Unknown photographer, Completely Destroyed English Tank, (Jünger 1930: 247). Digital scan: author.

nor courage could hold back the materially well-endowed Allied armies which subjected them to overwhelming pressure. Memorial to the German Army and Navy, 1871-1918 employs graphic illustrations of technology to provoke a warmer response. Rothe’s edited history comprises accounts of wartime operations written by senior officers

Technology and Combat in the First World War

163

and incorporates art works commissioned from members of the academic art establishment. Rothe rejects photography – the now preferred means of illustrating popular military histories – exploiting, instead, the ability of artists to represent the experience of tactical battlefield events imagined at moments of extreme danger in order to stimulate an affective response in the readerviewer. Rothe commissioned art works whose content conforms to the rhetoric of heroic resistance in the face of overwhelming technological might. The above description of Distling’s propaganda poster can, for example, be applied to Eric Mattschaß’s From the Great Tank Battle at Cambrai, 27 September to 8 October 1917 (Aus der grossen Tankschlacht bei Cambrai, 27. September bis 8. Oktober 1917) (Figure 38). As in Distling’s work, German soldiers are depicted rising from a collapsed trench in order to hurl grenade bundles at the tank. Again, the context is that of a major tactical engagement as at Cambrai: in pictorial depth other tanks roll forward through shellfire, supported by infantry and aircraft. However the work’s meaning is less explicitly grounded in the virtues of rational teamwork in the face of powerful yet vulnerable technology. Depicted from the ground level, the tank looms on the near horizon, where it takes on the qualities of a lumbering yet deadly leviathan threatening to crush the battered German position. Meaning coalesces around the act of a rational (tactically coherent), yet simultaneously sublime, confrontation between man and machine. The

Figure 38  Eric Mattschaß, From the Great Tank Battle at Cambrai, 27 September to 8 October 1917, in Memorial to the German Army and Navy, 1871-1918 (1927: opposite 214). Digital scan: author.

164

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

narrative exemplifies the moral qualities of defenders who demonstrate their unshaken will to battle in an uneven contest with the enemy’s war machines. The moral content of Mattschaß’s work is bound up solely in the act of resistance – the result of the engagement is irrelevant. Mattschaß plays to a convention of demonstrating German martial virtues in the teeth of technological challenges traced here back to late-nineteenth-century accounts of responses to the Chassepot rifle during the Franco-Prussian War. In particular, his work can be aligned with Röchling’s Field Artillery Under Fire: both invest heavily in the pictorial values of the military sublime. Distling’s work stresses the role of technology, teamwork and tactics in defeating the tank, while Mattschaß emphasizes more explicitly the triumph of the moral over the physical. A third, extreme, option was to exaggerate the Allies’ material superiority. Walter Bloem’s 1922 illustrated account of the industrial phase of the war in The World in Flames: Germany’s Tragedy, 19141918 (Der Weltbrand: Deutschlands Tragödie, 1914-1918), includes Ludwig Dettman’s And Then it Pounded Up, Tank Next to Tank (Und dann stampfte es heran, Tank neben Tank). Dettman, whose career as a salient war artist is introduced in Chapter 1, had been compared favourably with Adolph Menzel, and was praised by a 1916 exhibition reviewer for how: ‘The dark sides of war work most strongly on Dettman: dead horses, trenches filled with mouldering corpses, mud and filth, icy rain pouring on freezing soldiers … illustrated in Dettman’s pictures’ (Barnstone and Haakenson 2013: 78). And Then it Pounded Up refuses a naturalistic representation of pictorial space and the tactical realities of combat. Rather, Dettman’s Expressionistic aesthetic signifies an apocalyptic event; oversized tanks under a flaming sky spit fire as they crush everything in their path, including the survivors of German frontline units, who flee the battlefield. The pictorial values of the military sublime are exaggerated almost to the point of abstraction. The logic of overwhelming technological force is represented as a nightmare scenario in which the German soldier is absolved of responsibility for defeat. Visual representations of combat in which the German soldier was ‘unfairly’ overwhelmed by modern technology, despite the moral and conceptual excellence of the defence, began to circulate within weeks of the Armistice, as the claim that the army had been undefeated in the field took hold. Mars Ironing his Civilian Clothes prefigures the visual narratives described above (Figure 39). The tone of Hugo Kley’s drawing is perhaps more rueful than ironic, bearing in mind that the editors of Germany’s satirical magazines had by common agreement elected to refrain from mounting criticism of the war effort in August 1914. The athletic

Technology and Combat in the First World War

165

Figure 39  Heinrich Kley, Mars Ironing his Civilian Clothes, Simplicissimus 23, no.39 (24 December 1918), p. 486, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. © bpk-Bildagentur, Kunstbibliothek, SMB, photograph Dietmar Katz.

god of war kneels to position his trousers under the track of a diminutive British tank, as puny members of its crew look on. Mars – a latter-day Goliath – abases himself before the technology that, Kley suggests, has brought him to this, despite his warrior qualities. Behind him, the allegorical figure of Discord sows her poisonous snakes on the nation’s soil. Meanwhile, Mars’s weapons and shield are discarded, but not abandoned: they remain stacked against a shattered tree, off the ground, serviceable and to hand: to be defeated unfairly, Kley suggests, legitimizes the promise of a vengeful return to war. Taken in isolation, these examples suggest that images of British tanks were central to the construction of narratives designed to salvage the honour of German veterans and their army. But it would be misleading to accord the image of the tank too high a profile in such accounts of the war. As discussed in Chapter 3 in particular, the tendency to privilege the moral attributes of the soldier found a rhetorical frame in a romantic fascination with the mythology of the Teutonic Order, where armour took on connotations far removed from those associated with the tank. The nineteenth-century iconography of medieval chivalry invoked to uphold the virtues of duty and self-sacrifice is no less relevant in this context, given its significance for conservative elements in German society for whom technology seemingly posed a threat to the cohesion

166

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

of the Volk, rather than grounds to secure Germany’s place as a great European power in the Machine Age. The tendency towards flight into the pre-industrial past, symptomatic of the attitudes Jünger sought to challenge in his works of the early 1930s, is checked by images depicting industrial warfare in which tackling technology head-on is a non-negotiable imperative in the modern world. Wilhelm Schulz’s Farewell: ‘O Strassburg, o Strassburg –’ (Abschied: ‘O Strassburg, o Strassburg’ –) appeared in Simplicissimus on 17 December 1918. A battle-scared knight gazes back at the outline of Strasburg cathedral as he withdraws across the Rhine in compliance with the terms of the Armistice. Schulz’s appeal to the Teutonic past activates the idea of retreat twice over: it creates emotional distance from the realities of Materialschlacht and the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France; and it functions as a retreat behind the values of the armoured knight, avoiding confrontation with images of the technologically well-endowed Allied armies now occupying former German territory. Teutonic themes were commonly employed in accounts of post-war operations on Germany’s periphery. On 4 April 1920 the conservative magazine Phosphor dedicated an entire edition to Germany’s eastern border. Its cover carries Otto von Kursell’s head and shoulders of Bismarck dressed as a medieval knight, behind which an agrarian landscape lies under plough, replaying the convention of representing Germany as a pastoral idyll. Immediately after the Great War the reactionary trope of the armoured knight existed unproblematically alongside that of the modern storm trooper, each signifying Germany’s tactical and moral response to the realities of Materialschlacht. Fritz Erler’s Help us to Victory! (Helft Uns Siegen!), a canonical propaganda poster for the 1917 sixth war-bonds campaign, depicts a Prussian guardsman gazing confidently towards an unseen threat (Figure 40).9 Here again the will to battle is central to the meaning of the work. The figure’s determined expression, framed by the rim of a steel helmet, furnishes a visual connection with pre-existing imagery of the knight, while gas mask, barbed wire and grenade bag under his left arm locate the scene in the present. Erler’s example was emulated in post-war Freikorps recruiting posters. Impekoven’s 1919 Assault Battalion Schmidt, cited in Chapter 4, nods in the direction of Erler’s poster. The upper torso of a soldier dressed in contemporary uniform fills the frame, gazing out from under a helmet (Figure 40). Like Erler, Impekoven exploits the image of the steadfast storm trooper to rhetorical effect. But slippage occurs in his work: the illusionistic space behind the figure depicts idealized industrial and agricultural landscapes. The explicit relationship forged between defender and homeland suggests the work has at least as much

Technology and Combat in the First World War

167

Figure 40 Fritz Erler, Help us to Victory!, poster, 1917, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. © Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte.

in common with Kursell’s representation of Bismarck as it does with Erler’s representation of the storm trooper at the front. Both posters can be positioned within the tradition of representing the medieval knight as the virtuous defender of border territories, but the viewer has to work harder with the Erler to excavate the latent association. Assessed alongside Bismarck, Impekoven’s work suggests a return to a more self-conscious identification with Teutonic mythology in late 1918, at the expense of narratives of confrontation with technological modernity.10

168

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

On 16 February 1919, as tension mounted in the east, Kladderadatsch invoked the memory of the Teutonic guarantors of German territories east of the Elbe. As the figures in Wilhelm Steinert’s Ghosts in Danzig (Spukgeister in Danzig) patrol the outskirts of the city, one remarks: ‘Much has changed in Germany: only its neighbours have stayed the same’ (‘Vieles hat sich in Deutschland geändert, nur seine Nachbarn sind dieselben geblieben’). The tendency to play down the technological dimension of military operations is most evident in popular histories of the Baltic campaign of 1919, which present post-war campaigning in resolutely pre-industrial terms.11 The Order of Battle table (Kriegsgliederung) of German forces in the Baltic as in March 1919, published in the 1937 official history, reveals that many of the advanced technologies fielded during the Great War were employed on operations in 1919, including aircraft, armoured vehicles and radio communications (Forschungsanstalt für Kriegs und Heeresgeschichte 1937: 143). But Friedrich von Oertzen selects a photograph titled Cavalry Regiment of the Baltic Home Defence Force (Kavallerie-Abteilung der Baltischen Landeswehr) to illustrate his account of the Baltic campaign in his conservative Die deutsche Freikorps (Figure 41). A column of riders threads its way through a group of thatched farm buildings. Only uniform and equipment details inform the viewer that this was a recent event. Oertzen includes a caption that compounds the feudal overtones of the narrative: ‘Most of the ordinary riders of this cavalry regiment were large landowners and many of them held high officer ranks’ (Die meisten einfachen Reiter dieser Kavallerie-Abteilungen waren Groβgrundbesitzer und viele von ihnen hatten hohe Offiziersränge) (Oertzen 1936: 80). Popular histories did however include images depicting the use of advanced military technologies in their accounts of operations to defeat Bolshevik revolutionary activity after 1918. Agency photographs taken on the streets of Berlin during the communist-inspired General Strike in March 1919, for example, feature German and British-made tanks, as well as of artillery, heavy mortars and flame throwers deployed in urban areas. Photo-postcards conserved today in the Deutsches Historisches Museum, suggest that modern military technologies featured prominently on the streets and in media representations of counterrevolutionary activity. Significantly, when incorporated into illustrated popular accounts of the counterrevolution, such images develop narratives in which the German soldier is no longer pitted against technology, but is actively enabled by it. The moral component of fighting power continued to be favoured in photographic accounts of street fighting, but images depicting the use of

Technology and Combat in the First World War

169

Figure 41 Unknown photographer, Cavalry Regiment of the Baltic Home Defence Force (Oertzen 1936: 80). Digital scan: author.

technology to secure counterrevolutionary success were now accorded unprecedented significance.12 Graphic art works including Fritz KochGotha’s Battle Against Spartacus Snipers, with its depiction of a truckmounted searchlight combing metropolitan rooftops, conveyed the quality of technological modernity that was a feature of contemporary counter-insurgency tactics. On 18 June 1919, the independent socialist newspaper, Die Freie Welt, published Counter-Insurgency Strategy (Die Strategie des Bürgerkrieges), an extract from the Freikorps Manual of German Counter-Insurgency (Lehrbuch des deutschen Bürgerkrieges). A note accompanying a diagram depicting the tactical drill for advancing down streets in contested areas advises: ‘If possible, an armoured vehicle should accompany the lead element’ (Spitzen, wenn möglich, durch Kampfwagen begleiten lassen) (Freie Welt 18 June 18: 3-4). A Picture from Postwar Berlin: Assault Troops with Tank and Artillery in Street Fighting, reproduced in The Dangerous Moment, indexes the use of a tank precisely in accordance with this doctrine (Figure 42).13 An unprecedented relationship, indexed here, was newly established in this context between the

170

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

Figure 42  Unknown photographer, A Picture from Postwar Berlin: Assault Troops with Tank and Artillery in Street Fighting in The Dangerous Moment (Bucholtz 1931: 160). Digital scan: author.

storm trooper-type and enabling technology. Unlike works depicting British tanks discussed above, German soldiers were now represented working with, rather than against, this most modern of military machines: in a constellation of images relating to modern military technology on Germany’s contested streets, the sound of the internal combustion engine complemented that of hobnails on granite. Authors of illustrated histories present technology as a key enabler of success in illustrated popular accounts of the counterrevolution, in a manner analogous to equivalent histories of the Franco-Prussian War. In War and Victory, however, even Krupp’s battle-winning field artillery is typically figured as prop, in relation to which German soldiers rehearse their moral superiority in the face of the enemy. In visual narratives of the counterrevolution, however, the relationship between the moral and physical components of fighting power is transformed. As elaborated in the Manual of German Counter-Insurgency, the role of advanced technology was, as before, to enable the forward movement of infantry. But unlike field artillery supporting infantry from the rear, the armoured vehicle now spearheaded manoeuvre itself.

Technology and Combat in the First World War

171

The presence of agency photographers on Germany’s revolutionary streets from 1919 was a factor in this development. Artists’ representations of heroic engagement against technological modernity on the battlefield and photographers’ images of the landscapes of destruction taken during the First World War were, paradoxically, in the context of the limited nature of counterrevolutionary operations, supplanted by photographs that neither idealized, nor merely implied, moments of extreme danger after Trachtenberg’s ‘tokens of spent violence’. In the relatively secure and geographically delimited conditions characterizing homeland counter-insurgency operations it was possible to photograph an event in which soldiers were imaged in the act of reacting to enemy fire. A Picture from Postwar Berlin depicts an infantry platoon sheltering behind a tank towing a field artillery piece. The tactical narrative pivots around the tank. Its physical attributes (firepower, mobility and protection) condition the manner in which soldiers behave in an image in which all three components of fighting power are exemplified. The close integration of infantry, artillery and armour in the same tactical team reflects the wartime development of storm trooper tactics and their reinterpretation in the context of counter-insurgency operations. The indexical quality of a photograph taken in the moment when cohesion is threatened by enemy firepower throws the dynamics between the physical and moral components into relief. In idealized representations of the will to battle since 1871, the performance of mind and body was typically presented as more fundamentally important than the outcome, whether in the domain of combat or of command and control. However Street Battles in Berlin depicts a moment of hiatus, pending decision, in which the moral quality of the soldiers lies unproven. The soldiers’ continuing presence on the street is conditional on the advanced technology behind which they shelter. Their subsequent actions may prove their commitment to the moral imperative to combat, but at the moment of image capture it is the physical component of fighting power – the tank - that carries the burden of the narrative.14

Jünger’s vision of Machine Age society Jünger rejected the primacy of reason and individual rights, claiming to perceive a deeper reality in ancient myths of warfare and destruction.15 His photobooks deliberately exploit the presence of the camera at moments of

172

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

extreme danger in a world in which technology played an ever-increasing role in a competitive environment seemingly shaped by the will to power. For Jünger, modern technologies were a manifestation of this will. Technology enhanced the potential for extreme and prolonged violence, compounding the destructive power of conflict and enhancing the risk to the survival of a nation in a global order characterized by an endless cycle of domination and subjugation. Although they differ markedly in form and content, both The Dangerous Moment and The Transformed World are de facto histories of violent episodes and their outcomes in a recognizable landscape characterized by extreme danger. As such, they are self-consciously located in the tradition of illustrated popular histories of conflict.16 Collectively, they engage with the dynamic between the moral force of the will to succeed and the application of technological solutions towards the attainment of desired (battlefield) outcomes in recognizable (operational) situations. The Dangerous Moment comprises a series of short essays each accompanied by a series of related photographs in a similar format to his The Face of the World War: large-format images with wide margins and sparse captions, bound in clusters at regular intervals throughout the text.17 Jünger’s introductory essay ‘On Danger’, asserts that danger lies at the heart of the human condition: In the eyes of the warrior battle is a process that realises itself in a higher order, for the writer tragic battle is a condition in which the deeper meaning of life is registered very clearly, and a burning city, or one in revolt, is a field of enhanced activity for the criminal … then the gods appear in the elements as in the burning bush unconsumed by the flames. Through disaster and danger fate draws the mortal into the superior circle of a higher order. (Bucholtz 1931: 11–12)18

Subsequent chapters, which include photographs of the sinking Titanic, a volcanic eruption, the January 1919 revolution in Berlin, assassinations and combat during the Great War, develop his argument in a manner calculated to appeal to the reader-viewer’s heightened emotions. Jünger ‘desired to see technology … as the creator of a renewed order of heroic authority’ (Bullock 1992: 26). The Last Second (Die letzte Sekunda) is one of nine photographs accompanying the six-page text, ‘How I broke the world speed record in a car’ (Wie ich den Weltgeschwindigkeitsrekord im Autofahren brach) (Figure 43). The photographer captures the moment when the occupants of a high-performance car are flung out of the overturning vehicle. Technology opens up the field of human experience, generating new challenges in a world rendered less safe by modern machines.

