Kollwitz and Dix: War

Benjamin H.D. Buchloh

In August 1924, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the beginning of World War I, numerous commemorative events were staged in Weimar, Germany, generating a constellation of important graphic and photographic works that are of particular interest for our attempts to trace political communication in the print culture of that period. The first of these events was Käthe Kollwitz’s portfolio entitled Krieg (War). The artist had begun Krieg as a series of etchings and lithographs in 1918–1919 and had finally completed the project as a group of woodcuts, first exhibited in the fall of 1923 and again in 1924.1 The second, and by now far more notorious event of commemorative print culture, was the publication of Otto Dix’s cycle Der Krieg (The War), consisting of fifty extremely complex prints combining drypoint, etchings, and aquatint. Dix produced the technically and iconographically bewildering portfolio in 1923–1924. His publisher, the dealer Karl Nierendorf, who inaugurated the cycle’s exhibition in Berlin, had encouraged the artist to complete the series in time for the Great War’s tenth anniversary on August 1, 1924, undoubtedly also in the hope of supporting the opposition against revanchist ideologies emerging in the Weimar Republic. Both Dix’s and Kollwitz’s pacifist portfolios were exhibited together in 1924 in Ernst Friedrich’s Krieg dem Kriege Museum (War against War Museum) in Berlin, an institution founded in 1923 by the anarcho-pacifist Friedrich, who soon expanded his own antiwar agitation by publishing a book also titled Krieg dem Kriege (War against War). Nowadays the least known of the three pacifist publications, its extensive photographic documentation of the horrors of WWI appears to have struck a resounding chord in its day. The book sold seventy thousand copies in the first few months after its release, and it was republished in ten further editions through 1930, becoming one of the most efficient instruments of anti-military propaganda in Weimar Germany.2 Even Dix appears to have drawn on the book’s photographic reportage. The fortuitous constellation of these three components in one exhibition defined one of the most important public protests against the forces that, in violation of the terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty, were voicing revanchist and protofascist requests for the remilitarization of the German state. But this constellation also conjoined three fundamentally different practices of political image production and thus offers an exceptional opportunity to reflect upon the seemingly incompatible strategies and differences between graphic and photographic techniques that has challenged all politically active artists in Europe since the 1920s. And since these differences would again define similar debates concerning the tasks and tools of public criticism and political opposition in Mexican print culture from the mid1930s onward, to distill the specific features distinguishing Dix, Friedrich, and Kollwitz is of particular importance for our historical project.

As the biographically based literature on Kollwitz has told us over and over again, the iconography of her portfolio traces trauma, loss, and mourning after she had to confront the death of her son Peter. While undoubtedly a major motivation, my hope is to develop a reading that complements the foregrounding of biography in order to understand the significance of the fundamental changes in Kollwitz’s processes of printmaking. Kollwitz’s portfolio Krieg was defined by the consequential, almost programmatic deskilling of all of her previous achievements as an eminent printmaker and graphic artist. To respond to the traumatic experience of the war, the artist had to sacrifice her exceptional competences as a master of iconic representation and of highly differentiated printing techniques, so that her intense, primitivizing, figurative reductions could become readable as inscriptions of loss and as acts of mourning.3 Kollwitz herself emphasized how important—and excruciatingly difficult—the work on the War portfolio had been for her, writing to an artist friend, Erna Krüger, at the end of 1922, “I have now almost completed the series of woodcuts on the subject of war. Nobody would ever imagine that these seven woodcuts of medium size are the results of many years of work, but that is actually the case. They imply a confrontation with the part of life comprised by the years 1914–1918 and these four years were indeed hard to comprehend.”4 In 1919, the very year Kollwitz rediscovered the woodcut, Dix had just executed his last series of expressionist woodcuts in his portfolio Neun Holzschnitte (Nine woodcuts) before abandoning this particular technique of the graphic crafts altogether. 5 In extreme contrast, in an almost operatic resuscitation of the skills of the presumably lost arts of advanced intaglio printmaking, Dix’s print cycle Der Krieg now confronted the visitors to the exhibition at the Krieg dem Kriege Museum (and no less us as contemporary spectators) with the dialectical opposite of Kollwitz’s strategies. Mobilizing all of his artisanal and technical resources, Dix uses a range of intaglio techniques, etching on soft and hard ground, aquatint, and drypoint—apparently, as Frank Whitford observes, to exploit “the corrosive qualities of aquatint to suggest physical and moral decay.”6 Already a year before, in his painting Schützengraben (The Trench), the utter devastation of the human physiognomy and physiology had been the subject of one of Dix’s major post-WWI achievements and one of the greatest scandals his work would ever provoke.7

The histrionics of Dix’s reskilling strike us all the more if we remember that only four years before, in 1920, the artist had been one of the key figures in the Dada Messe in Berlin. Displaying some of the most aggressive assemblage and collage paintings of the moment, such as Kriegskrüppel: 45% Erwerbsfähig (War Cripples: 45% Fit for Service, 1920) and Kartenspielende Kriegskrüppel (Playing war cripples, 1920), Dix had not only ostentatiously signaled his decisive departure from the aesthetics of expressionism but also his strategy to follow the post-cubist—or, rather, post-WWI—mandate of extreme deskilling of artistic talent and artisanal mastery.

