Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture, 1914–1936

The First World War was a defining experience for the German painter Otto Dix (1891–1969), as it was for many artists of his generation. The years he spent on the front uniquely qualified him to show the public the war as he – and many of his fellow veterans – experienced and remembered it. Throughout the years of the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), the memorialisation of the war was, however, highly contested in both visual culture and written discourse. Dix produced artworks that were among the most controversial and celebrated contributions to the public debate about the truth and the meaning of the war. In her tightly focused study, Ann Murray investigates Dix’s most confrontational representations of the war and their reception in Germany: his Dadaist depictions of war amputees of the early 1920s, the lost work The Trench (1923), the large print portfolio The War (1924), the triptych Metropolis (1928), and his monumental multi-panel composition War (1929–1932) – works that challenged dominant heroic narratives and offered stark visual testimony to the war’s trauma.