Technology and Combat in the First World War

173

Figure 43  Unknown photographer, The Last Second, photograph, in The Dangerous Moment (Bucholtz 1931: 72). Digital scan: author.

Jünger advanced the view that photography provided the means to secure an aesthetic perspective on an age in which people had no option but to learn the virtue of self-sacrifice in pursuit of a higher cause. Photographs depicting a moment of violence, death or extreme pain indexed a necessary objectification of the body appropriate to the Machine Age: the photograph ‘holds fast the bird in flight just as much [as it does] the man in the moment-of-truth [Augenblick] in which he gets torn apart by an explosion’ (Zimmerman 1990: 57).19 Considered in the context of the will to battle and the application of technological solutions, the form and content of The Last Second are closer to that of Röchling’s 1896 Field Artillery Under Fire (Figure 30) than might at first be apparent. A mechanical object provides the fulcrum; each depicts a team handling state-of-the-art equipment in dangerous circumstances; men push themselves beyond the limits of safety, exemplifying their corporeal weakness relative to the strength of their machine.20 Both teams are still ‘at their posts’ at the moment of disaster. In each case, the work’s meaning does not rest on the attainment of a desired outcome, or an act of resistance to external factors, but in the team’s coherence, and its commitment to maximizing the effectiveness of the technology at its disposal. The narrative content of The Last Second does not therefore merely reflect a post-war preoccupation with the

174

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

relationship between man and machine that apparently exemplified Machine Age culture; nor is it simply to be understood in the context of Jünger’s personal experience of the Great War, or his illustrated histories. Rather, its full meaning can be comprehended in the context of a wider tradition of negotiating the relationship between soldier and battlefield technology extending back to Wilhelmine illustrated histories of the wars of unification. If Jünger succeeds, as Bullock suggests, in advancing absolute ideas in an artificial environment, if his pictorial language and narrative logic are as clear and transparent as a traditional narrative, then this is surely due to the thematic continuities he establishes with visual accounts invoking an affective response to representations of the military sublime. The Dangerous Moment focuses primarily on the contemporary experience of danger, but The Transformed World is more ambitious; it functions as an extended metaphor proposing the character of an entire society organized in a manner calculated to exploit the potential of technology. Werneburg and Phillips consider it a companion piece to Jünger’s most ambitious exposition of his intellectual project, Der Arbeiter: The Transformed World ‘should not be read … as a consistent, conceptually worked-out exercise in social theory, but as the elaboration of an imaginative construct that allows social phenomena and experiences to be condensed into metaphoric language and images’ (Werneburg 1992: 45–6).21 Jünger advances an account of an authoritarian utopia in which the boundaries between civilian and military experience are opaque, in which no tension exists in attributing collective values to soldiers and workers alike, whose disciplined activities together comprise the sinews of a society mobilized in perpetuity to meet challenges to its integrity. Unlike The Dangerous Moment, which comprises a series of short essays accompanied by photographs, the narrative of The Transformed World is carried by a dense array of photographs, typically arranged two or three to a page, unsupported by text and without a contents page to frame its order. Following Jünger’s introduction, the structure is encountered as sparse chapter headings, which, along with the use of terse captions, advance the apparent objectivity of the authors’ claims.22 In the chapter ‘The Transformed Face of the Masses’ (Das veränderte Gesicht der Masse) Jünger offers four photographs on two pages, unified under the title The Powerlessness of the Masses (Die Ohnmacht der Massen) (Figure 44)). Photographs of political gatherings head each page: Uprising in Metropolis (Aufstand in Metropolis) depicts a union rally in America, while Unemployed under Horses Hooves (Arbeitslose unter Pferdehufen) captures a confrontation

Technology and Combat in the First World War

175

between police and a marching crowd in Britain. Beneath them, Work on a Conveyor Belt (Arbeit am laufenden Band) depicts sacks on a stacking machine in a warehouse, alongside And where one no longer has any use for the masses (und wo man für die Massen keine rechte Verwendung mehr hat), in which a British tank formation cooperates with aircraft on a mechanized military exercise. The four photographs mount a collective narrative that conflates many of Jünger’s thematic preoccupations, including the inadequacy of self-centred bourgeois values and consumer-led modes of production and consumption (leading to strikes, unemployment, social unrest); the divisive nature of class warfare; a contempt for the masses because they lack social discipline; the metropolis imagined as a place of danger equivalent to the battlefield; and, in Uprising in Metropolis, the view expressed on the foremost placard that war is an aberration to be shunned as a matter of principle. The overall narrative revolves around the expression of will and its relation to modern technology. Photographs of crowds, perhaps the ultimate expression of circumstances marked by the absence of the ethics of attention, represent the unbridled expression of selfinterest in a society apparently destabilized by the workings of the capitalist economy. Protest occurs against the high-rise architectural symbols of that order, but the depiction of horses in a crowd-control situation adds an anachronistic air. The lower photographs function dialectically with those above. The human figure is scarcely visible in either. Work on a Conveyor Belt depicts a space devoid of human action, but the representation of a systematic approach to a logistical task involving modern machinery connotes a regard for efficiency and discipline on the part of the unseen workforce, while the conveyor belt signifies technological efficiency. And where one no longer has any use for the masses is the culminating image of the four photographs, which, together, can be read clockwise from top left as a single text. Having derided the politics of class warfare and the failure of the capitalist economy, Jünger evacuates the work place to make a dramatic point, only to reintroduce the human figure in the context of the industrialized battlefield. Six tanks are depicted in a tactical formation, crew members’ torsos protruding from turret hatches, as an aircraft flies low overhead. Captions across both pages suggest the rhetorical importance of this photograph. Those accompanying the first three images are terse and objective, but under this final photograph Jünger delivers the commentary conferring overall meaning: in a disciplined society organized to meet the challenges of technological modernity there is no place for distractions, disparate masses working to alternative agendas, or economies structured to meet the selfish needs of bourgeois consumers.

176

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

Figure 44  Unknown photographers, The Powerlessness of the Masses (Schultz and Jünger 1933: 34–5). Digital scan: author.

The mechanized battlefield provides the definitive example. Tank crews man their machines, just as Röchling’s artillerymen man their gun, but technology now plays a leading role in Jünger’s account. The will to battle is no longer articulated with reference to personal resolve in the face of the enemy’s firepower. The imagined future battlefield is characteristically emptied of the human form.

Technology and Combat in the First World War

177

Figure 44  Continued

Not, as in the First World War, because soldiers have entrenched themselves to avoid the lethal effects of modern weapons systems, but because they fight from within machines whose attributes confer on these Machine Age warriors every imaginable advantage. Further, the presence of the aircraft suggests the employment of technologies in tactical combination, itself a manifestation of the

178

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

physical component of fighting power, that promises synergistic effect with all its implications for success in combat. The combined, synchronized, air–ground solution to warfighting indexed here functions as a metaphor for a social order in which society’s selfless soldier-workers deliver specialist contributions as components of a coordinated whole towards the desired outcome. The mechanical fighting machine is here presented as both panacea and opportunity: as an object worthy of the viewer’s admiration. The meaning of Mattschaβ’s representation of German soldiers pitting their bodies and their will against British tanks at Cambrai is here turned on its head. Jünger implies that narratives such as this serve as an indictment of Germany’s conservative outlook. Mattschaβ’s work connotes the state’s failure to exploit the potential of technological modernity during the Great War, as a result of which conventional manifestations of the will to battle amount to an exercise in futility. In an equivalent two-page montage in the section titled ‘Life’ (Das Leben), Jünger again presents mechanized warfare as exemplary. Technology Draws the Face of the World (Die Technik zeichnet das Gesicht der Erde) juxtaposes war and peace, city and country (Figure 45). Photographs of a concentration of tanks, and of a tractor working a vast field, are positioned alongside images of modern industrial architecture and an oblique view of a gridded town plan. The prevailing mood is calm and orderly, even as the photograph of a post-war British training exercise rehearses the potential for future interstate violence. The hulls of the tanks dominate the photograph, crews scarcely visible. Will is manifested in the offensive use of technologies that obviate the need for vainglorious acts in which the body must necessarily take centre stage.23 The burden of success has already been shouldered by individuals who have sublimated their individual desires in the service of the Machine Age state. Bullock suggests that in the 1930s the world made visible by art in publications such as War and Victory and Memorial to the German Army and Navy constituted ‘a collective domain of experience that has now largely been displaced by mass media’. The seemingly anachronistic domain of experience to which he refers comprised reception characterized by ‘The slow process of penetrating the significance of any representation and entering its realm of meaning by the empathetic imaginative act of interpreting an individual perspective’ (Bullock 1992: 27). The format of The Transformed World conforms to Bullock’s view: it has more in common with printed matter designed for mass circulation and rapid, image-based assimilation by a less class-specific reader-viewer than it

Technology and Combat in the First World War

179

has with the conventional military history; Jünger eschews the ‘slow process of penetrating the significance of any representation’, with its ‘bourgeois’ cultural connotations. The Transformed World can be understood as a form of militarized polemic, justified by his vision of a social order permanently mobilized against the shocks of a violent world. On formal grounds alone, it constitutes a significant departure from older accounts of conflict. But its content cannot be viewed as equally radical, when assessed against the sample of popular illustrated military histories published since 1871, addressed here. Bullock’s observation that traditional histories provoke an empathetic response to representations of individual experience is congruent with the argument adopted here that such accounts valorize the will to battle, and that this tendency is particularly evident in their visual content calculated to appeal to the sensibilities of the viewer. Jünger’s construct of the soldier-worker also emphasizes the importance of the moral dimension in his account of total mobilization. But in his visual narratives of future war – Jünger’s ultimate testing ground – the human body is displaced by representations of machines in accounts that break with the precedent established in patriotic histories of past wars. Technologies (rifle, artillery, aircraft and tank) no longer appear as incidental detail, in relation to which the viewer develops an empathetic response to soldiers’ moral and corporeal deeds enacted within generic tactical contexts, exemplified by The Life of Frederick. In The Transformed World the claustrophobic spaces of the battlefield vignette give way to wide perspectives. Objects of interest spill from the edges of Jünger’s images, nonetheless. The photographer struggles to capture the expanse of ground over which just a few examples of the latest military technology may manoeuvre and dominate events. Necessarily pushed back from the picture plane, it suits Jünger’s purpose to deny the human body visual dominance in his narratives of conflict. Any suggestion that the moral example of human conviction had been wholly displaced by a preoccupation with the technical is, however, illusory. The performance characteristics of the machines that soldiers now crew – the tank’s firepower, its relative invulnerability and enhanced mobility – suggest the character of future conflict. But they also act as metaphors for human qualities grounded in the virtue of enhanced attentiveness – a state of supreme psychic self-awareness which, Jünger argues, must be developed in order to prevail in modern material conditions.24 Jünger’s photobook is self-consciously modern in form, but his argument is fundamentally conservative. The physical and conceptual components of fighting power may be important, but what wins

180

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

Figure 45  Unknown photographers, Technology Draws the Face of the World (Schultz and Jünger 1933: 68–9). Digital scan: author.

wars and advances societies, he affirms, is the attainment of national objectives through the application of an ineluctable will to outperform the opposition. Ultimately, Jünger maintains continuity with the dominant manner of representing the Prusso-German way of war in popular histories. His construct of a social utopia fuses the force of social coherence with the irrational energies

Technology and Combat in the First World War

181

Figure 45  Continued

of the military sublime, located in the mythology of Prusso-German feats of arms, recycled in illustrated histories extending at least as far back as the 1840s, currently in the process of being augmented by equivalent accounts of the Great War. Jünger’s project is remarkable for the manner in which he too invokes a sense of the sublime, but without provoking an empathetic response to images

182

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

that reveal the fragility of the human body: his work is marked by a ruthless denial of pathos, with all its ‘bourgeois’ potential for self-pity or ennoblement. In this respect, Jünger’s project does indeed mark a significant modification, if not a definitive break, with that well-established mode of narrating the German experience of conflict in illustrated popular accounts of significant historical events.

Conclusion

This fundamentally art historical inquiry traces an enduring relationship between German cultural production and a tradition of military thought extending back to the 1813–15 wars of liberation, which sustained what is here categorized as a prevailing militarized mode of representation. It has identified and examined thematic continuities in the visual representation of Germans at war and assessed how these themes were handled by authors, artists and photographers, in the technology-driven reproductive context of their time, in order to celebrate putative German martial values in accounts that upheld the prestige of the nation and its military institutions, as well as the reputation of veterans, inserted and upheld in social memory through the act of reading and viewing illustrated histories. While this project is fundamentally concerned with visual production, and is resolutely ground in an iconological approach, it nevertheless also advances a critique of the disciplinary biases observable in the history of art and visual culture. It does so by making a virtue of working with a body of images that have largely fallen out of sight in order to make a claim for their continuing relevance. In doing so, it has not merely distanced itself from the art historical centre ground, but mounted an assault on the impoverished horizons of a discipline with its roots in European modernism and its legacies, that privileges alterity, opposition, rupture, and alienation/trauma to the almost complete exclusion of other possibilities, and is therefore not well placed to provide a platform for thinking rigorously about how armed conflict was inflected, in this present context, in popular, broadly conservative, German visual culture. No historical field of human experience is more poorly served by art historians today than that of armed conflict and its representation, not least when the preoccupations underpinning historical visual production included such ‘unfashionable’ concepts as ‘honour’, ‘bravery’, ‘nation’, ‘killing’, ‘victory’ and ‘sacrifice’. In order to re-energize this field, this inquiry has turned, in a way more typical of art history, to other academic disciplines whose thematic and methodological concerns intersect with the source material addressed here, and which surface

184

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

continuously across the piece, helping to describe and define the continuities this book reveals existed across the subject period. Moral philosophy and nature of the anthropological ‘cultural turn’ in military affairs has served to figure armed conflict as no less mediated in culture than its representation. Above all, representations of armed conflict can often be understood as implicated in a quest for moral legitimacy: we fought ‘justly’ (within culturally accepted boundaries); we fought ‘well’ (our performance was manifestly excellent); we were well led and intellectually more rigorous; above all, our quintessentially German moral virtues excelled. We won because we deserved to; we lost despite our supreme virtues. And so on. Such constructs chimed with wider contemporary notions of ‘Germanness’ of nation, and the ‘spirit of the age’. In this context, military history offers insights into the possibility that illustrated accounts of armed conflicts upheld the notion of a ‘national way’ of waging armed conflict. Robert Citino provides the framework, out of which it has been possible to point to striking continuities in thought and action, amounting to a recognizable, enduring cultural construct that promoted the values, in performance, of a ‘German way’ of war. This book addresses what this amounted to and how it was manifested over time in visual culture; its findings are summarized below. Any inquiry into the content of illustrated popular histories is necessarily indebted to the academic field of remembrance and commemoration for much of its framing material. After all, the overwhelming majority of the material addressed here, including all the illustrated books, was made as interventions in post-war debates about how a recent military past could and should be remembered. These works functioned as ‘cultural markers’ influencing the formation of social memory and its values in a contested field. The subjectivities attending image production in particular, especially those depicting idealized forms of behaviour at war, suggest that they had everything to do with how reader-viewers were induced to ‘remember’ past events in order to understand themselves, their communities and German society at large. Remembering was political: these images analysed here, along with the illustrated histories more broadly, articulated unambiguously a keen sense of what was to be remembered – and cherished – about German conduct on operations; and their producers sought to bolster the institutional prestige of the German armed forces with recourse to images depicting exemplary personal conduct. All the images addressed here were inserted into accounts that were highly imaginative in their conception, but were nevertheless regarded as conveying wartime truths.

