For the novelist Henry James the outbreak of the First World War represented not merely the breakdown of international relations but also the dawning of an event so cataclysmic that it repudiated the cult of progress that had propelled the previous century. On 5 August 1914, the day after Britain declared war on Germany and any hopes of a limited war had been brought to an end, James wrote to his friend Howard Sturgis:
The plunge of civilisation into the abyss of blood and darkness ... is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we had supposed the world to be with whatever abatement gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for meaning is too tragic for my words.1
Two days later James wrote to another friend of ‘our murdered civilisation’.2 Then, on 10 August, he penned a sorrowful and somewhat self-pitying letter to the Welsh novelist Rhoda Broughton:
Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers, and I’m sick beyond cure to have lived on to see it. You and I, the ornaments of our generation, should have been spared this wreck of our belief that through the long years we had seen civilisation grow and the worst become impossible. The tide that bore us along was then all the while moving to this grand Niagara – yet what a blessing we didn’t know it. It seems to me to undo everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way.3
Before the trenches of the Western Front had been dug, before chlorine gas and unrestricted submarine warfare, before the Somme and Verdun, the novelist understood what the politicians at that point did not: that this great war was a great rupture. Henry James was later to recover some of his optimism and even reassemble his sense of artistic purpose, but his initial assessment was prescient. Only when all predictions of easy victories and of armies returning home by Christmas had been proved wrong did a generation of European statesmen – members of one of the most educated and privileged elites in history – see what Henry James had recognised in the very first days of the war.
The barbarism of 1914 and the years that followed were a devastating rebuttal of the theory of inevitable and irreversible progress that had infused the intellectual atmosphere of Europe in the nineteenth century. One effect of the cult of progress was that it had externalised savagery and barbarism. Africa, in particular, had become what the novelist Chinua Achebe later called ‘the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilisation’.4 The totemic power of the African masks Picasso viewed at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in 1907 stemmed not just from their radical and dynamic form but also from the fact that they were symbols of the supposed inner savagery of a continent that Europeans had come to regard as the ‘Heart of Darkness’: Europe’s mirror image. It was for such reasons that in the years leading up to 1914 African masks became objects of enormous curiosity. In 1915, on the Western Front, a new type of warfare, industrial and total, exposed the countenance of Europe’s own latent barbarism. The gas mask, newly invented and rapidly evolving, became the face of that underlying inner savagery.
In the hands of the German painter Otto Dix, perhaps the greatest of the many unofficial war artists, the gas mask became a symbol for the historical rupture that his doomed generation was destined to witness. In 1914 Dix was one of the millions of young European men who enthusiastically rushed to enlist at the outbreak of war.5 He is said to have marched into battle with the Bible and a book of Nietzsche’s philosophy in his backpack. For three years he fought and subsisted in the mud and the slime of the trenches, serving on both the Western and the Eastern Fronts. For some of his time he served in a machine-gun unit, wielding the ultimate industrial weapon – the literal fusion of the gun and the machine. It was the weapon that turned the age of the machine, which had begun in the mills and factories of England in the eighteenth century, against the bodies of its inventors’ great-grandchildren. It was a weapon that, until then, had only been used on the supposedly uncivilised peoples of the colonies, returned to its home continent.
Throughout his war service Dix produced hundreds of sketches. Some were drawn directly on the many postcards he dispatched home. His images graphically recorded what the new weapons did to flesh and bone. He drew the broken faces and decaying putrid corpses. He chronicled in detail how industrial warfare transformed the soldier from warrior to victim, how it de-skilled combat, making it random and chaotic. Dix wrote of the duty he felt to ‘bear witness’ to the war, yet simultaneously he served with enthusiasm. During the war and afterwards he believed that, for all its horrors, the conflict delivered experiences and insights that would have remained beyond his reach in normal civilian life. In old age he admitted:
The war was a horrible thing but there was something tremendous about it, too. I didn’t want to miss it at any price. You have to have seen human beings in this unleashed state to know what human nature is. I need to experience all the depths of life for myself, that’s why I go out, and that’s why I volunteered.6
Although his work was used by anti-war campaigners, Dix himself was never a pacifist.