However, when returning to printmaking in 1924 for the production of the portfolio Der Krieg, Dix reversed the course of these avant-garde practices and literally, in a dramatic retour à l’ordre, shifted to the most elaborate combination of the classic intaglio print techniques, engaging and mobilizing the entire apparatus of the great printmakers of the past, from Rembrandt to Francisco Goya, for his graphic spectacles of traumatic memory, the very lineage that Kollwitz at the same moment had publicly decided to leave behind.

Dix now positioned himself as the heir to the eighty-two prints constituting Goya’s Los desastres de la guerra (The Disasters of War, 1810–1815), even paraphrasing Goya’s “I have seen this” when he claimed, affirming his status as an eyewitness, “no one else has seen the reality of war as I have.” The posture of the eyewitness is furthered by Dix’s captioning of his prints with references to exact locations and dates (e.g., Die Trümmer von Langemarck [The ruins of Langemark] and Verwundeter [Herbst 1916, Bapaume] (Wounded Man [Autumn 1916, Bapaume], p. 156) or with the phrases “seen on” or “found on.”8

In the deeply ambiguous cover sheet, carrying the dedication to his publisher Nierendorf, Dix depicts himself as a worn-out frontline soldier with an oversize machine gun in an image that hovers between self-deprecating caricature and heroic self-aggrandizement.9 But Dix had studied the horrors of industrial and chemical warfare not only at the front but also in the photographic collection of Friedrich’s Krieg dem Kriege Museum and its publications. Thus, Dix’s Der Krieg confronts us with a heretofore unknown fusion of two utterly opposed practices of image conception and production. On the one hand, the artist’s retour à l’ordre enacts a return to the hallowed grounds of European print culture and its elaborate skills, affirming the viability of these traditions of representing subjectivity, the innate telos of asserting the mastery of the maker as much as that of the depicted subjects. After all, the highlights of print culture from Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt to the beginning of the nineteenth century—with few exceptions—had ascertained and disseminated the formation and the image of European bourgeois subjectivity. In the prephotographic era they had equally served as the most reliable resources for bodily depiction, for modeling anthropomorphic volumes and physiognomic veracity, and for constructing spatial recessions and depths, even generating exceptional gradations of illusionary luminosity. Never before—at least not until the arrival of Goya—had these exquisite artistic and artisanal skills been tasked with rendering the potential annihilation or actual physiological and psychological destruction of that very subjectivity, the utter fragmentation of bodily wholeness, the putrefaction of flesh, the corrosion of skeletons.10

The conflicts represented in Dix’s paradoxical resuscitation of exquisite graphic skills become even more bewildering when we recognize to what extent the artist was synthesizing two utterly opposite epistemes of representation and technology, a dialectics that challenged Dix literally on all fronts. On the one hand, his extreme graphic depictions operate in the mode of the excessive verism of a Neue Sachlichkeit turned calamitous and traumatic. On the other hand, Dix confronts the epitome of recovered artistic and graphic virtuosity with an almost neutral photographic veracity. After all, the most advanced and differentiated examples of the graphic arts had emerged from the height of West European bourgeois culture and had celebrated the subject as both an agent of representation and as an image of representability. By contrast, the photographic image had evolved from a historical situation that was not only primarily defined in terms of industrial technology but whose sociopolitical agenda had been to record precisely those phenomena that had previously been omitted or had remained outside the field of depiction. This would include not only the social classes that had been previously excluded from political representation but also precisely those morphologies and spaces that had been inaccessible to sight, such as micro- and macroscopic structures, and, as in the case of war photography, the most concrete possible details of the chemical or machinic destruction of the body and the most horrific disfigurations of the subject itself. This collision, or rather fusion, of painterly verism and photographic veracity generates one of the cycle’s innate powers to utterly subvert if not detonate the melancholic appeasement that both the photographers of Neue Sachlichkeit (think of the photography of Albert Renger-Patzsch and August Sander) and its painters were about to establish as the new ruling parameters of representation in the first decade after WWI.