Conclusion

185

This inquiry has also turned to work on narrative form, not least its potential for ‘performative immersion and identification’. Narrative has been loosely defined here, resting on the notion of a ‘mnemonic community’, comprising the entire German nation conditioned by militarism and the practice of universal male conscription, which fuelled narrative templates furnished by military doctrine itself, the wellspring of ‘how we fight’ that shaped and sustained training, operational experience and the construction of social memory. In particular, it propounds the view that the illustrated histories, and some independent art works too, exploited the psychological power of narrative and thereby established the capacity of images and text to influence reader-viewers beyond the reading/viewing moment: that such works were constitutive of not only memory but also social identities, extending to Hyden White’s notion of a drama of self-identification. The rhetorical power of the visual component of these works transported the reader-viewer into an imagined world related to, but distinct from, the accompanying historical account of the circumstances in which they occurred. They generated excitement without overwhelming the viewer with a sense of danger or insecurity: the narrative pleasure derived from reading and viewing this material was partly located in the familiarity of wellestablished visual tropes, made stable through endless repetition and offering the comfort of an accessible viewing experience. Developing these ideas, this inquiry has also been influenced by Judith Butler’s address to identity and performativity. Specifically, it too contests the notion that acts and gestures are merely symptomatic of an underlying condition. It cautions against the inclination to consider that the reader-viewers of this material might have regarded the ‘German way’ of war and the putative will to battle seemingly evinced by German men as being seemingly innate. Rather, the political agency of these images was conditioned by the notion that what they evinced was not a lived reality, but a moral example, emplotted in the romantic mode, in the hope that past performance represented thus would be remembered in a manner transcending the critique mounted by alternative accounts, and would shore up the prestige of national institutions and the integrity of individuals. The final interdisciplinary intersections concern the relationship between the representation of embodied performance and the situating of historical events in a ‘hallowed’ landscape defined as quintessentially German by right of conquest or sustained tenure. Fundamental to this is the notion of a haunting presence attending battlefield sites in both annexed and lost territories. The notion of ‘unquiet closure’ was conveyed in images studded with victory monuments and German graves, which have the effect of making hallowed landscapes

186

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

strangely familiar, shaping memories of selfless commitment, national unity and an enduring right to tenure. This humanist approach to space and place in representation privileged the realm’s memory and imagination. A symbiotic relationship developed between German military doctrine and its battlefield manifestation, on the one hand, and its visual representation, on the other, between unification in 1871 and the demise of the Weimar Republic sixty-two years later. During six decades of considerable social, economic and political change Germany was involved, sequentially, in regional conflict, total war, counter-insurgency and border skirmishes, each event unlike the others in terms of objectives, scale and means. Yet popular illustrated accounts of these conflicts display a remarkable affinity in terms of what their authors privilege, drawing out positive meanings from images representing the apparently exemplary behaviour of German soldiers. From images of leaders making decisions at one end of the spectrum of operational experience, to infantrymen in combat at the other, popular illustrated histories typically upheld the enduring coherence of the army and its values, positing it as a national institution whose members were unified on operations by their manifest commitment to the attainment of their commanders’ aims, no matter what the circumstances. What has here been elaborated as a militarized mode of representation was widespread; deep-rooted in a society that practised universal male conscription and in which the founding myths of the German state were predicated on short wars fought aggressively, culminating in the crushing defeat of neighbouring nation-states. Militarized visual representation was implicated in the tactics, techniques and procedures taught to generations of conscript soldiers from the mid-nineteenth century, manifested in wartime experience itself. In the process of upholding German tactical doctrine, illustrated popular histories celebrated the philosophical underpinnings of German military thought, not least the Clausewitzian view that warfare is essentially chaotic, and that successful tactical solutions necessarily have to take account of the ‘fog’ and ‘friction’ attending military operations. Ultimately, the authority of militarized visual representation rested on how images of conflict were perceived by the ultimate reader-viewer ‘expert’ – veterans. Bearing this in mind, this inquiry has worked out of the Clausewitzian tripartite model of the components of fighting power – moral, conceptual and physical – and concludes that the moral component was invariably given precedence in representation: in popular accounts of Germans at war the will to battle was presented as supreme because it was the best guarantor of cohesion in the face of chaos and disintegration. That said, the images examined here were

Conclusion

187

frequently also invested in the physical and conceptual components. The claim that the performance of the Prusso-German army was consistently outstanding is conveyed most strongly in images in which the moral, conceptual and physical components of fighting power coalesce in accounts of actions delivered more aggressively, more coherently and at a higher tempo than the enemy. The majority of images addressed here depict teamwork in the act of either decision-making or combat. Although the content of typical popular illustrated histories is more wide-ranging, these categories have been privileged in this analysis because they were treated as such by authors themselves. Moreover, they usefully represent the poles of battlefield experience, and are both susceptible to Riegl’s theory of the representation of active, selfless, attentiveness. Parading the ethics of attention was fundamental to the values advanced by this prominent, militarized mode of representation, not least because attentiveness suggests (self-)disciplined cohesion in all battlefield circumstances and across the nation, too. In images proclaiming the ethics of attention, the reader-viewer encounters models of exemplary behaviour whereby soldiers of all ranks sublimate their self-interest in order to function effectively in the interests of the national good. Images of decision-making typically invoke a rational, calculating mode of address. Those of combat, however, appeal more directly to the emotions, in which case the moral force of images of Germans at war typically finds its apogee in representations of the military sublime, where men are depicted working selflessly together in tumultuous manifestations of extreme violence. The dynamic established between these two contrasting viewing experiences is a singular, enduring feature of popular illustrated histories. This dynamic found its equivalence in political thought after 1918. Schmitt’s critical address to political romanticism, for example, deplored the aestheticization of politics and argued for rational, hard-headed decisionmaking. Jünger too upheld the need for a ruthlessly unromantic approach to making battlefield decisions and to the ordering of Machine Age society. That said, the rational framework he proposed merely provides the framework in which worker-soldiers are best placed to develop and exercise their remorseless will to battle. Jünger invokes the Nietzschean will to power in his address to the moral component of fighting power, but his address to the spirit is never divorced from the conceptual and the physical components: representational dissimilarities notwithstanding, his approach conforms to the precedent established in Wilhelmine popular histories of the wars of unification. Jünger’s works on the Great War, including his two best-known photobooks, may aestheticize the experience of conflict and mount a strong appeal to the viewer’s

188

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

emotions, but Jünger ultimately represents warfare as a fundamentally rational activity. Affect may be savoured on irrational grounds as evidence of a purer, elemental experience transcending the everyday but, Jünger argues, the virtues of the warrior are also located in cool decision-making and remorseless action in pursuit of calculated military objectives. In as much as this is fundamental to his programmatic agenda, his essentially militarized mode of representation is ultimately not far removed from the values of Kugler and Menzel’s Life of Frederick, published over half a century earlier. Three core myths were fundamental to the creation and maintenance of popular narratives of conflict across the period. The earlier Life of Frederick consolidated mythic accounts of command that presented Frederick II as a uniquely gifted military leader under whose unifying direction Prussia had survived the vicissitudes of protracted wars. The myth of performing excellence subsequently became more firmly embedded in German culture after 1871, when illustrated popular accounts of the wars of liberation circulated widely. War and Victory, for example, advances a popular historical account of the FrancoPrussian War on terms that proclaimed the Prusso-German army’s apparently enduring ability to outperform its opponents. Under Pflugk-Harttung’s editorial direction, contextualizing textual accounts of battle are accompanied by images whose meanings frequently celebrate the will to battle of the German soldier and his leaders. The armies of the German states working under Prussian leadership are presented as operationally coherent entities, well equipped to adapt to technological challenges, and to cope with the fog and friction of war. A significant number of images exemplify the ethics of selfless attention: command teams and groups of soldiers in combat alike are depicted working in harmonious combinations; soldiers watch and listen intently to their leaders and to each other. That said, individuals are nevertheless depicted as self-possessed agents, capable of exercising their initiative in a manner that promotes overall coherence in pursuit of their commander’s unifying aim. The Wilhelmine rhetoric of performing excellence at war had utility in the context of post-war borderlands politics, too. Illustrated popular histories typically include images of former battlefields in territories annexed in 1871, and, subsequently, of Germany’s eastern borders during and after the First World War. In these accounts, borderlands are represented as hallowed ground on the fragile periphery of the nation. Here, in places where a sense of ‘Germanness’ was seemingly manifest, soldiers, farmers and soldier-farmers, too, are represented as active agents in society. Performing excellence on recent operations, connoted by grave markers (sacrifice) and memorials (endeavour/

Conclusion

189

victory), found its equivalence in representations of families working the land. Farming, like combat, involved the performance of demanding but necessary tasks, each one contributing to a self-consciously German mission that involved securing terrain, understood as a cultural as well as a tactical proposition. After 1918 two additional myths were established that relied heavily on that of performing excellence and on the cultural construct of a militarized border landscape. The veteran’s notion of Fronterlebnis cast the First World War as a positive experience. It was remembered as a defining event in which German men from across a diverse society rediscovered shared values as they fought successfully to maintain unit cohesion, even as the destructive power of modern machines transformed the conditions in which the war was fought. For civilians and veterans alike, the myth that the army had never been defeated in the field but had been stabbed in the back on the home front – the third myth – was no less invested in the notion of performing excellence. Claims that the First World War ushered in a fundamental shift in experience or representation after 1914 should be treated with caution, despite manifest differences in aesthetic and rhetorical strategies, and the media employed. The body of images examined here demonstrate that war was always experienced, and represented, in a fragmented manner. In particular, illustrated accounts of frontline experience in the Great War are no less invested in the rhetoric of group coherence and the will to battle than equivalent accounts of the Franco-Prussian War. What demarcates illustrated histories of the Franco-Prussian War from those addressing subsequent conflicts is the relative weight given to the components of fighting power, in relation to which battlefield performance can be evaluated by the reader-viewer. In Franco-Prussian War histories, tactics and the use of equipment are manifestly subordinated to the moral component, and a similar approach is discernible in visual accounts of counterrevolutionary and border operations after 1918. But in the context of the First World War, the physical component of fighting power (both material and technological) assumes greater importance in the wake of defeat, although it seldom transcends the value of the moral. The Allies’ overwhelming superiority in the physical component is typically depicted in a manner that threatens to overwhelm all that is most to be admired about the ‘German way’ of waging war; the military sublime mutates into an exculpatory nightmare in which the image of the enemy tank features heavily in order to explain Germany’s defeat. Yet the credibility of this approach is ultimately reliant on a rhetorical strategy that upholds the putative moral qualities of the German soldier, who, according to the prevailing myth, remained undefeated in near-apocalyptic circumstances.

190

The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871–1933

A decade later Jünger redefined the relationship between the components of fighting power in The Transformed World. On terms that reveal his modernist credentials, he stressed how important enabling technologies were to the development of warfighting solutions, and to national survival. The tank features prominently in his formulation of a future society adequate to the demands of the Machine Age. Nevertheless, even here, technology does not lie at the heart of his account. As in War and Victory, Jünger’s photo book proposes a model of a society prepared for war, in which the interdependent moral, conceptual and physical components of national capability are optimized under unified command. German’s very survival, Jünger argues, rests on the creation of an authoritarian society in which the leader’s goals are achieved by a population whose remorseless will to total war is deployed to its full potential by a mobilized society capable of operating coherently at a higher tempo than Germany’s enemies, and of staying the distance, however long it takes to win. The Wilhelmine rhetoric of performing excellence at war, here understood in the field of visual production as a militarized mode of representation, continued to resonate into the 1930s. In Jünger’s hands it was elevated to the status of a grand-strategic vision. Throughout a period in which conflict was experienced in a variety of forms and with differing outcomes, illustrated patriotic accounts of conflict fell back repeatedly on an artistic tradition affirming the existence of a ‘German way’ of war, characterized by aggressive operations conducted by a coherent force whose collective will to battle in itself advances a compelling claim to moral superiority, even in defeat: hearts – not machines – promise victory.

Notes Chapter 1 1 Following Michèle Martin, the term ‘illustrated newspaper’ is here understood as ‘a paper in which the illustration has priority over the text; which is at least partly devoted to reports of current events; and finally, whose production is subject to the laws of the market’ (Martin 2006: 45). 2 According to Tatlock, the term ‘reading nation’, after William St Clair, refers to ‘those who regularly read German language printed books, but also to those who by reading participated in the German national culture that was being made and supported by book production over the course of 150 years … From the late eighteenth century through the Weimar Republic … publishing, measured by any standard, boomed in the German territories’ (Tatlock 2010: 3–4). 3 Illustrated books in general were a publishing phenomenon of the age. Writing about the Paris World’s Fair of 1878, Françoise Forster-Hahn notes that in the German pavilion, ‘the most popular attraction was a long table displaying Germany’s recent production of illustrated books’, although none was on a military theme so soon after the Franco-Prussian War. See ‘Constructing new histories: nationalism and modernity in the display of art’ (Forster-Hahn 1996: 73). 4 John Moses recalls Roman Catholic liberal Franz Schnabel observation, in his fourvolume Geschichte Deutschlands im 19. Jahrhundert, that ‘Prussia was not a state with an army but rather an army with a state’ (Moses 2012: 904). 5 These preoccupations – with newness and modernity as privileged historical phenomena – are trailed by Francoise Forster-Hahn in her edited book, Imagining Modern German Culture: 1889-1910, not least in her essay Constructing New Histories: Nationalism and Modernity in the Display of Art (Forster-Hahn 1996: 71–89). 6 Mosse argues that ‘a hierarchy of function [of command and obedience] rather than status had always been the ideal of modern German nationalism, where all members of the Volk were presumed to be equal’ (Mosse 1990: 65). 7 Jünger’s account of his experience at the beginning of the March 1918 offensive on the Western Front provides a clear example: ‘The mood was curious, brimming with tension and a kind of exaltation… We attacked… Our rage broke like a storm… The immense desire to destroy that overhung the battlefield precipitated a red mist in our brains. We called out sobbing and stammering fragments of

192

8

9

10

11

Notes sentences to each other, and an impartial observer might have concluded that we were all ecstatically happy’ (Jünger 2003: 231–2). Note here the association between Schmitt’s political decisionism and its military equivalent that finds expression in Jünger’s work. Schmitt abhors circumstances in which ‘the ideal of political life consists in discussing … The essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion’. Military decisionism of the type advanced by Prussian doctrine disavows cautiousness and the half measure in order to create the conditions in which the decisive bloody battle will occur on Prussia’s terms. All battlefield leaders are sovereign to the extent that they are free to make up their own mind about what to do in circumstances that call for extraordinary measures (Schmitt 2005: 63). As a further example, Jünger’s literary diary entry on the front line, dated 4 July 1918 contains two distinct sections. The first half tackles issues of morale and deploys the Nietzschean will to power in order to explain the enduring motivation to fight in disadvantageous circumstances. The second half is an account of the daily routine, or battle rhythm, at the front. Their project involved interviewing serving and former soldiers, who were invited to talk about ten of their own photographs selected on the basis that they represented memorable aspects of their military lives. The research focuses on the narratives generated during the interviews, and on ideas about military identity this memory work invoked. Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes how ‘the elation that follows the initial postdefeat depression … signifies a recovery from collective psychological breakdown, a recovery triggered by the overthrow of authority. In the wake of Germany’s defeat in World War 1, Ernst Troeltsch coined the term dreamland for this phenomenon, in which all blame is transferred to the deposed tyrant and the losing nation feels cathartically cleansed, freed from any responsibility or guilt’. The dreamland phenomenon deflects blame from the army, an enduring institution of the state in which German society had invested so much before and during the war (Schivelbusch 2003: 10–5).

Chapter 2 1 Hobsbawn writes that the Bismarckian unification of Germany was ‘the only national historical experience which the citizens of the new Empire had in common… . And within this experience, the Franco-Prussian War was central. Insofar as Germany had a (brief) “national” tradition, it was symbolized in the three names: Bismarck, William I and Sedan’ (Hobsbawm 2007: 276).

