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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Paul Fox
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This book is about German images of German men at war. It examines how accounts of recent warfighting prowess published in illustrated histories after unification in 1871 were rooted in established Prussian traditions of writing, painting, and drawing; specifically, how the notion of exemplary teamwork lay at the heart of a discerible tendency in German popular visual culture to uphold the apparently innate will of German men to defeat their enemies on the battlefield, and to uphold this putative national characteristic as a moral quality of the highest order. The inquiry pivots around 1896, the twenty-fifth anniversary of victory over France and the founding of the German state, and goes on to trace how visual tropes of combat in celebratory accounts of the Franco-Prussian War were reworked in order to remember the First World War on equivalent terms after defeat in 1918. This fundamentally iconological inquiry works out of prominent illustrated popular histories published before and after the First World War and traces the wider cultural context in which this putative national tendency is visible, including studio painting, graphic art and photography. It: considers the implications of this enduring, mutable trope of martial masculinity in a society that practiced universal male conscription; explores the relationship between military experience and social memory formation; and addresses how the visual rhetoric of the putative German will to battle was employed to negotiate concerns about the future trajectory of Germany in a world increasingly influenced by technological change. The book begins by addressing representations of military command published in patriotic histories of Prussia’s wars of the eithteenth and nineteen centuries. With reference to art practice after Unification in 1871 and the earlier wood-engravings Adolph Menzel made for the illustrated patriotic history, Life of Frederick, it explores how group portraits on the subject of German wartime leadership typically gave visual expression to the psychological quality of the putative interactions between prominent commanders and their advisors, whose moral meanings are located in the quality of respectful attention their subjects confer on each other. The inquiry then addresses the will to combat itself as represented in images of battle, or of former battlefields located in contested border territories, also 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 postwar border conflict circulated alongside pre-existing representations of imperial military campaigns. Together, they can be understood as components of a sustained address to the experience of conflict that was influential in determining patriotic attitudes to German militarism in the Weimar Republic. The book then examines how images of trench warfare published after the First World War could no longer assert the moral right to occupied lands, since none existed any more. 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. More traditional illustrated histories published after 1918 still included art works as well as photographs, but the more self-consiously popular relied exclusively on photography. Either way, they mounted visual accounts of experience at the Front that continuously emphasise 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 matériel, 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, characterised 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 emphasised the altogether warmer, lived experience of combat in order to bring the reader closer to the experience, while also suggesting that a cold, distant mode of perception was in operation. The book turns to aerial photography to suggest how the combination of aircraft and camera had far reaching 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 by art historians 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 affective response to such photographs. The final chapters address the relationship between battlelfield technologies and the bodily performance of martial virtues. The first 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, they concern the way in which German soldiers are represented as interacting with weapons systems, concluding that the physical (technological) component of fighting power is always subordinated to the moral component, typically expressed as the will to battle. The final chapter explores how the rhetoric of man-and-machine was transformed after 1916, when the image of the tank epitomised the war of materiel during the second half of the First World War. It draws together many of the long-standing preoccupations addressed in this book 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 so many of the artists and photographers discussed here – remained fundamentally invested in the values of a tradition of imagining conflict extending back at least to the mid-nineteenth century. In summary, the book argues that patriotic narratives maintained a consistent thematic approach to the representation of the German soldier at war despite seismic shifts in the political, social and technological circumstances in which armed conflicts occurrred and images were made. Performing excellence, located in the German soldier’s putative will to battle, was upheld as an enduring virtue in visual accounts of decision making and of combat throughout the period despite the impact of increasingly lethal technologies, and of defeat in 1918.
Author(s): Fox PLD
Series Editor(s): Paul Jackson
Publication type: Authored Book
Publication status: Published
Series Title: A Modern History of Politics and Violence
Year: 2017
Number of Volumes: 1
Number of Pages: 240
Print publication date: 14/12/2017
Online publication date: 14/12/2017
Acceptance date: 18/05/2017
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Place Published: London
URL: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-image-of-the-soldier-in-german-culture-1871-1933-9781474226165/
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9781474226141