If one of the ambitions of Dix’s prints was to acquire the precision of the photographic image, then it is precisely photography’s neutralizing indifference that has caused critics such as Whitford to wonder whether Dix’s work actually even attempts to instigate protest and opposition against war.11 Ultimately, the histrionics of Dix’s high-strung performance of the medium’s potentials never allow us to resolve the question of what these images actually represent. Is it the renewed mastery of the medium, achieved at a moment of its all too obvious historical delegitimization? Or is it the mastery of the master’s personal trauma, trying to overcome the artist’s post-traumatic stress disorder with a hypertrophic mobilization of all the registers that graphic print culture once had held? Yet faced with the actual degree of murderous and machinic horror of war, these graphic skills paled and failed by comparison with the photographic accounts now widely available and disseminated. Dix’s retour à l’ordre is in fact also a retour à l’ordure, the prime paradox being that the chasm between the resuscitation of the mastery of the skills of the past, which had served as a principle of authoritarian reconstitution, now served to depict previously unknown and unseen degrees of destruction and horror, the actual physical and psychological annihilation of the subject.

Thus Dix’s ostentatious performance of reskilling also serves as the compensatory restitution of a deeply traumatized masculinity, as has been extensively argued by Paul Fox.12 But to what degree was Dix’s graphic project thus also a deeply gendered one? After all, its emphatic display confronts us not just with images of extreme horror and suffering. Dix also delivers images of a triumphant recuperation of the identity of the male artist. Yet not only the artist’s exceptional qualifications have been restored; perhaps more important, national trauma has been overcome, since the excellence of the work itself attests to the rebirth of the male artist and national culture.

In an astonishing essay, Kristie La fundamentally redefines the discussions that compared Kollwitz’s and Dix’s graphic cycles in response to WWI.13 La’s primary distinction focuses on the question of whether either artist actually reflected on the need to transcend the viewers’ scopic sadistic pleasure, increasingly understood as an apparently inevitable effect in the display of the suffering of others. Basing her arguments on more recent theorizations of trauma and the specular reception of the representation of traumatic experiences, La makes a convincing case that Kollwitz’s strategy of extreme iconic reductions in her primitivizing woodcuts served precisely to prevent these very effects of scopic pleasure in the depiction of suffering. Unlike Dix, Kollwitz not only refrained from any attempt to incorporate images of physiological destruction; she also prevented the spectacularization of suffering that Dix needed to compensate for the loss of his virility as a soldier and as an artist. Finally, Kollwitz also recognized that the process of mourning and social compassion could not be initiated or mediated by the display of the trauma of others but required precisely the opposite set of artistic practices—that is, the negation of supreme virtuosity, including her own, to correlate spectators of catastrophic loss and pain not in a display of refound mastery but within the spatial and iconic registers of loss itself.

1. Kollwitz’s portfolio was published by Emil Richter in Dresden in 1923 in several editions printed on different types of paper. The woodcuts are titled as follows: Das Opfer (The sacrifice), Die Freiwilligen (The volunteers), Die Eltern (The parents), Die Witwe I (The widow I), Die Witwe II, Die Mütter (The mothers), and Das Volk (The people). For discussions of the Krieg portfolio that were developed in comparison with Otto Dix’s Der Krieg (The War), see, in particular, Dora Apel, “‘Heroes’ and ‘Whores’: The Politics of Gender in Weimar Antiwar Imagery,” Art Bulletin 79, no. 3 (September 1997): 366–84; Claire Whitner, “Käthe Kollwitz and the Krieg Cycle,” in Käthe Kollwitz and the Women of War: Femininity, Identity, and Art in Germany during World Wars I and II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); and Ingrid Sharp, “Käthe Kollwitz’s Witness to War: Gender, Authority, and Reception,” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature and Culture 27 (2011): 87–107. My essay has benefited greatly from these works, even though I have attempted to complement the model of Kollwitz studies that is largely based on biographical references. As with the transition of her work on the image for Gedenkblatt für Karl Liebknecht (In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht), Kollwitz completed the Krieg portfolio only after having shifted to the woodcut medium. As Marchesano and Kirchner state, “in the War series, the style and composition change with each technique as if different print matrices—copper and stone, which she rejected, and finally wood—compelled Kollwitz to unearth their distinct languages. Taking advantage of the planar character of the woodblock, she materialized horrific despair as dense fields of black that dominate her compositions in the early 1920s. . . . With an economy of means, realized with extraordinary effort, her woodcuts quietly convey overwhelming physical and psychological oppression. ”

See Louis Marchesano and Natasha Kirchner, “Artistic Quality and Politics in the Early Reception of Kollwitz’s Prints,” in Käthe Kollwitz: Print, Process, Politics, ed. Louis Marchesano (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2020), 3. Kollwitz’s Krieg portfolio spans two crucial moments: the beginning and end of the Weimar Republic. In January 1919, she had just been elected the first woman to the Prussian Academy, which added to the public impact of the Krieg portfolio as a major pacifist manifestation. The portfolio’s indictment of those revanchist ideologies that glorified the experience of war and solicited a new nationalism to prepare for another war likely motivated the National Socialists to remove Kollwitz in 1933 from her position in the academy and to interdict any further exhibitions of her work.