Notes

193

2 Prussia’s principal coalition partners were Bavaria, Baden, Saxony and Württemberg. Brunswick, Hesse-Darmstadt and Mecklenburg also provided components. George Mosse notes that ‘the ideal of camaraderie could be extended to the newly unified nation, a people of comrades united in their emotional identification with Germany’. He also observes that on war memorials and commemorative tablets the common soldier ‘was for the most part treated as part of an anonymous collectivity’; only after the First World War was equal honour given to all the dead. Visual accounts of combat in illustrated histories of the Franco-Prussian War typically confer equal honour on all ranks, suggesting that the politics of commemoration before 1914 were more complex than Mosse allows for (Mosse 1990: 48–9). 3 The church was consecrated on 1 September 1895 – Sedan Day – the annual national celebration of the battle that precipitated Napoleon III’s capitulation and enforced exile. 4 For a detailed analysis of relations between Bismarck and Moltke see (Wetzel 2013: 149–66). 5 Arden Bucholz writes: Moltke ‘was a pragmatist interested in achieving the best practical results at the least cost. What Moltke added to war was close to Clausewitz’s central point about destroying the enemy’s will to fight … using the technological and organizational tools of the mid-nineteenth century’ (Bucholz 2001: 54). 6 Denis Showalter argues that the German crisis of command and control at Versailles did indeed highlight the grave consequences of breaking the link between war and policy: ‘The protracted conflict fanned public passions that encouraged Bismarck to develop the demand for Alsace-Lorraine that proved such a burden for the new Reich. On the other side of the line it generated a Volkskrieg of partisans and improvised armies that might be defeated but could not be crushed – at least not by conventional methods. In short, a war fought under what German analysts increasingly recognised as near-ideal circumstances almost led to Germany conquering itself to death’ (Showalter 2000: 681–2). 7 The antagonism between Bismarck and Moltke came to a head in the days before the Armistice on 28 January 1871. After a failed attempt by the crown prince to conciliate, Bismarck wrote to the king voicing his objections to Moltke’s conduct. The new emperor sided with Bismarck and the possibility of Moltke’s resignation was averted only by the cessation of hostilities. See 7474Howard 1972: 437–8. 8 A close analysis of the reasons why this shift occurred is beyond the scope of this book. Writing about the Gründerjahre, Arden Bucholz describes Germany as a society in transition. He argues that such societies easily create new armies along with ways of relating, or imagining, them. After 1871 the army was regarded by many conservative Germans as ‘a priceless national treasure … the aristocratic officer of the exclusive guards regiment came to be the model for aspiring social

194

9 10 11

12

13

14

15

Notes classes, and the rank order of the military and military patterns of thought the standard for the prestige hierarchy’. In the circumstances Bucholz describes, there developed greater interest in, and understanding of, the enabling activities of an ‘institution of refuge and permanence amid the teeming waves of change’. In such circumstances, accounts of warfare that paid scant attention to enabling military activities by both subordinate officers and soldiers no longer sufficed. See 2626Bucholz 1985: 2–3. For a discussion of the origins of the Life of Frederick see 5050Forster-Hahn 1977: 243–6. These include royal death scenes, victory celebrations, a cavalry action and two scenes in which Frederick addresses generals before battle. Hubertus Kohle writes that Menzel’s art reveals a deep affinity with the concept of Geschichtsmalerei [history painting with a realist inflection]: ‘which he imbued with most subtle psychological dimensions of meaning, a subtlety rarely achieved in this genre and which Historienmalerei with its focus on the universal rather than the individual was basically incapable of reaching. In his pursuit of psychological refinement, Menzel deconstructed inherited models of the iconography of rulers by humanizing the King, reducing the hierarchical character of the pictorial field, and radically altering the temporal structure of his images’ (Kohle 2007: 138). The death of Holy Roman emperor Charles VI provided an opportunity to tackle long-standing grievances with Austria over territory in Silesia. Prussia was economically and militarily well equipped to wage war. Kugler considers that ‘with such resources at command, a powerful, manly spirit might look fortune in the face, and venture in search of fame and greatness’. Frederick William had created, but never used, his large standing army. Its competence under Frederick II on operations during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–8) came as a major surprise to Austria, and transformed the balance of power in Europe. The inscription includes the opening line of music, and the first couplet of the poem which furnishes the text: ‘The sea glimmered, boundless, in the dying sun of evening’ (Das Meer erglänzte hinaus im letzten Abendscheine). At the opening ceremony for Werner’s Sedan Panorama in the Potzdamerplatz railway station on 1 September 1883, for example, the Kaiser declared a veteran’s interest in authenticity when he declared: ‘You have moved the theory and understanding of the day at Sedan closer to the people through your masterwork, and my fullest recognition may be the sweetest reward for your labour’ (Daβ Sie durch Ihr Meisterwerk dem Volke die Erinnerung und das Verständnis für den Tag von Sedan nahe gerückt haben und meine vollste Anerkennung dafür mag Ihnen der schönste Lohn für Ihre Arbeit sein). Quoted in (9Bartmann 1993: 59). The fictional salon was an ideal space in which authors could rehearse the experience of the Franco-Prussian War. Note, for example, Guy de Maupassant’s

Notes

16

17

18

19

20

195

1882 Mademoiselle Fifi, in which the narrative unfolds in the public rooms of a French chateau occupied by Prussian officers. Immediately after the Prussian victory over the Austrian army at Leuthen, Frederick personally led a thrust by a weak advance guard into the town of Lissa in order to maintain the initiative, keep the enemy off balance and secure an important river crossing. According to Frederician lore, he burst into the castle, taking prisoner Austrian officers, who were too surprised by his unexpected appearance to offer any resistance. Showalter argues that by 1895 professional German soldiers clearly understood that the life of the conscript infantryman in future conflict was likely to be ‘solitary, nasty, brutish, and above all short’. An offensive against France was likely to incur ‘a nightmare’s worth of blood’ (Showalter 2000: 688–9) Note the similarities with Council of War at Versailles, which is also located at a culminating point, and whose meaning also conveys anxiety about the conduct of future military operations. Robert Kunath, too, considers that ‘Nationalist communities in Imperial Germany looked at German art and found in it a reflection of their anxieties about the weakness of the new nation’ (Barnstone and Haakenson 2013: 58). Menzel’s two large-format battle paintings also exemplify this potential. The subject of his unfinished Frederick Addressing his Generals Before Leuthen (1859–61), is based on Frederick II’s victory. On the other hand, his Frederick and his Troops at Hochkirch, 1856, represents a low point in the King’s military career where, as Kugler makes plain, he underestimated his enemy’s resolve, resisted the advice of his subordinate commanders and was defeated. Viewed together, they resist an unqualified reading of Frederick’s reputation for performing excellence.

Chapter 3 1 Bessel estimates that of some eleven million ex-servicemen, around 400,000 joined the all-volunteer Freikorps, paramilitary units raised, trained and led by army officers motivated to challenge the post-war settlement and to defeat revolutionary factions in Germany (Bessel 1993: 258). 2 Sherwin Simmons’ work exploring responses to anti-Bolshevist posters provides a useful oversight of the organizational factors behind their production. See also Bessel (1993). 3 An early full-page illustration of four characters responding negatively to the content of an edition of Simplicissimus under the title ‘Our enemies’ spells out the values that the magazine sought to challenge: ‘stupidity’, ‘misanthropy’, ‘prudery’ and ‘sanctimony’ (Simplicissimus 1. 6 1896). Militarism was a favourite target

196

4

5

6

7 8 9

10 11

Notes in the pre-war years. The tone changed immediately on the declaration of war. The cover of the first war edition (Simplicissimus 19. 19 1914)) carried an Eduard Thöny line drawing in a heroic style depicting Bavarian soldiers marching to war. The subsequent edition carried a Thomas Theodor Heine image depicting a knight under the German flag slaying allegorical creatures representing the Allies. Although the battle is often named after the village of Vionville where the action began, it is also commonly referred to as the Battle of Mars-la-Tour, a larger settlement to the west. David Lloyd has identified a number of factors that conferred on First World War battlefields the qualities of a sacred place in British culture after 1918: the scale of death and bereavement necessitated a specific language to give it meaning; wartime imagery emphasized the spiritual nature of the struggle; the example of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address; and the French tradition of identifying battlefields with the sacred. In Germany’s case, the sanctification of front experience after the Great War was similarly rooted in the scale and intensity of the experience, and in the spiritual quality conferred on it by wartime propaganda. Illustrated histories of the Franco-Prussian War prompted a sensuous mode of perception that conferred a sacred quality on the battlefields of 1870–1. As such, visits by Germans to these sites in the years 1871–1914 can also be regarded as pilgrimages (Lloyd 1998: 26–8). In France the corollary applied. Karine Varley writes: ‘It was at the Mars-la-Tour memorial constructed only a few minutes away from the new German border in 1875 that truly captured the nation’s imagination.’ (Varley 2008: 181). An opinion voiced during an evening lecture at the Association of Friends of the Poster in Berlin in 1920. In sichern Frieden geh der Pflug durchs Land/ Und Sonne, die auf Heldengräber schien/ Sie spende reichsten Segen drüber hin/ Im neuerkämpften freien Vaterland! Frantzen writes: ‘Modern soldiers, like medieval knights, saw themselves as executioners avenging insults to sacred beliefs and institutions; they also saw themselves as sacrificial victims.’ He argues that the self-understanding of soldiers in the Great War included a ‘sacrificial’, or vengeful, response that necessitated the taking of life to avenge another, so perpetuating cyclical violence. On the other hand, an ‘antisacrificial’ response was also in evidence, one that opposed the taking of life and brought the cycle of violence to a close. These two chivalric impulses validated a third response, ‘self-sacrifice’, that ‘conflated prowess and piety and blurred the lines between sacrifice and antisacrifice’ (Frantzen 2004: 2–3). Die Hunnenwoge ist zerschellt/ Und frei die deutsche Erde!/ Der Mann im Felde, die Frau im Feld –/ Greift aus, ihr Ackepferde!! At Tannenberg between 17 August and 2 September 1914.

Notes

197

12 See also Bernd Küster’s discussion of Bernhard Winter’s full-length portrait of a wartime woman in traditional dress sowing a ploughed field: Die Kriegssaat, 1915 (Küster 2008: 124–5). 13 An exodus of ethnic Germans from East Prussia had occurred in 1914 during the Russian offensive at the outbreak of war. The propaganda value of representations of Germans in these circumstances requires no elaboration. 14 The juxtaposition of agricultural and industrial motifs in relation to the notion of collective belonging became a well-established convention in visual culture as Germany industrialized. A clear example was printed in Ulk 47. 47 on 22 November 1918. Under a banner proclaiming Freedom!, two male figures representing Industry and Agriculture look up to a third representing Capital. Behind and to the left of the figure group, under the rays of an unseen rising sun, a farmhouse breaks the horizon and, to the right, a factory. Smoke curling from the chimneys of both premises and birds perched on an abandoned steel helmet hold out the prospect of a harmonious and productive society – so long as German society remains under the control of its traditional leaders. Hüppauf writes: ‘The steel helmet became a symbol of the First World War’ (Ein symbol wurde in Ersten Weltkrieg der Stahlhelm.) (Hüppauf 2015: 188–9). 15 Under the terms of the Armistice, Germany was compelled to return AlsaceLorraine to France. Germany also faced the prospect of French demands to relinquish the Rhineland. What marked-out border issues in the east for particular attention was the willingness of Polish nationalists to resort to violence in order to pre-empt the Versailles settlement, and the attempt by Freikorps formations to seize Baltic territories formerly controlled by Prussian landowners. 16 On the morning of 16 August 1870 elements of the Prussian Second Army crossed the Mosel River south of Metz in order to interdict what was assessed to be the rearguard of the French army as it retreated westwards towards Verdun. The commander of the first Prussian corps to make contact with French forces, Constantin von Alvensleben, eventually came to understand that he in fact faced the main body of the French army, which had failed to withdraw quickly enough to elude the pursuing Prussians. Although considerably outnumbered, Prussian forces pressed their attack and, after heavy fighting, secured control of the road to Verdun, thereby creating the conditions that eventually led to the surrender of a significant element of France’s professional army under the walls of Metz (Howard 1972: 144–66). 17 The action at Vionville included three major cavalry actions providing artists with ample dramatic material. Two of the landscapes, all of the history paintings and the most ambitious of the vignettes take cavalry for their subject. 18 Participant testimony to the realities of modern combat are exposed in Mark Hewitson’s reassessment of ‘the causes, stages and significance of combatants’

198

19

20

21

22

23

Notes responses to modern warfare’, which challenges the view that ‘the majority of soldiers enjoyed – or were relatively untroubled by – killing [but rather did] not find it straightforward to ignore civilian taboos on killing or to accustom themselves to the sight, sound, odour and touch of dismemberment and death (Hewitson 2016: 399). Schlacht (battle) is here translated as ‘battlefield’, because Emelé depicts a postconflict scene. Prussian forces incurred heavy casualties as they pressed forward onto this exposed slope in order to bring French troops around Vionville under effective artillery fire and so cut the road from Metz to Verdun: ‘General Ferdinand von Stülpnagel’s 5th Division, Brandenburgers from the heart of Prussia, advanced in company columns on a broad front and were shot to pieces by the assembled guns and infantry of Charles Frossard’s II Corps.’ The role illustrated histories of the Franco-Prussian War were able to play in developing a collective German identity is suggested by the diverse origins of the troops who fought at Vionville: ‘Between 3:30 and 4 P.M., the first units of General Konstantin von Voights-Rhetz’s X Corps arrived on the field. … The troops, a mixed bag of ‘New Prussians’ – Frisians, Oldenburger, Hanoverians, and Brunswicker [incorporated into the North German Confederation in July 1867] – shambled heavily into battle’ (Wawro 2003: 154 and 157). The other sketch, which includes carcasses of horses on open ground on the far side of the Metz-Verdun road, depicts the site of a later cavalry engagement. ‘Bredow’s charge’ pitted Prussian cavalry against French artillery closely protected by infantry. Its success (attributed to Bredow’s judicious use of the ground to conceal his approach) was seized on by exponents of the cavalry arm as proof that cavalry could still function effectively in an offensive role against troops armed with modern rifles. With hindsight, it proved to be the last example of a successful major engagement of this type in the history of European warfare, so adding to the emotional appeal of place and event. At the outset of the war Prussia was able to deploy its permanent frontline strength of 300,000 men, backed by a million reservists and Landwehr, or home guard (Wawro 2003: 75). Flavigny is visible in the middle distance to the left of the monument. In order to achieve a representation that privileges the monument while simultaneously depicting the landscape beyond Taubert’s composition locates the viewer above ground level on the rear slope behind the crest. The Order of Battle (ORBAT) table is a feature of abbreviated operational writing techniques employed to convey written orders succinctly. Units of combat power are assigned to the operational control of designated formations, according to the imperatives of the task. The ORBAT graphic mandates command relationships, and consequently conveys legal, disciplinary and command responsibilities.

Notes

199

The incorporation of an ORBAT table into an artwork presupposes a militarily literate reader-viewer and collapses the space between military modes of visual representation and those of the artist. 24 In the preface to the second edition, Mitchell asks what happens to landscape when its effects are considered in relation to space and place. Citing David Harvey’s attempt to synthesize the phenomenological-experiential and Marxist traditions, Mitchell notes how authors as diverse as Gaston Bachelard, Martin Heidegger, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault agree that ‘space’ and ‘place’ are fundamental categories of analysis. He argues that there is a need to consider them in relation to landscape as a conceptual whole. Mitchell considers that Certeau’s work offers a useful series of binary oppositions with which to begin this work (112Mitchell 2002: xi) 25 Representations of topography have long been regarded as useful aids to military orientation: ‘Francisco de Hollanda reports Michelangelo as saying: “What greater service can a brave leader perform for raw recruits than to show them, before the battle, a picture of the town they are to storm or the river, hills and country houses they are to march past the following day?”’ 180180Warnke 1994: 56–7). 26 Simon Schama describes how his own research practice reflects his belief in the importance of ‘directly experiencing “a sense of place”’ wherever possible – of using ‘the archive of the feet’ (Scharma 1996: 24).