In 1924, during a year of anniversaries and international remembrance, Dix produced his print cycle Der Krieg, a series of fifty-one images that offer a fragmentary narrative of the lives of the front-line soldiers and that has been compared to Goya’s great series The Disasters of War. In Dix’s work isolated traumatic incidents were set alongside moments of everyday drudgery. In the most famous, Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor (Storm Troops Advance under Gas Attack), five German soldiers are depicted in the moment of a frontal attack on an enemy trench. Their faces are concealed by the primitive gas masks of the earlier war years. The landscape through which they emerge is otherworldly, rendered opaque by smoke and toxic gas; only the blasted stumps of trees are visible through the gloom.
85. One of the fifty prints from Otto Dix's portfolio Der Krieg showing storm troopers advancing on an enemy position. Although Dix sketched while the trenches, Der Krieg was based on the memories of war that haunted him in the years after.
Dix presented the barbarism of the front in stark and brutal honesty, but without judgement or political intent. His was the artistic voice of a man who remained proud to have been a soldier and determined that the sufferings of his comrades be remembered. But, for all his Nietzschean lust for experience, he was also a man who wrote of his art as a form of exorcism of the war from his dreams and visions.7
Critically, Der Krieg was based not on the sketches Dix had drawn during the war but largely on the memories that had troubled him in the years since.
His ultimate statement on his years in the trenches was the painting known as Triptychon Der Krieg. It was begun in 1929 and slowly refined until its completion in 1932, with multiple alterations being made and certain visual elements abandoned as the work become ever simpler and ever more stark. It was inspired by the extraordinarily rich tradition of the triptych in German Renaissance art and is loaded with religious iconography. The narrative plays out from daybreak to dusk, and the action moves from left to right. In the left-hand panel German soldiers march through the smoke, under a blood-red morning sky, towards the battlefield. Their steel helmets glint as they catch the light. The central panel, the most powerful and the most laden with allegory, presents the wasteland of the Western Front, and makes reference to an earlier work, The Trench (1923).
The front line, and the war-torn land around it, appear as a great putrid scar of mud and decaying flesh, cut across the face of Europe. The figures of the dead dominate the panel. The skeletal form of a dead soldier leers over the battlefield. Another, caught on the barbed wire, is a nod to the Crucifixion, except his body is inverted. The ghastly, bullet-riddled legs, a visual quotation of the Christ figure in Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1516), point upwards. An outstretched hand has a bullet hole through his palm.
In 1917 the Isenheim Altarpiece had been transported from the formerly French province of Alsace-Lorraine to Munich and there became the subject of enormous levels of fascination and nationalistic passion. Its return to France by a defeated Germany in 1919 added to the sacred aura that surrounded Grünewald’s masterpiece, symbolic both of the human cost of the war and of Germany’s defeat.8 The living figures in the central panel of Dix’s triptych lurk anonymously at the back of the trench or huddle under corrugated iron sheeting wearing gas masks, the war’s first prosthesis. In the right-hand panel the results of battle are made manifest. A soldier drags a wounded comrade from the battlefield. His face is that of Dix himself, a self-portrait fixed with a traumatised and haunted expression. At his own feet Dix painted another survivor, who crawls over the torn and broken bodies of his dead comrades.
86. The monumental triptych The War (Der Krieg), held at Galerie Neue Meister in Dix’s home town of Dresden, is the artist’s ultimate statement on the war. Three years in the making, it recalls and subverts the Medieval German tradition of triptychs and altarpieces.
The triptych was exhibited in 1932 to little comment, and then placed in storage. A year later, after the passing of the infamous Enabling Act in March 1933, the Nazis began their assault on what they regarded as ‘degenerate art’. Otto Dix, despite his war service and his enormous talent, was dismissed from his teaching post at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. Paintings by Dix were among those later destroyed by the Nazis.
The enemies of Otto Dix, the soldiers of the victorious Entente powers, whom he had faced across no man’s land for three years, were awarded a service medal at the end of the war. The soldiers, sailors and airmen who survived the carnage each received the Inter-Allied Victory Medal, almost 6 million of which were struck in bronze. On the front was the winged figure of Victory, an allusion to classical mythology. On the reverse was a simple inscription encircled by laurels. Despite the mechanised slaughter that had killed 22 million people, brought down ancient empires and bankrupted nations, the inscription read, with no sense of irony: ‘The Great War for Civilisation 1914–1918’.