2. Friedrich had refused military service, and his controversial Krieg dem Kriege Museum in Berlin presented photographs, postcards, and other war paraphernalia. The museum, already the site of assaults by members of the Freikorps before 1933, was closed immediately after the rise of the Nazis that year, and the publication and distribution of Krieg dem Kriege was instantly prohibited.

3. Ingrid Sharp describes the process: “For the cycle she chose the hard, practically grainless pearwood, working over several months at achieving a coherence of line, images, form and shape in order to communicate with her audience as directly and clearly as possible. . . . Unlike Dix’s sprawling account, Kollwitz’s woodcuts are lean, reducing all she has come to understand about the war into seven starkly iconic images. With none of the specificity or narrative detail of Dix’s account, unencumbered by particulars that would restrict them to a specific time or place, Kollwitz’s War with its generic titles and pared down expressive images makes claims to a more universal truth about the nature of war.” Sharp, “Käthe Kollwitz’s Witness to War,” 91.

4. See Käthe Kollwitz, Briefe der Freundschaft und Begegnungen (Munich: List Verlag, 1966), 136.

5. Dix’s last woodcut portfolio, Acht Holzschnitte (Eight woodcuts), was conceived in 1919 but not published until 1922.

6. Frank Whitford, “The Revolutionary Reactionary,” in Otto Dix: 1891–1969, ed. Frank Whitford et al. (London: Tate Gallery, 1982), 184.

7. When Dix’s Schützengraben was first exhibited in 1923 at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, whose director had acquired it, the painting had to be protected by a curtain. A year later in May and June at the Berlin Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts), it caused a scandal, with protests escalating nationally. Julius Meyer-Graefe, one of the most important critics of the time, wrote that the painting was “a public scandal . . . not only badly but infamously painted with a penetrating joy in detail that made the viewer want to puke.” Julius MeierGraefe, “Die Ausstellung in der Akademie,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, July 2, 1924. For Westheim, who wrote a positive review of the painting for the Frankfurter Zeitung (for which he had been chief art critic for about twelve years), the encounter would have unpleasant consequences. The publishers of the paper terminated their contract with Westheim, writing to him, “you have practiced a certain radicality in matters of modern art which undoubtedly has had an impact on the life of modern art in Germany. However, the heart of the matter is that in the course of many years this narrow devotion to an unconditional radicality has overtaken your writing. . . . But you would undoubtedly understand that such explicit positions, consistently argued within the pages of a daily paper, inevitably would insert an unforgiving and harsh tenor which cannot be reconciled with the liberalism that a newspaper mirroring the totality of the cultural life should uphold.” Bernd Fechner and York Egbert König, Paul Westheim: Kunstkritiker— Publizist—Sammler (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich / Centrum Judaicum, 2017), 45–46.

8. Quoted in Otto Conzelmann, Der Andere Dix: Sein Bild vom Menschen und vom Krieg (Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1983), 187.

9. In September 1915, Dix volunteered for the front from his machine gunner training camp at Bautzen. Seven plates of the cycle show soldiers in combat, nine depict soldiers engaged in frontline battle, and four present life behind the lines. Eight are of the landscapes at the front, while twenty-two deal with suffering and death.

10. Dix’s extraordinary pathos in depicting the mutilated body prefigures a challenge that painting would again face after WWII, when it had to make itself the medium of bodily decomposition, as is evident, for example, in the work of Jean Fautrier’s Otages (Hostages), aptly identified by Rachel Perry as a retour à l’ordure. Rachel Perry, “Jean Fautrier’s Jolies Juives,” October 108 (Spring 2004): 51–72.

11. Whitford, “The Revolutionary Reactionary.”

12. See Paul Fox, “Confronting Postwar Shame in Weimar Germany: Trauma, Heroism and the War Art of Otto Dix,” Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 2 (2006): 247–67.

13. Kristie La, “Käthe Kollwitz’s War without War,” unpublished seminar paper, 2019.