Chapter 4 1 Halke’s figure group bears a striking resemblance to that of the leading company in Carl Röchling’s, Tod des Majors von Hadeln (Gravelotte, 18 August 1870) (See Bartmann 1993: 97). 2 Wörth, Gravelotte and Mars-la-Tour. The choice of Orleans is no less interesting, as is Halke’s decision to foreground this gravestone so prominently. The Orleans battle marked the furthest limit of one of the deepest incursions into French territory during the winter of 1870–1. 3 Related to armour, Warnke argues that the depiction of castles in late Renaissance Italian and German painting ‘suggests that a certain satisfaction was derived from the thought that these grand seats of power had become ineffectual. Stripped of any real function, they were now merely decorative motifs, to be used as ornamental fillers’. The castle, like the mailed arm of Heine’s Teutonic knight, might have been rendered obsolete, but both connote surveillance and a protective presence (Warnke 1994: 42–3). 4 Schivelbusch considers that ‘dreamland’ is eventually displaced by ‘awakening’. The new regime finds itself cast in the role of its predecessor. Reactionary elements

200

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

Notes associate it with myths of wartime betrayal – such as the ‘stab in the back’ (Schivelbusch 2003: 13–16). Veterans were quick to police the terms on which their identity was constructed in Weimar Germany, and the ability to make witness claims about the war was fundamental to this process (Fox 2006: 249–67). This tendency is exemplified by Jünger, who declares how: ‘In this manner a trove of images built up, which can be pieced together in various ways, and act not only as a lively stimulus to the soldier’s memory, but also as a useful aid to the imagination of those who could not take part in the world of the war’. (Es ist auf diese Weise ein Schatz von Bildern entstanden, der sich manningfaltige Weise zusammensetzen läβt, und der nicht nur die Erinnerung des Kämpfers lebhaft erregen, sondern auch der Vorstellungskraft dessen, der an dieser Welt nicht teilhaben konnte, eine wertvolle Hilfe erteilen wird.) (Jünger 1930: 9–10). Categories of inquiry include morale, the General Staff, leadership, logistics, the Church, postal and telegraph, munitions, medical, strategy and tactics, and the combat arms: infantry, cavalry and artillery. This approach opens up the field of what comprised relevant subject matter for authors and artists alike. Art works depicting telegraph communications troops, railway operations, or even quartermasters conducting inventories of requisitioned stores, conditioned the way artists and photographers responded to technological modernity. Jünger also includes six maps providing an overview of each theatre of operations: Western, Eastern, Italian, Serbian, Rumanian and a map of the ‘New Germany’, depicting the territorial losses mandated by the Versailles Treaty. Das Buch stellt zwei Bücher in einem dar: das Erlebnisbuch des Frontkämpfers im Wort und in Bildern. Beide Teile verschmelzen zu einem geschlossenen Ganzen, wie es in den Erlebnisbüchern bisher unbekannt ist. – Die 200 Aufnahmen, die das Werk enthält, sind aus 25000 Photographien ausgesucht, die Frontkämpfer zur Verfügung gestellt hatten. Schauwecker’s claim to an unprecedented approach suggests that what Schauwecker had in mind was the example of contemporary histories of the First World War, rather than Wilhelmine antecedents. Jünger describes the photograph as an ‘optical document’, a cluster of visual data offering ‘detailed impressions of the surface of events’, that betrays both its utility and its limitation in the task he assigns to it, which is to stimulate the imagination. Woods makes a more complex point when he observes that ‘It has been suggested that books on the First World War written in the Weimar years fall into one of two categories: either they show it as a heroic event or as senseless torture. … This is a very convenient categorisation – on the Conservative Revolutionary side, war as an opportunity to show one’s heroism, as a glorious test of courage; on the pacifist side, war as the bringer of pointless death and suffering. … Yet this categorization

Notes

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21 22

201

does not take into account the complexity of the productive tensions lying at the heart of much Conservative Revolutionary writing on the war’ (Woods 1996: 78). Sebastian Remus writes, ‘The photographs of the amateur [military] photographer have their limits forced upon them by a kind of moral self-censorship and the conditions of a soldier’s life and mission in the trenches’ (Remus 2008: 7). See his discussion about photographer Frank Hurley, who was ‘concerned about the limitations created by photographic equipment and battle conditions … which made it impossible to fully capture the war. [Hurley] wrote: I have tried and tried to include events on a single negative, but the results were hopeless. Everything was on such a vast scale … all the elements of a picture were there could they but be brought together and condensed’ (ibid.). During fighting at Langemarck, Jünger recalls, ‘We sat down in a trench that was more imagination than reality, and breakfasted. Kius pulled out his inevitable camera and took pictures (Jünger 2003: 169). It is probable that both photographs were taken on training areas. There is sufficient ambivalence about the origin of Jünger’s choice to allow him to present it as a substitute for virtually non-existent images of soldiers in action. Accounting for events during the 1870–1 siege of Paris provides an example of the challenge. The siege itself is only part of the story. Political manoeuvres, sorties, French attempts to raise the siege from the provinces, and irregular warfare harassing German lines of communication have all to be accounted for in a coherent and stimulating manner. Pflugk-Harttung’s commemorative history does so too. His introduction – titled ‘Veterans! German Men and Women! – is signed ‘A Warrior from 1870-71’ (PflugkHarttung 1896: v–vi). Although it does not merge into the surrounding space there is a vignette-like quality to this photograph. Its truncated quality – the limited view offered to the reader – is reliant on a supporting narrative for its context and meaning. The chapters in The Face of the World War dealing with experience in the line, in reserve and in the rear area mirror the structure of the battlefield. Jünger’s thematic approach is well adapted to describing the simultaneous execution of multiple tasks necessary for the conduct of modern military operations. Jünger exemplifies this offensive mindset with a photograph depicting German soldiers scrambling up the face of a mine crater in order to gain possession of its rim in advance of the enemy. See ‘Occupation of a dry mine crater immediately after the explosion’ (Jünger 1930: 113). Robert Citino’s argues that the ‘operational mentalité’ of the German officer corps was characterized by an aggressive approach that privileged the offensive (Citino 2005). Das Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, Bund deutscher Kriegsteilnehmer und Republikaner. Veterans’ associations were politicized during the Weimar years.

202

Notes The Stahlhelm organization and the German Officers’ Association (Der Deutscher Offiziersbund) endorsed right-wing politics, while the International Association of the Victims of War and Work (Der Internationaler Bund der Opfer des Kriegs und Arbeit) asserted its credentials by distancing itself from the more moderate Reichsbund, reflecting the political rift between radicals and the moderate Social Democratic Party. See Whalen 1984: 118–27.

Chapter 5 1 Virilio provides examples of the resulting vertical imagery (his Figures 7 and 8). His discussion of specialist photoreconnaissance operations during the Second World War is accompanied by an illustration from a contemporary training manual demonstrating how a successful sequence of overlapping frames provides stereo coverage – in this case of a pinpoint target (his Figure 30). His explanation describing how this is achieved is inaccurate, however. The synchronization required to achieve the ideal 60 per cent overlap between frames involves a mathematical calculation involving the aircraft’s height above ground, predicted ground speed and the speed of the camera’s frame advance mechanism (178Virilio 2000) For a comprehensive account of the development of imaging technologies during the Great War see Finnegan (2006). 2 Wir flogen etwa eintausendachthundert Meter hoch. Das Wetter war schön klar, die Belichtungszeit zufällig – Erfahrungen hatte ich ja noch nicht – richtig … Schön waren die Aufnahmen ja gerade nicht, aber doch noch gerade brauchbar … Sah man doch jetzt zum erstmal, was man überhaupt an Stellungen vor sich hatte. 3 The March 1921 plebiscite in Upper Silesia ratified German sovereignty. On 3 May 1921 Polish forces invaded the region. Freikorps forces mobilized without official sanction and counter-attacked across the River Oder to recover lost territory. 4 The sketches are small in scale, but note how the lower left sketch (situation as at 1300 hours) depicts the ‘left hook’ around the Annaberg feature, encircling the Polish defences from the north, as ordered in sub-paragraph 4b of the Operation Order: ‘Detachment Horadam: the Annaberg and woodland to the north. Main effort is encirclement on the left wing’.

Chapter 6 1 For a comprehensive account of the evolution of German military technologies and their tactical employment, see Brose (2001).

Notes

203

2 See, for example, Albert Robida’s 1887 La Guerre au Vingtième Siècle. For a comprehensive analysis of the development of military science fiction see Clarke (1966). 3 The volume is divided into three sections: open warfare, siege warfare and an extended section in which each military capability, ranging from the General Staff officer to the role of official war artists, is discussed in the context of the campaign. Examples of exemplary events are liberally incorporated to enliven the narrative and provide context. 4 The dynamic between the will to battle and technical competence – the moral and the physical – suggested by Röchling’s work is equivalent to that established between the moral component and tactical concerns identified in works discussed in earlier chapters. Röchling’s work exists within the wider tactic context of cooperation between infantry and artillery at Vionville, but it is calculated to appeal most strongly to the emotions. Carl Schmitt’s address to political romanticism aside, discussion about the aestheticization of state-sponsored violence is commonly grounded in Walter Benjamin’s work inspired by his experience of National Socialist spectacle. Quoting Marinetti, Benjamin notes the importance of images of technology in the aestheticized vision of war: ‘War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights’ (Benjamin 1999: 234–5). The aestheticization of battlefield technology, enabled by advances in photomechanical reproduction, is already visually discernible in late-nineteenth-century military histories. 5 A comparison can usefully be made between War and Victory and the Life of Frederick. Whatever the realities of eighteenth-century warfare, the latter history – including Menzel’s illustrations – has little to say about technology: cannon are cannon and muskets are muskets, no matter who employs them. Implied technological parity is, unwittingly, a determining factor in their account. The moral and physical components of fighting power therefore play out more starkly. 6 It was understood that the cavalry charge was tantamount to suicide in the face of modern infantry firepower. 7 For an exposition of this doctrine see Pflugk-Harttung (1896a: 34–5). PflugkHarttung begins: ‘The artillery has become far more important than the cavalry in battle. It grew as the inseparable sister-arm of the infantry, coming to them not infrequently as a saving angel’. (Weit wichtiger als die Reiterei ist die Artillerie für die Schlacht geworden; sie erwuchs zur unzertrennlichen Schwesterwaffe der Infanterie, sie kam ihr nicht selten wie ein rettender Engel.) 8 Showalter in Haycock (1988: 126). 9 The sluggish tempo of siege operations created the conditions in which Leon Gambetta, Interior Minister in France’s Government of National Defence, was

Notes

204

10

11

12 13

able to channel the considerable resources still available to the state in support of a guerrilla war, under the banner ‘guerre à outrance!’ (war to the utmost). See Howard (1972: 233–49). There is a distinction here between attempting to derive coherence from surface appearances and a more robust equivalent drawn from an understanding of tactical norms, the specificity of the local concept of operations, and the technical capabilities of enabling weapons systems. As discussed in Chapter 5, the robust performance of the German army in defence during the First World War reflected soldiers’ understanding that, no matter what they were currently experiencing, there was an underlying tactical and technological logic to events. Where they occur, annotated mapping and technical diagrams support this outlook in illustrated histories, and assist in developing the structural logic of accounts, such as that presented in War and Victory. Any subsequent detachment of image from military context is a particular challenge for art historians addressing military art works shorn of the wider contexts they referenced, and in which they were conceived and consumed. In open ground, German attackers had to cross a 600-m zone between the maximum effective range of the Chassepot (1000m) and that of the Needle Gun (400m). For a description of the event see Howard (1972: 335). Showalter notes that in 1870–1 ‘the soldiers of the new empire … demonstrated tractability … They conducted themselves well in and out of action. Commentators, German and foreign, were particularly fond of contrasting the sober, disciplined family men in the German ranks with the semiliterate soldateska that surrendered en masse at Sedan and Metz, or with the Third Republic’s rowdy levies’ (Showalter 1994: 62).

Chapter 7 1 Naval and aerial combat are beyond the scope of this book, but were commonly represented as machine-on-machine events. 2 The manner in which the war was depicted under wartime censorship is a field of inquiry in its own right. The profile of the wartime output of satirical magazines such as Simplicissimus and Kladderadatsch charts three phases. The ‘reorientation’ phase, up to the late winter of 1914–15, during which the transition from open to trench warfare was frequently represented as a challenging adventure; the ‘interim’ phase, which lasted until the beginning of the Verdun offensive in February 1916, in which narratives focused on exploring the unprecedented conditions of trench warfare; and the ‘industrial’ phase, which lasted until the end of the war, in which the conditions of Materialschlacht were represented. Greater exposure to accounts of events at the front awaited the relaxation of censorship.

Notes

205

3 The tank was invented in Britain and first deployed on the Western Front in 1916. It too was no wonder weapon. Its limited potential, like that of Krupp’s guns over forty years earlier, was dependent on the manner in which its capabilities were optimized through tactical innovation. For an account of the development of the tank and a limited discussion of its representation by British artists see Brose (2001). 4 Prussian Blue was superseded by Field Grey in 1910. The strong tonal properties of the soldier’s clothing recalls the pictorial values of works depicting the German uniforms of 1870, such as in Röchling’s work discussed in the previous chapter. The artillery piece is drawn with such economy that it is impossible to identify it as anything more than a generic example of late-nineteenth-century field artillery. (The contemporary C-96nA weapon is described and depicted in Brose (2001: 142–3)). 5 The tank was invented in Britain and first deployed on the Western Front in the autumn of 1916. It too was no wonder weapon; its limited potential, like that of Krupp’s guns over forty years earlier, was dependent on the manner in which its capabilities were optimized through tactical innovation. For an account of the development of the tank and a limited discussion of its representation by British artists see Wright (2000). 6 The armour of the first generation of British tanks was designed to be proof against conventional rifle ammunition. The German response was to substitute hardened steel for the soft metal core of machine gun ammunition, enhancing its ability to penetrate steel plate. Distling’s poster accurately reflects British doctrine for the attack: ‘Tanks can be employed in co-operation with infantry either with, or without a preliminary bombardment. In the former case, tank units will either precede the infantry, covering its advance with fire, overrunning the enemy’s machine guns and clearing gaps in the hostile wire, or they will follow in close support of the infantry, moving forward at once to engage the enemy at any points where the infantry is checked. In the latter case, the duty of the tank units will be to lead the advance and to crush a way for the infantry through the enemy’s wire’ (Beach 2008b: 56). 7 In an analysis of the turn-of-the-century debate about art’s role in marketing mass-produced commodities, Sherwin Simmons notes that ‘real socio-political entities were increasingly embodied and mobilised through visual signs, a practice that intensified during the war and revolution’. Addressing a poster advertising the 1910 ‘Art in the Service of the Businessman’ exhibition, Simmons notes that ‘Like the Sachplakate, or object posters developed by Lucian Bernhard, it depends on a simplified image which subtly engages the viewer’s space and directs attention to the brand name’ (Simmons 1999: 121–46). 8 The Battle of Cambrai (20 November–3 December 1917) involved the unprecedented use of over 450 tanks. The combination of infantry and tanks

206

9 10

11

12

Notes supported by aircraft broke through the strong German defences of the Hindenburg Line. The German counter-attack was equally effective, regaining most of the ground. A number of British tanks, some of them undamaged, fell into German hands. Photographs of these vehicles associated with a German tactical success feature prominently in popular accounts of the war. It appeared on the front page of the Frankfurter Zeitung on 8 April 1918. Helmut Lethen considers that‚ ‘Panzer, which in English means armour, shield, and tank, is one of the magical words in the [Weimar] republic’s masculinity cult. On the one hand, it recalls legends of the fallen warrior, overcome only by dint of material superiority; on the other, it accepts the necessity of a form of resistance that assimilates the tools of the aggressor’ (Leuthen 2002: 161). The newly created states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were a political flashpoint in 1919. Soviet Russia backed the extension of Bolshevik control in the region, while Prussian landowners sought to perpetuate their hereditary control of the rural economy in loose alliance with White Russian forces. The Allies backed the Baltic States. Until the early summer of 1919 they allowed the German military to resist the common threat posed by Bolshevism. In August, when it became clear that the local German military leadership aspired to total dominance of the region and the restoration of baronial control, the Allies intervened militarily, spelling the end of a campaign that was never officially endorsed by the German government. Some Freikorps formations attempted to fight on, but the campaign was over by December. See Jones (2004). By 1918 the idea that one might reach for an innovative technological solution to tactical problems was more firmly engrained in military culture than it had been in 1914. For an account of this phenomenon from the Allied perspective see Rawling (1992). Rawling’s work makes for a useful comparison with Brose’s account of technological change in the German army between 1871 and 1918. Specifically, in the context of Freikorps operations in urban conurbations, it is useful to understand the tactical context in which the flame thrower – developed as a weapon to clear bunkers at the front – was deployed on the streets to counter the Bolshevik tactic of using women and children as human shields, behind which to snipe, or snatch and murder German soldiers on cordon, or riot control, duty. Fear of flame ensured that the mere demonstration of the capability guaranteed standoff distances that solved the problem without loss of life. Klaus Theweleit discusses the implications of the presence of women in violent crowd events at some length. His psychoanalytic account of the way such events are narrated in Freikorps memoirs is problematic because it fails adequately to consider the moral, conceptual and physical dynamics of organized riots and responses to them, despite the copious evidence offered by the quotations he deploys. Thus, conservative motivation is viewed by Theweleit as determined primarily by the unconscious, rather

