![]() They often facilitate a deeper insight into the World War beyond factual knowledge. These paintings are important or relevant because they had a major impact on contemporaries, an impact the viewer of today still senses. Above all-according to Hamann -“the mass, the quantum of suffering that such a war has brought on the world cannot even be intimated by condensing it onto the narrow space of a picture” (in Jürgens-Kirchhoff 1993, 18).īut this was precisely what visual artists from a number of countries, almost without exception combatants and veterans, were attempting as they created important works-works they were already making during the war as well as in the 1920s and 1930s. It could only display a vast field, ruins, vapors, clouds, and sky. A representational portrait of a large battlefield would be unable to depict human beings at all. Modern battle, Hamann wrote, had become impossible to portray. ![]() A clear answer was provided in 1917 by the art historian Richard Hamann. The French writer Léon Bloy also asked himself, after visiting an exhibition of war paintings, how one could express the reality of this war “without making oneself ridiculous and without becoming a liar” (Robichon 1994, 296). This idea strikes me as downright comical, even if I think about Delacroix, we must do this completely differently, completely differently! (Marc 1989, 102–103) It is incredible that there were times in which one represented war by painting campfires, burning villages, falling horses or riders on patrol and the like. But how should the unprecedented and initially incomprehensible experiences in the industrialized war of materials be dealt with and expressed artistically: the mass killings and mass deaths, the new demands imposed on perception and behavior induced by the long-range artillery rounds, machine gun deployments, and drumfire, by gas, grenades, aerial bombs, and the first tank attacks? (For a survey, see Jürgens-Kirchhoff ( 1993), Cork ( 1994), Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn ( 2013).) In 1914 many of them had volunteered enthusiastically to go to war, a war from which they hoped to experience a purification and also a destruction of societies they regarded as outdated, decrepit, and suffocating, and from which they expected the birth of a “New World of Art” and, even more, of a “New Age.” Soon after the turn of the century, the avant-gardists had already commenced with their artistic “fragmentation of reality” (in the words of Gottfried Benn) and were creating a new kind of art both in form and content. Aldington describes here one of the answers to the problem that was inevitably posed for the European avant-garde artists immediately after the outbreak of the war. He destroys both of his pre-war drawings, along with an old self-portrait. Although he sees “the ruined village” and “the broken desecrated ground” in front of him and hears “the ‘claaang’ of the heavies dropping reverberantly into M-,” “his hand and brain” fail him (Aldington 2013, 315–316). In his 1929 war novel Death of a Hero, the English writer Richard Aldington depicts at one point how his protagonist-a soldier stationed on the Western Front but a modern painter in civilian life-attempts in vain to sketch a military engagement he once experienced, a combat operation that included heavy artillery shelling, a long-lasting barrage of gunfire, and a gas grenade attack. ![]() The written recollections and paintings of the gas warfare played a significant role here. Particularly at the end of the 1920s, a wave of publications mainly in England and Germany displayed a renewed public interest in the preceding war. The second part of this article addresses the public battle over the interpretation and collective remembrance in the war’s aftermath. Nearly all of the authors and painters condemned the waste and pointlessness of the ongoing or past war, but their vision of the future often differed according to their national background. There are striking similarities in their representation of the gas war: the impersonality of this enemy, the feeling of helplessness in gas attacks, the shock of seeing one’s comrades “guttering, choking, drowning” and not least the exposure to an infernal landscape. ![]() This article examines the literary and artistic topics and forms used to express this ordeal by German, British and French writers, poets and painters, the majority of whom had fought in the war. The gas attacks during the First World War stood for a new kind of warfare and shaped the soldiers’ experience of living through an apocalypse never before imagined. ![]()
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