Notes

13

14 15

16

17

18

19

207

than by reflection on the means-ends rationale that influenced the way veteran authors of memoirs had acted: ‘for the construction of Fascist texts, it seems, however, to be crucial first that women always be present and second that they be depicted as present at the bidding of others – as used for some ulterior purpose’. The construction Theweleit himself suppresses is that of the Bolshevik-inspired conceptual component of fighting power deployed by the German Communist party (KPD). His account amounts to no more than a convenient fiction, divorced from the legal and humanitarian realities attending the challenge to democratic politics (Theweleit 2003: 27–33). The tank is a British model captured during the Great War. They were superior to the German type (the A7V) and captured machines had been repaired and used against their original owners in 1917 and 1918. The photographic evidence indicates that they were employed in limited numbers by Freikorps formations in major German cities. On Riegl’s terms, Street Battles in Berlin depicts the moment of fragile attentiveness before characters begin to respond coherently to a verbal exhortation. Thomas Nevin suggests that as a member of the educated elite, Jünger possessed two terms of reference with which to make sense of his experience at the front: he shared with the whole of German society ‘the “folk memory” of Friedrich II and the nineteenth-century wars’; but he took with him the Homeric scenario: ‘In Homer, the waging of war overwhelms the purported goal itself. There is no promise of eventual peace or an everlasting dominion for victors. Like the warriors before Troy, Jünger was engaged in fighting for its own sake’ (Nevin 1997: 41). Bullock notes that ‘by substituting absolute ideas in an artificial environment’ he succeeds in establishing ‘a coherent picture of the whole… . Thus both his language and the narrative logic can remain as clear and transparent within the framework of these ideas as a traditional narrative showing human motivations in a still intact and recognisable social landscape’ (28Bullock 1992: 25). A less lavishly illustrated example that deserves to be counted in the cluster of illustrated books written or edited by Jünger in the early 1930s is his patriotic history of the Freikorps, Der Kampf um das Reich. So ist die Schlacht für das Auge des Kriegers ein Vorgang, der sich in hoher Ordnung vollzieht, der tragische Konflikt für den Dichter ein Zustand, in dem der tiefe Sinn des Lebens sehr deutlich zu erfassen ist, und eine brennende oder im Aufruhr befindliche Stadt für den Verbrecher ein Feld gesteigerter Tätigkeit. … denn die Götter erscheinen in den Elementen, so im feurigen Busche, den die Flamme nicht verzehrt. Durch Unglück und Gefahr bezieht das Schicksal den Sterblichen in den übermächtigen Kreis einer höheren Ordnung ein. Bodo von Dewitz writes that all the authors of German First World War photobooks, no matter what their political affiliation, ‘were united in the belief

208

20

21

22

23

24

Notes that the medium of photography was the only appropriate means of objective documentation based on its optical and technical nature’ (Wilkes-Tucker 2012: 153). Field Artillery Under Fire depicts bodies succumbing to shrapnel, but the far wheel of the gun carriage remains structurally intact, despite having incurred damage to its rim, permitting the gun to remain in action. Although the car will be damaged in the accident depicted in The Last Second, the bodies of the drivers risk irreparable harm. Jünger rejects bourgeois values stemming from Enlightenment liberalism (freedom, the rule of law and democracy). His utopian order is based on his belief that ‘what the war disclosed was precisely the possibility of blending a strict order and a wild anarchy: the mixture of precision and explosion found in both the great battles and the daily life of modern cities’ (Werneburg 1992: 48). Sections comprise: ‘The downfall of the old order’ (Der Zussamenbruch der Alten Ordungen), ‘The transformed face of the masses’ (Das Veränderte Gesicht der Masse), ‘The transformed face of the individual’ (Das Veränderte Gesicht des Einzelnen), ‘Life’ (Leben), ‘Domestic politics’ (Innenpolitik), ‘The economy’ (Die Wirtschaft), ‘Nationalism’ (Nationalismus), and ‘Imperialism’ (Imperialismus). Jünger’s imagery of the armoured battlefield complements his address to the image of the ‘soldier-worker’. Lethen observes that ‘In Jünger’s book Der Arbeiter … the icon of the warrior fascinates the gestalt of the cool persona. The warrior’s physiognomy – beneath a steel helmet or crash helmet – is metallic, “galvanised, as it were.” “The gaze is steady and focussed, schooled in the observation of things that can be captured in high velocity conditions”. Lethen considers that ‘Jünger’s compendium … serves the education of an “aristocracy” and an “order”. But his nervous gaze discovers it in incipient form in tank and submarine crews … in a type that can be reproduced in masses, not in the individually prominent duelling subject’ (Lethen 2002: 163–4). Jünger’s account of the relationship between man and machine does not, however, collapse the space between the two categories in order to suggest the cyborg, understood as ‘a cipher – an enigmatic figure that is human but is not human, that is a machine but is not a machine’ (Grenville 2001: 9). Like Martin Heidegger, whose work he informed, Jünger asks questions that are not about technology as such, but deal with the way technology influences social development: ‘The essence of technology is a way of being in the world, a manner of appearing to oneself and others such that everything emerges as ready at hand, for use or as a “standing reserve,” or as prefigured for instrumental action’. Mark Proster in (Zylinska 2002: 20).

References Anderson, B. (1991), Imagined Communities, London, Verso. Andrews, M., S. Sclater, C. Squire and A. Treacher (2004), The Uses of Narrative: Explorations in Sociology, Psychology, and Cultural Studies, London, Transaction Publishers. Apel, D. (1999), ‘Cultural Battlegrounds: Weimar Photographic Narratives of War’, New German Critique, 76: 49–84. Ashplant, T., G. Dawson and M. Roper, eds (2004), Commemorating War, London, Transaction Publishers. Ashworth, T. (1980), Trench Warfare, 1914-1918: the Live and Let Live System, London, Macmillan. Barnstone, D. A., and T. O. Haakenson, eds (2012), Representations of German Identity, Oxford, Peter Lang. Barthes, R. (1981), Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York, Hill and Wang. Bartmann, D. (1985), Anton von Werner. Zur Kunst und Kunstpolitik im Deutschen Kaisereich, Berlin, Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft. Bartmann, D., ed. (1993), Anton von Werner, Geschichte in Bildern, Munich: Hirmer. Beach, J., ed. (2008a), The German Army Handbook of 1918, London: Frontline Books. Beach, J., ed. (2008b), SS135: The Division in the Attack – 1918, Upavon: Strategic and Combat Studies Institute. Beegan, G. (2008), The Mass Image: A Social History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian London, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Benjamin, W. (1979), ‘Theories of German Fascism: on the Collection of Essays War and Warrior, edited by Ernst Jünger’, New German Critique 17: 120–8. Benjamin, W. (1999), Illuminations, London, Pimlico. Bessel, R. (1993), Germany After the First World War, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Biggs, L. (1950), Illustration and Reproduction, London, Blandford Press. Bloem, W. (1922), Der Weltbrand. Deutschlands Tragödie, 1914-1918, Berlin, Hobbing. Boime, A. (2007), Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848-1871, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Bond, B. (2002), The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Böss, M., ed. (2014), Conflicted Pasts and National Identities: Narratives of War and Conflict, Aarhus, Aarhus University Press. Boym, S. (2002), The Future of Nostalgia, New York, Basic Books.

210

References

Bröger, C. (1930), Pillbox 17: The Story of a Comradeship-in-Arms, London, Thornton Butterworth. Brose, E. D. (2001), The Kaiser’s Army: The Politics of Military Technology in Germany during the Machine Age, 1870-1918, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Bryden, E. (2010), ‘Heroes and Martyrs of the Republic: Reichsbanner Geschichtspolitik in Weimar Germany’, Central European History 43: 639–65. Bucholz, F., ed. (1931), Der Gefährliche Augenblick. Eine Sammlung von Bildern und Berichten, Berlin: Junker & Dunnhaupt Verlag. Bucholz, A. (1985), Hans Delbrück and the German Military Establishment: War Images in Conflict, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press. Bucholz, A. (2001), Moltke and the German Wars, 1864-71, Basingstoke, Palgrave. Bullock, M. P. (1992), The Violent Eye: Ernst Jünger's Visions and Revisions on the European Right, Detroit, Wayne State University Press. Butler, J. (1997), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, London, Routledge. Canetti, E. (1962), Crowds and Power, London, Gollancz. Certeau, M. D. (1988), The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, University of California Press. Citino, R. M. (2005), The German Way of War: from the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich, Lawrence, University Press of Kansas. Clarke, I. F. (1966), Voices Prophesying War, 1763-1984, London, Oxford University Press. Clausewitz, C. V. (1989), On War, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Confino, A. (1997), ‘Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method’, American Historical Review 102: 1386–1403. Connerton, P. (1989), How Societies Remember, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Conrad, S. (2010), Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Crary, J. (1990), Techniques of the Observer: on Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Dawson, G. (2005), Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities, London, Routledge. Deutsche, V. U. (1929), Illustrierte Geschichte der Deutschen Revolution, Berlin, Internationaler Arbeiter-Verlag. Döblin, A. (1983), A People Betrayed. November 1918: a German Revolution, New York, Fromm International. Drzdzewski, D., S. de Nardi and E. Waterton, eds (2016a), Memories of War, Place, and Identity, London, Routledge. Drzdzewski, D., S. de Nardi and E. Waterton, eds (2016b), ‘Geographies of Memory, Place and Identity: Intersections in Remembering War and Conflict’, Geography Compass 10/11: 447–56. Duttlinger, C., L. Ruprecht and A. Webber, eds (2003), Performance and Performativity in German Cultural Studies, Oxford, Peter Lang.

References

211

Eisenhart Rothe, E. V., ed. (1927), Ehrendenkmal der Deutschen Armee und Marine, 1871-1918, Berlin: Deutscher National-Verlag AG. Finnegan, T. (2006), Shooting the Front: Allied Aerial Reconnaissance and Photographic Interpretation on the Western Front, Washington, DC, NDIC Press. Fontane, T. (1982), Short Novels and Other Writings, New York, Continuum. Forschungsanstalt für Kriegs- und Heeresgeschichte. (1937), Darstellungen aus den Nachkriegskämpfen Deutscher Truppen und Freikorps: der Feldzug im Baltikum bis zur Zweiten Einnahme von Riga, Januar bis Mai 1919, Berlin, Mittler & Sohn. Forster-Hahn, F. (1977), ‘Adolph Menzel’s “Daguerrotypical” Image of Frederick the Great: A Liberal Bourgeois Interpretation of German History’, The Art Bulletin 59: 242–61. Forster-Hahn, F., ed. (1996), Imagining Modern German Culture: 1889-1910, Washington: National Gallery of Art. Forster-Hahn, F., ed. (2001), Spirit of an Age: Nineteenth-Century Paintings From the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, London: National Gallery Company. Fox, P. (2006), ‘Confronting Postwar Shame in Weimar Germany: Trauma, Heroism and the War Art of Otto Dix’, Oxford Art Journal 29: 249–67. Frantzen, A. (2004a), Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War, London, University of Chicago Press. Frantzen, A. J. (2004b), Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Friedrich, E. (1987), War Against War!, London, Journeyman Press. Frye, N. (1957), The Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Für Kriegs-und Heeresgeschichte, F. (1937), Darstellungen aus den Nachkriegskämpfen Deutscher Truppen und Freikorps: der Feldzug im Baltikum bis zur Zweiten Einnahme von Riga, Januar bis Mai 1919, Berlin, Mittler & Sohn. Fussell, P. (1975), The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Grenville, B., ed. (2001), The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture, Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, Arsenal Pulp Press. Griffith, P. (1994), Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army’s Art of Attack, 1916-18, New Haven, Yale University Press. Halbwachs, M. (1992), On Collective Memory, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Harthan, J. (1981), The History of the Illustrated Book: The Western Tradition, London, Thames and Hudson. Hartog, F. (2015), Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, New York, Columbia University Press. Haycock, R. G., and K. Neilson. (1988), Men, Machines & War, Waterloo, ON, Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Heigl, F. (1926), Taschenbuch der Tanks. Wesen, Erkennung, Bekämpfung, Munich, J. F. Lehmanns Verlag. Herf, J. (1998), Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

212

References

Hetherington, K., and R. Munro. (1997), Ideas of Difference, Oxford, Blackwell. Hewitson, M. (2000), National Identity and Political Thought in Germany: Wilhelmine Depictions of the French Third Republic, 1890-1914, Oxford, Clarenden. Hewitson, M. (2004), Germany and the Causes of the First World War, Oxford, Berg. Hewitson, M. (2016), ‘German Soldiers and the Horror of War: Fear of Death and the Joy of Killing in 1870 and 1914’, History: the Journal of the Historical Association 101: 396–424. Hirsch, E., and M. O’Hanlon, eds (1995), The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space, Oxford, Clarendon. Hobsbawm, E., and T. Ranger. (2007), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Hodder, I., and S. T. Sweeney, eds (2002), The Body, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Howard, M. (1972), The Franco-Prussian War: the German Invasion of France, 1870-1871, London, Granada. Hughes, D. J., ed. (1993), Moltke on the Art of War: Selected Writings, Novato, CA: Presidio Press. Hüppauf, B. (1993), ‘Experiences of Modern Warfare and the Crisis of Representation’, New German Critique, 59, special issue on Ernst Jünger: 41–76. Hüppauf, B. (2013), Was ist Krieg?: zur Grundlegung einer Kulturgeschichte des Kriegs, Bielefeld, Transcript. Hüppauf, B. (2015), Fotografie im Krieg, Paderborn, Wilhelm Frink. Hynes, S. (1990), A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, London, Pimlico. James, P. (2009), Picture This: World War 1 Posters and Visual Culture, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press. Jennings, M. (2000), ‘Agriculture, Industry, and the Birth of the Photo-Essay in the Late Weimar Republic’, October 93: 23–56. Jones, H., J. O’Brien and C. Schmidt-Supprian, eds (2008), Untold War: New Perspectives in First World War Studies, Leiden, Brill. Jones, N. H. (2004), The Birth of the Nazis: How the Freikorps Blazed a Trail for Hitler, London, Robinson. Jünger, E., ed. (1930), Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges: Fronterlebnisse Deutscher Soldaten, Berlin: Neufeld & Henius Verlag. Jünger, E. (1932a), Der Kampf um Das Reich, Essen, Deutsche Vertriebsstelle ‘Rhein und Ruhr’. Jünger, E. (1932b), Der Arbeiter, Hamburg, Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt. Jünger, E. (1985), Copse 125: A Chronicle From the Trench Warfare of 1918, Zimmermann & Zimmermann. Jünger, E. (2003), Storm of Steel, London, Penguin. Junior, R., ed. (1931), Hier Spricht der Feind. Kriegserlebnisse Unserer Gegner, Berlin: Neufeld & Henius.

References

213

Kaes, A. (2000), M, London, British Film Institute. Kaes, A. (1993), ‘The Cold Gaze: Notes on Mobilisation and Modernity’, New German Critique, 59, Special issue on Ernst Jünger: 105–17. Kant, I. (2003), Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, Berkeley, University of California Press. Karner, C., and B. Mertens, eds (2013), The Use and Abuse of Memory: Interpreting World War II in Contemporary European Politics, London, Transaction Publishers. Keren, M., and H. H. Herwig, eds (2009), War Memory and Popular Culture: Essays on Remembrance and Commemoration, London, McFarland & Company. Kessler, H. G. (1999), The Diaries of a Cosmopolitan, 1918-1937, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Kohle, H. (2007), ‘The Modernity of History Painting: the Case of Adolph Menzel’, Intellectual History Review 17: 135–51. Korzetz, I. (2009), Die Freikorps in der Weimarer Republic: Aufstellung, Einsatz und Wesen bayerischer Freikorps, 1918-1920, Marburg, Tectum. Kugler, F., and A. Menzel. (1877), The Life of Frederick the Great: Comprehending a Complete History of the Silesian Campaigns and Seven Years’ War, London, George Routledge and Sons. Kunath, R. C. (1993), War and Art: Nationalist Ideology, Academic Artists, and the Interpretation of the Visual Arts in Imperial Germany, 1914-1918, Stanford, Stanford University Press. Küster, B., ed. (2008), Der Erste Weltkrieg und die Kunst: Von der Propaganda zum Widerstand, Oldenburg, Merlin Verlag. Kwon, H. (2008), Ghosts of War in Vietnam, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Langewiesche, D. (2000), Liberalism in Germany, London, Macmillan. Laqueur, T. W. (1994), ‘Memory and Naming in the Great War’, in J. R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Le Bon, G. (2005), The Crowd, New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction. Lethen, H. (2002), Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, Berkeley, University of California Press. Lloyd, D. (1998), Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia and Canada, 1919-1939, Oxford, Berg. Lowenthal, D. (1985), The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Loxley, J. (2007), Perfomativity, London, Routledge. McBride, P. (2012), ‘Narrative Resemblance: The Production of Truth in the Modernist Photobook of Weimar Germany’, New German Critique 115: 169–98. Martin, M. (2006), Images at War: Illustrated Periodicals and Constructed Nations, Toronto, University of Toronto Press. Michalski, M., and L. GOW. (2007), War, Image and Legitimacy: Viewing Contemporary Conflict, London, Routledge.

214

References

Mitchell, W. J. T. (2002), Landscape and Power, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Moltke, H. (1891), The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, London, Harper and Brothers. Moses, J. (2012), ‘The Prusso-German Idea of War: The Values of a Virtual Rogue State’, History Compass 10: 901–17. Mosse, G. L. (1990), Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, New York, Oxford University Press. Mosse, G. L. (1998), The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Muzaini, H. (2016), ‘Personal Reflections on Formal Second World War Memorials in Everyday Spaces in Singapore’, in D. Drozdzewski, S. De Nardi and E. Waterton (eds), Memory, Place and Identity: Commemoration and Remembrance of War and Conflict, 38–55, London: Routledge. Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2012), The Make-Believe Space: Affective geography in a Postwar Polity, London, Duke University Press. Nevin, T. R. (1997), Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914-1945, London, Constable. Nietzsche, F. W. (1968), The Will to Power, New York, Vintage Books. Nora, P. (1989), ‘Between memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations 26: 7–25. Oertzen, F. W. V. (1936), Die Deutschen Freikorps, 1918-1923, Munich, F. Bruckmann. Olin, M. R. (1989), ‘Forms of Respect: Alois Riegl’s Concept of Attentiveness’, The Art Bulletin 714: 285–99. Olin, M. R. (1992), Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press. Palmer, R., and T. Frangenberg, eds (2003), The Rise of the Image: Essays on the History of the Illustrated Art Book, Aldershot, Ashgate. Palmér, T., and H. Neubauer. (2000), The Weimar Republic Through the Lens of the Press, Cologne, Könemann. Paret, P. (1988), Art as History: Episodes in the Culture and Politics of NineteenthCentury Germany, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Peukert, D. J. K. (1996), The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, New York, Hill and Wang. Pflugk-Harttung, J. A. G. V., ed. (1896a), Krieg und Sieg, 1870-71: ein Gedenkbuch, Berlin: Schall & Grund. Pflugk-Harttung, J. A. G. V., ed. (1896b), Krieg und Sieg, 1870-71: Kulturgeschichte, Berlin: Schall & Grund. Plümer, E. (1987), August Stuckenbrok Main Catalogue, 1912, Hildesheim, Olms Presse. Porter, P. (2009), Military Orientalism: Eastern War through Western Eyes, Hurst & Company, London. Prussian Field Photography Detechment. After 1871. Bilder aus dem Kriegsleben vor Paris und Strassburg Während des Feldzuges 1870/71, nach der Natur Photographisch Aufgenommen, Munich, J. B. Obernetter.

References

215

Rawling, B. (1992), Surviving Trench Warfare: Technology and the Canadian Corps, 1914-1918, Toronto, University of Toronto Press. Remus, S. (2008), German Amateur Photographers in the First World War: a View from the Trenches on the Western Front, Atglen, Schiffer. Renshaw, L. (2011), Exhuming Loss: Memory, Materiality, and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War, Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA. Ricoeur, P. (1986), Time and Narrative, Chicago, Chicago University Press. Ricoeur, P. (2006), Memory, History, Forgetting, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Rieger, B. (2005), Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890-1945, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Riegl, A. (1999), The Group Portraiture of Holland, Los Angeles, Getty Research Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. Roland, A. (1995), ‘Science, Technology and War’, Technology and Culture 36: S83–100. Rosenberg, A. (1895), A. von Werner, Bielefeld, Verlagen & Krafing. Roth, J. (1999), Right and Left, London, Granta. Rothe, E. (After 1918), Ehrendenkmal der Deutschen Armee und Marine, 1871-1918, Berlin, Deutscher National-Verlag AG. Salomon, E. V. (1931), The Outlaws, London, Jonathan Cape. Salomon, E. V. (1938), Das Buch vom Deutschen Freikorpskämpfer, Berlin, Wilhelm Limpert-Verlag. Samuels, M. (1995), Command or Control? Command, Training and Tactics in the British and German Armies, 1888-1918, London, Frank Cass. Schama, S. (1996), Landscape and Memory, New York, Vintage. Schauwecker, F. (1928), So War der Krieg: 200 Kampfaufnehmen aus der Front, Berlin, Frundsberg. Schivelbusch, W. (2003), The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery, London, Granta. Schmitt, C. (1986), Political Romanticism, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Schmitt, C. (2005), Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Schmitt, C. (2007), The Concept of the Political, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Schultz, E., and E. Jünger. (1933), Die Veränderte Welt: eine Bilderfibel Unserer Zeit, Breslau, W. G. Korn. Schultz, M., S. Maguire, A. Langley and H. Tsoukas, eds (2002), Constructing Identity in and around organisations, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Schwartz, F. J. (1996), The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture Before the First World War, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press. Showalter, D. (1983), ‘Army and Society in Imperial Germany: the Pains of Modernisation’, Journal of Contemporary History 18: 583–618. Showalter, D. (1994), ‘The Political Soldiers of Bismarck's Germany: Myths and Realities’, German Studies Review 17: 59–77.

216

References

Showalter, D. (2000), ‘From Deterrence to Doomsday Machine: The German Way of War, 1890-1914’, The Journal of Military History 64: 679–710. Siebrecht, C. (2012), ‘Portrayals and Concepts of Martial Masculinity from the Wars of Liberation to the First World War in Germany’, Journal of War and Culture Studies 5: 261–75. Siegfried, S. L. (1993), ‘Naked History: The Rhetoric of Military Painting in Postrevolutionary France’, The Art Bulletin 75: 235–58. Sillars, S. (2005), Visualisation in Popular Fiction, 1860-1960: Graphic Narratives, Fictional Images, London, Routledge. Simmons, S. (1998), ‘Grimaces on the Walls: Anti-Bolshevist Posters and the Debate about Kitsch’, Design Issues 14: 16–40. Simmons, S. (1999), ‘Advertising Seizes Control of Life: Berlin Dada and the Power of Advertising’, Oxford Art Journal 22: 121–46. Soldan, G. (1928), Der Weltkrieg im Bild. Originalaufnahmen des Kriegs- Bild- und Filmamtes aus der modernen Materialschlacht, Berlin, Berlin-Oldenburg. Sorel, G. (1999), Reflections on Violence, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Stone, D. (2002), First Reich: Inside the German Army during the War with France, 187071, London, Brassey’s. Tatlock, L., ed. (2010), Publishing Culture and the ‘Reading Nation’: German book history in the Long Nineteenth Century, Rochester, Camden House. Taubert, O. (1894–1901), Die Schlachtfelder von Metz, Berlin, Alexander Duncker. Theweleit, K. (2003), Male Fantasies, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Thoms, R., and S. Pochanke. (2001), Handbuch zur Geschichte der Deutschen Freikorps, Munchen, MTM Verlag. Tilmans, K., F. van Vree and J. Winter (2010), Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press. Torp, C., and S. O. Müller, eds (2011), Imperial Germany Revisitied: Continuing Debates and New Perspectives, New York, Berghahn. Trachtenberg, A. (1990), Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to Walker Evans, New York, Hill and Wang. Travers, M. (1982), German Novels on the First World War and Their Ideological Implications, 1918-1933, Stuttgart, H-D Heinz. Union Deutsche. (1885), Illustrierte Geschichte des Krieges, 1870/71, Stuttgart, Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft. Varley, K. (2008), Under the Shadow of Defeat: The War of 1870-71 in French Memory, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan Verhay, J. (2000), The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth, and Mobilization in Germany, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Virilio, P. (2000), War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, London and New York, Verso. Walzer, M. (1977), Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, new York, Basic Books.

References

217

Warnke, M. (1994), Political Landscape: The Art History of Nature, London, Reaktion Books. Watson, A. (2005), ‘“For Kaiser and Reich”: The Identity and Fate of the German Volunteers, 1914-1918’, War in History 12(1): 44–74. Watt, R. M. (2003), The King’s Depart: The Tragedy of Germany; Versailles and the German Revolution, London, Phoenix. Wawro, G. (2003), The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 18701871, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Weisberg, G. P. (1982), The European Realist Tradition, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Weizman, E. (2012), Hollow Land: Isreal’s Architecture of Occupation, London, Verso. Werneburg, B., and C. Phillips. (1992), ‘Ernst Jünger and the Transformed World’, October 62: 42–64. Wertsch, J. V. (2002), Voices of Collective Remembering, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Wetzel, D. (2013), A Duel of Nations: Germany, France and the Diplomacy of the War of 1870-1871. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press. Whalen, R. (1984), Bitter Wounds, German Victims of the Great War, 1914-1919, Ithaca, Cornell University Press. White, H. (1975), Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press. Wilkes-Tucker, A., W. Michaels and N. Zeit. (2012), War Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and its Aftermath, New Haven, Yale University Press. Winter, J. (2000), Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Winter, J. (2006), Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century, New Haven, Yale University Press. Wolin, R. (1991), The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Woods, R. (1996), The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic, Basingstoke, Macmillan. Woodward, R., and T. W. W. N Jenkings. (2007), ‘Remembering and Accounting for Conflicts: the Experience of UK Ex-Service Personnel and the Use of Personal Photographs’, Constructions of Conflict: Transmitting Memories of the Past in European Historiography, conference organised by the Modern European Ideologies, Conflict and Memory (MEICAM) research group. Swansea University. Wright, P. (2000), Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine, London, Faber. Ziemann, B. (2013), Contested Commemorations: Republican War Veterans and Weimar Political Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Zimmerman, M. E. (1990), Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Zylinska, J. (2002), The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age, London, Continuum.

218

Index Advancing in Bounds (Sprungweises Vorgehen)  154–5 aerial photography  125–37 aesthetic experience  31, 32 Aesthetic of Horror, The (Bohrer)  31 aestheticization, of battlefield technology  203 n.4 agency photographers  171 Allegory of War (Colossus) (Menzel)  90 Alsace-Lorraine  91–9, 166, 193 n.6, 197 n.15 Alvensleben, C.  120–1, 148, 197 n.16 And Then it Pounded Up, Tank Next to Tank (Und dann stampfte es heran, Tank neben Tank-) (Dettman)  164 And where one no longer has any use for the masses  175 Anderson, B.  39 Apel, D.  21–2 armed conflict, representation in industrial age  1–5 art history and disciplinary conceits  19–23 myth and identity formation and  38–42 Nietzschean will and  29–33 romanticism and  36–7 truth telling and ethics of attention and  33–6 visual culture and intersections and  5–19 will to battle and being German and  23–8 Armistice  4, 27, 81, 83, 91, 109, 164, 166, 193 n.7, 197 n.15 ‘art as thought’  36 art history and disciplinary conceits  19–23 artillery, significance of  203 n.7 Assault Battalion Schmidt (Sturmbataillon Schmidt) (Impekoven)  91, 166 Assault on the Spicherer Berg (Werner)  70 atmospheric landscape art  88

attention, ethics of  33–6 attentiveness  53, 54, 62, 65, 68, 71, 179 disinterested  56 fragile  207 n.14 selfless  118, 187 Austria  49, 61, 146, 194 n.12 Austrian Prisoners after Leuthen (Menzel)  67, 68 authoritarian utopia  174 Avenue of Death, The (Die Todtenallee) (Taubert)  103–5, 134 Bachelard, G.  199 n.24 Baden  193 n.2 Barthes, R.  42–3 Batterie I vor Neubreifach (Müller)  151 Battle Against Spartacus Snipers (KochGotha)  169 Battle as Inner Experience (Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis) (Jünger)  30 Battle of Cambrai  205–6 n.8 Battle on the Lilaine, The (Roessler)  148 Battle Sketches on the Progress of the Assault on the Annaberg (Gefechtsskizzen vom fortschreitenden Angriff auf den Annaberg) (Roederer)  136 Battlefield seen from the South (Emelé)  97, 98, 102, 148 Battlefields Around Metz, The (Taubert)  83, 132–4 Battlefields of Metz, The (Taubert)  135 Bavaria  193 n.2 Bavarians in the Attack (Bayern im Angriffe) (Knötel)  153 Benjamin, W.  32, 33, 203 n.4 Bernhard, L.  205 n.7 Bessel, R.  40, 42, 195 nn.1–2 Billet Outside Paris (Werner)  43, 68–76 Bismarck, O.  52, 54–6, 166, 167, 193 nn.4, 6–7 Bloem, W.  164

220

Index

Blumenthal, L. G.  53, 56 Bohrer, K. H.  30, 31 Bon soir, messieurs!  73, 74, 96 Bond, B.  18 Bönker, D.  23 Book of German Freikorps Fighters, The (Das Buch vom deutschen Freikorpskämpfer) (Salomon)  135 Böss, M.  10, 11, 16 Boym, S.  77 breech-loading technology  146–8, 154 Brendamour, R.  149, 150 British tanks  205 n.6, 207 n.13 Bröger, K.  123–4 Brose, E.  152, 202 n.1, 205 nn.3–4, 206 n.12 Brühl, Count  58 Brunswick  193 n.2 Brütt, A.  52 Bucholz, A.  74, 193 n.5, 193–4 n.8 Bullock, M. P.  174, 178–9, 207 n.16 Butler, J.  15, 185 By the Sea (Heine)  69, 75 Campaign Planning with Augustus III, 1742 (Menzel)  58–9, 134 Camphausen, W.  147 Cavalry Regiment of the Baltic Home Defence Force (KavallerieAbteilung der Baltischen Landeswehr)  168, 169 Certeau, M. D.  92–3, 98, 105, 199 n.24 Charles VI, death of  194 n.12 ‘Chassepot effect’  146, 147, 153–4 Cheers of the Fathers, The (Das Hurrah der Väter) (Halke)  106–8 Chodowiecki, D.  65–7 Citino, R.  7–8, 184, 201 n.21 Civic Guards (Jacobsz)  61 Clarke, I.  142, 203 n.2 Clausewitz, C.  23–5, 27, 30, 75, 136, 193 n.5 cold mode of perception, of lens  129 collective belonging  197 n.14 collective coherence  35 collective memory  38, 39 collective narrative  175 collective will  36 combat and landscape politics  125–32 mapping  132–7

commemoration  9–10, 12–13 Completely Destroyed English Tank (Vollkommen zestörter englischer Tank)  161, 162 Confino, A.  9 containment metaphor  38, 40 contemporary (wartime) sketch  98–9 Copse 125 (Das Wäldchen 125) (Jünger)  30, 32, 157 Council of War at Versailles  195 n.18 Council of War at Versailles (Kriegsrat in Versailles) (Werner)  53, 54–7 counter-insurgency operations  171 Counter-Insurgency Strategy (Die Strategie des Bürgerkrieges)  169 Craterfield in Flanders  130–2 Crown Prince’s Headquarters at Versailles, The (Stabswache des Kronprinzen in Versailles)  71, 72 cultural memory  13 cultural turn  5–7 Dangerous Moment, The (Jünger)  157, 158, 172, 174 Dawson, G.  14 Denmark  49, 146 Der Arbeiter: The Transformed World  174 Der Reichsbanner (newspaper)  123 derealization, of military engagement  126 Dettman, L.  20, 164 Dewitz, B.  207 n.19 Die Freie Welt (newspaper)  169 Distling  159–60, 163, 164, 205 n.6 dreamland  192 n.11, 199 n.4 Drumfire on the Chemin des Dames  127 East Prussians! (Ostpreußen!) (Zille)  86–8 ‘elastic defence in depth’  122, 123 Emelé, W.  97–8, 100, 101, 103, 107, 148, 198 n.19 English Tank  161 Erler, F.  166, 167 Estonia  206 n.11 Face of the World War, The (Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges) (Jünger)  2, 109, 110, 112, 114, 115, 128, 131, 161, 172, 201 n.19 Farewell (Schulz)  166

Index Field Artillery Under Fire (Röchling)  144–5, 164, 173, 208 n.20 5th Division Memorial at Flavigny, The (Denkmal der 5. Division bei Flavigny) (Pflugk-Harttung)  100, 101 Finnegan, T.  202 n.1 Firing Line Advances (Schauwecker)  118 First World War technology and combat  156–71 and Machine Age society, Jünger’s vision of  171–82 Five Weeks in a Balloon (Verne)  141 Fontane, T.  72–5 Forster-Hahn, F.  50, 65–7, 191 nn.3, 5, 194 n.9 Foucault, M.  199 n.24 Four Riflemen Near Vionville (Zimmer)  93, 95, 117, 119, 132, 134 France  49, 61, 134, 147 Franco-Prussian War (1870–1)  1–3. See also individual entries Francois, General  70 Frantzen, A.  86, 196 n.9 Frederick Addressing his Generals before the First Silesian War (Menzel)  60–2 Frederick and his Troops at Hochkirch (Menzel)  195 n.20 Frederick at the Battle of Torgau (Menzel)  64–6, 68, 70, 124 Frederick II  194 n.12 Frederick in Command During the Battle of Chotusitz (Menzel)  63 Frederick the Great  57–68, 195 n.16 Frederick the Great’s Address to his Generals Before the Battle of Leuthen (Menzel)  61, 62, 195 n.20 free will  35 Fricke, H.  131 friction, notion of  24 Friedrich, E.  21, 119 From the Great Tank Battle at Cambrai, 27 September to 8 October 1917 (Mattschaß)  163 front experience  108, 110, 115, 121, 123, 135, 189 myth of  41 Fronterlebnis phenomenon. See front experience

221

Gambetta, L.  203 n.9 Gardner, A.  72 Geertz, C.  33 German Assault Troops Reach the Wire Entanglement  117, 119, 121, 124, 132 German Fire on an Enemy Position on the Aisne  127 German way  7–8, 15, 28. See also individual entries Germanness  188 Geschichtsmalerei (history painting with a realist inflection)  194 n.11 Ghosts in Danzig (Spukgeister in Danzig) (Steinert)  168 Graf, D.  114–16 Group Portraiture of Holland, The (Das holländische Gruppenporträt)  34 Gully of the Alzon at Marsla-Tour, The (Die Alzonschlucht bei Mars-la-Tour) (Emelé)  99 Hachez, K.  89–91 Halbwachs M.  11, 38, 39 Halke  106, 199 nn.1–2 Hand Grenade Throwers on the Kemmel (Handgranatenwerfer auf dem Kemmel) (Graf)  114–16 Hartog, F.  18 Harvey, D.  199 n.24 haunting presence  18, 185 Hegel, F.  26 Heidegger, M.  31, 199 n.24, 208 n.24 Heigl, F.  131 Heine, H.  69 Heine, T. T.  85, 86, 88, 107, 196 n.3, 199 n.3 Help us to Victory! (Helft Uns Siegen!) (Erler)  166, 167 Herf, J.  4, 29, 32, 36, 115 Hesse-Darmstadt  193 n.2 Hetherington, K.  19 Hewitson, M.  6, 197–8 n.18 Hirsch, E.  19 historical fiction  13–14 Hobsbawm, E.  49, 192 n.1 Homeland is in Danger, The! (Die Heimat ist in Gefahr!) (Hachez)  89, 91 Howard, M.  23, 25, 56, 204 nn.9, 12 Hülsen, B.  136 human agency  19

222

Index

Humour Magazine War Album (KriegsAlbum der Lustigen Blätter)  158 Hüppauf, B.  110, 112–14, 116, 117, 119, 121, 126, 129, 131, 132, 157, 197 n.14 Hurley, F.  201 n.13 Hynes, S.  12 illustrated books  191 n.3 illustrated history  13–17, 30, 33, 39, 44, 49–51, 83, 91, 93, 102, 105, 106, 108, 109, 125, 143, 148, 157–8, 161, 170, 172, 174, 181, 184, 185, 186, 188, 193 n.2, 196 n.5, 198 n.19 Illustrated History of the War, 1870-71 (Illustrierte Geschichte des Krieges, 1870-71) (Röchling)  148 illustrated newspaper  191 n.1 illustrated texts  13 Impekoven, I.  91, 166, 167 Incident from the Battle of Torgau (Menzel)  93, 94 Ingold, T.  19 Instructions for Large Unit Commanders (Moltke)  24 Jacobsz, D.  61 Jones, N. H.  206 n.11 Jünger, E.  2, 4, 22, 25, 27–33, 36, 37, 44, 45, 109, 110, 113–19, 121, 124–8, 130–2, 135, 137, 143, 156, 157, 161, 166, 171–4, 176, 178–82, 187–8, 190, 191 n.7, 192 n.9, 200 nn.5, 7, 10, 201  nn.14–15, 19–20, 207 nn.15, 17, 208 nn.21, 23–4 Junior, R.  161 Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (Schwechten)  51 Kant, I.  36 Keisch, C.  72, 76 Kley, H.  164–5 Knötel, R.  153–4 Koch-Gotha, F.  169 Kohle, H.  194 n.11 Kramer, A.  17 Krupp, A.  146, 170, 205 nn.3, 5 Kugler, F.  2, 51, 57–8, 61–4, 66–7, 71, 83, 89, 93, 96, 134, 188, 194 n.12, 195 n.20 Kunath, R.  20, 195 n.19

Kursell, O.  166, 167 Küster, B.  197 n.12 Kwon, H.  18 landscape, representation of  19 landscape art  86–8 Lang, K.  50 Last Second, The (Die letzte Sekunda)  172, 173, 208 n.20 Latvia  206 n.11 Leerssen, J.  13, 14 Lefebvre, H.  199 n.24 legitimacy  9, 12, 17, 105, 109 moral  5, 10, 184 political  6, 50 Lethen, H.  206 n.10, 208 n.23 Life of Frederick the Great (Geschichte Friedrichs des Grossen) (Kugler; Menzel)  2, 27, 43, 49, 51, 58, 74, 89, 93, 95–7, 109, 119, 134, 135, 179, 188, 203 n.5 Lithuania  206 n.11 Lloyd, D.  196 n.5 Lorenz, C.  12 Lowenthal, D.  76 Machine Age  28–30, 114, 143, 146, 157, 166, 171–82 Man of Honour, A (Fontane)  72–3 Manual of German CounterInsurgency  170 mapping  132–7 Mars Ironing his Civilian Clothes (Kley)  164–5 Martin, M.  191 n.1 Mattschaß, E.  163–4, 178 Maupassant, G.  194 n.15 mechanical human perception, notion of  125 Mecklenburg  193 n.2 Meissonier, J.-L.  147 Memorial to the German Army and Navy, 1871-1918  162, 178 memory work  38–9 Menzel, A.  2, 9, 25, 43, 51, 69–72, 74, 77, 83, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96, 124, 134, 164, 188, 194 n.11, 195 n.20, 203 n.5 life of Frederick the Great and  57–68 Metz Battlefields, The (Taubert)  99, 100, 101, 105, 137

Index military sublime  31, 36, 37, 64, 83, 94, 104, 113, 116, 118, 134, 145, 149, 164, 174, 181, 187, 189 Mitchell, W. J. T.  84, 199 n.24 mnemonic community  16–17, 185 modernism  4, 9, 20, 29, 32, 33, 45, 183, 190 modernity  8, 20, 27, 75, 113, 125, 126, 131, 143, 149, 156, 161, 191 n.5 political  23 technological  30, 45, 147–8, 152, 157, 167, 169, 171, 175, 178, 191 n.3, 200 n.6 Moltke, H.  24, 35, 52, 54, 56, 57, 147, 193 nn.4–5, 7 Moltke and his Staff Outside Paris (Moltke mit seinem Stabe vor Paris) (Werner)  147 moral commitment  8 moral component  25, 28, 30, 32, 45, 105, 141, 143, 148, 152, 153, 157, 158, 168, 171, 186, 187, 189, 203 n.4 moral content  61, 62, 68 moral elements  25 moral legitimacy  5, 10, 184 moral superiority  22, 27, 44, 124, 135, 144, 170, 190 Moses, J.  191 n.4 Mosse, G.  26, 42, 191 n.6, 193 n.2 Müller, H.  151 myth and identity formation  38–42 Myth of the War  12, 42 Napoleon III at the Battle of Solferino, 1859 (Meissonier)  147 narrative  16 closed  17 Navaro-Yashin, Y.  18, 19 Needle Gun (Zündnadelgewehr)  146, 149, 155 Nevin, T. R.  31, 207 n.15 new art history  9 New Year’s Wish 1915 (Heine)  85, 88, 107 Nietzsche, F.  29–30 Nietzschean will  29–33 non-ordinary temporality  31 Nora, P.  10, 14 object poster (Sachplakat)  160 Oertzen, F.  168 Olin, M.  34–5, 53

223

On an axis of advance (Junior)  161 On Pain (Über den Schmerz) (Jünger)  30 On War (Clausewitz)  23 Only if You Stay Calm (Nur die Ruhe Kann Es Machen) (Distling)  159–60 Operation Order  136 Order of Battle (ORBAT) table  198–9 n.23 Orleans battle  199 n.2 Outstanding Quality Precision Double and Triple -Barrelled Shotguns  151 patriotic history  28 performativity and identity  13–16, 185 Pflugk-Harttung, J.  2, 3, 83, 93, 94, 97, 100, 109, 146, 148, 152, 153, 188, 201 n.17, 203 n.7 Phillips, C.  174 Phosphor (magazine)  166 photoreconnaissance  129, 131 Picabia, F.  151 Picture from Postwar Berlin, A  169–71 Pillbox 17 (Bröger)  123, 135 place and space, relationship between  92 Pocketbook of Tanks (Heigl)  131 Pocock, J.  22 Podbielski, E.  53, 54 Poe, E. A.  31 Polish Village Photographed from an Aircraft  128, 132 political agency  185 political legitimacy  6, 50 political order  37 popular history  2, 4, 5, 14–17, 28, 30, 32, 38, 39, 42, 43, 49, 58, 83, 92, 95, 96, 105–8, 113, 114, 121, 124, 135, 148, 157, 159, 168, 172, 180, 184, 186–8 Porter, P.  5 Powerlessness of the Masses, The (Die Ohnmacht der Massen) (Jünger)  174, 176–7 psychological refinement  194 n.11 Rang, F. C.  32 Rawling, B.  206 n.12 reactionary modernists  4, 32 reader-viewers  2, 4, 11, 13–15, 17, 22, 23, 31, 33–5, 43, 44, 62, 64, 67, 68, 70, 84, 86, 93–100, 102, 116, 119–20,

224

Index

125, 127–9, 131, 134–5, 142, 151, 172, 178, 184–7, 189, 199 n.23 reading nation  191 n.2 Reichsgründung  3 Reminiscence (Reminiszenz)  158 Remus, S.  201 n.12 Renshaw, L.  18 Ricoeur, P.  17 Rieger, B.  143 Riegl, A.  34, 35, 53, 54, 56, 61, 187, 207 n.14 Rigney, A.  13 Robida, A.  203 n.2 Röchling, C.  144–5, 147–9, 164, 173, 176, 203 n.4, 205 n.4 Roessler  148–9, 154 Roland, A.  19–20 romanticism  36–7 political  37 Roon, Albrecht von  52, 54, 56 Rosenberg, A.  69 Rothe, E.  162–3 Salomon, E.  81, 82, 135, 137 salon culture  69, 72–7, 194 n.15 Samuels, Martin  122 Saxony  193 n.2 Scates, B.  18 Schadow, J.  65, 66 Schama, S.  199 n.26 Scharnhorst, Gerhard von  35 Schasler, M.  67, 71 Schauwecker, F.  22, 109–11, 113–16, 118–21, 124, 125, 127, 128, 135, 200 n.9 Scheffel, V.  135–6 Schilling, E.  81, 82, 84, 108 Schivelbusch, W.  192 n.11, 199–200 n.4 Schmitt, C.  36, 37, 187, 192 n.8, 203 n.4 Schnabel, F.  191 n.4 Schubert, F.  69–71, 75, 76 Schultz, E.  2 Schulz, W.  166 Schuster, P.-K.  8 Schwartz, F.  160 Schwechten, F.  51 self-awareness  34, 35, 54, 59, 62 self-consciousness  35, 71, 108, 167, 172, 179, 189 self-esteem  35, 59, 60, 65

Showalter, D.  144, 147, 152, 193 n.6, 195 n.17, 203 n.8, 204 n.13 Simmons, S.  84, 195 n.2, 205 n.7 Simplicissimus (magazine)  81, 83, 85, 195–6 n.3, 204 n.2 social identities  185 social memory  10–12, 183–5 social myth  41 social utopia  180 soldier-farmers  81 Solnit, A.  74 Sorel, G.  41 Soviet Russia  206 n.11 spatial stories  92 Spirit of An Age  8 St. Clair, W.  191 n.2 Staalmeesters, The (van Rijn)  35, 54 Steinert, W.  168 Storm of Steel (Jünger)  32, 118 Street Battles in Berlin  171, 207 n.14 Stukenbrok, A.  151 subjectivity  10, 13, 16, 53, 184 of photography  22 subordination, notion of  35 Surrender Negotiations at Donchery (Werner)  53 Taking Counsel at the Map Table (Brütt)  52 Tatlock, L.  2, 191 n.2 Taubert, O.  36, 83, 104, 105, 134, 198 n.22 landscape prints of  99–103 technological modernity  30, 45, 147–8, 152, 157, 167, 169, 171, 175, 178, 191 n.3, 200 n.6 technology and combat  141–55 Technology Draws the Face of the World (Die Technik zeichnet das Gesicht der Erde) (Jünger; Schultz)  178, 180 Terborch, G.  56 Teutonic themes  158, 165–8, 199 n.3 Theweleit, K.  206–7 n.12 Thomson, A.  16 Thoughts on Command (Moltke)  24, 57 Thus was the War (So war der Krieg) (Schauwecker)  109, 111 Tillich, P.  31 ‘token of spent violence’  72, 77, 131, 171 topography, representations of  199 n.25 Trachtenberg, A.  72

Index Transformed World, The (Die Veränderte Welt) (Jünger; Schultz)  2, 28, 157, 158, 172, 174, 178, 179, 190 Travers, Martin  41–2 trench warfare  106–24 Troeltsch, E.  192 n.11 truth telling and ethics of attention  33–6 21cm Bronze Mortar (Brendamour)  149, 150, 159 Ulk (magazine)  106 Unemployed under Horses Hooves (Arbeitslose unter Pferdehufen)  174 unquiet closure  18, 185 Unquiet Western Front, The (Bond)  18 Uprising in Metropolis (Aufstand in Metropolis)  174, 175 van Rijn, R.  35, 54 Van Santen  84 Varley, K.  196 n.6 Verne, J.  141 vertical photography. See aerial photography View of the Vionville Battlefield (Blick auf d. Schlachtfeld v. Vionville) (Taubert)  102, 103 Vionville battle  84, 93, 197 n.17 Vionville Battlefield, The (Das Schlachtfeld von Vionville) (Taubert)  102, 103 Virilio, P.  125, 126, 202 n.1 Voights-Rhetz, K.  198 n.19 Walzer, M.  6, 7 War Against War! (Friedrich)  21, 119 War and Cinema (Virilio)  125 War and Victory 1870-71 (Krieg und Sieg, 1870-71) (Pflugk-Harttung)  2, 3, 40, 83, 93, 95–8, 100, 101, 105, 106, 109, 119, 124, 132, 134, 136, 137, 142, 143, 148, 149, 151–4, 158, 160, 170, 178, 188, 190, 203 n.5, 204 n.10 War and Warrior (Jünger)  32, 33 war graves  103–5 war of material (Materialschlacht)  156–8, 160, 166, 204 n.2

225

war photography, significance of  71 Warnke, M.  88, 89, 199 n.3 Watson, A.  15 Wawro, G.  50, 134, 144 Werneburg, B.  174 Werner, A.  9, 43, 51, 59, 60, 147, 194 n.14 and command decision  51–7 outside Paris  68–77 Wertsch, J.  16, 17 Whalen, R.  202 n.22 Where is the Germans’ Fatherland? (Schilling)  81, 82, 84, 86, 108 White, H.  14, 185 Wilde  31 Wilhelm, F.  53 Wilhelmine accounts  3–5, 11, 25, 29, 32, 33, 188, 190 Wilhelmine conservatism  4, 5 will to battle  29–34, 37, 40–1, 44, 45, 65, 69, 70, 103, 109, 119, 121, 124, 141, 143–5, 154, 157, 164, 166, 171, 173, 176, 178, 179, 185, 203 n.4 and being German  23–8 collective  36, 114, 118 Williams, R.  86 Winter, B.  197 n.12 Winter, J.  12–13, 16 Woods, R.  20–2, 200–1 n.11 Woodward, R.  38–9 Work on a Conveyor Belt (Arbeit am laufenden Band)  175 Worker, The (Der Arbeiter) (Jünger)  29, 30, 31, 157, 208 n.23 World in Flames, The (Bloem)  164 World War in Pictures, The (Der Weltkrieg im Bild)  161 Wright, P.  205 n.5 Wundt, W.  34–5 Württemberg  193 n.2 Zerubavel, E.  16 Ziemann, B.  1, 17 Zille, H.  86–90, 107 Zimmer, E.  93–5, 117, 121, 132, 134 Zimmerman, M. E.  30, 31

226

227

228