Postcards from the Trenches

A German Soldier's Testimony of the Great War

Irene Guenther

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350015777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

German art student Otto Schubert was 22 years old when he was drafted into the Great War. As the conflict unfolded, he painted a series of postcards that he sent to his sweetheart, Irma. During the battles of Ypres and Verdun, Schubert filled dozens of military-issued 4" x 6" cards with vivid images depicting the daily realities and tragedies of war. Beautifully illustrated with full-color reproductions of his exquisite postcards, as well as his wartime sketches, woodcuts, and two lithograph portfolios, Postcards from the Trenches is Schubert's war diary, love journal, and life story. His powerful artworks illuminate and document in a visual language the truths of war. Postcards from the Trenches offers the first full account of Otto Schubert, soldier-artist of the Great War, rising art star in the 1920s, prolific graphic artist and book illustrator, one of the "degenerate" artists defamed by the Nazis, and a man shattered by the Second World War and the Cold War. Created in the midst of enormous devastation, Schubert's haunting visual missives are as powerful and relevant today as they were a century ago. His postcards are both a young man's token of love and longing and a soldier's testimony of the Great War.

Chapter

1

The Great War and the Uses of Art

The War Experiences of Soldiers and Civilians

The terrifying ferocity and unprecedented scale of the Great War still defy comprehension a century after the first shots were fired. In the four years between 1914 and 1918, more than one hundred countries on six different continents were embroiled in devastating conflict. Seventy million men served in uniform, and millions of civilians served on their home fronts or volunteered on the war fronts in various supportive roles. Russia, Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, and Romania suffered the gravest losses relative to the number of men they mobilized; each experienced a casualty rate exceeding 60 percent. By the war’s end, the number of military and civilian casualties – a category including not only the dead, but also those who were wounded, taken prisoners-of-war, or thought to be missing-in-action – surpassed 37 million. And, of these, 9.5 million combatants and 6.5 million civilians were dead, sixteen million in total, due to battlefield deaths, war wounds on war fronts and home fronts, displacement, malnutrition, and disease. Back home, more than three million widows and ten million orphans had been left behind. They, too, were victims of the Great War.¹

Machine guns; tanks; zeppelins; airplanes; poison gas; the forced expulsion and mass murder of Armenians; atrocities also committed against non-combatants in Belgium, Galicia, and elsewhere; and naval blockades designed to deny enemy civilians the most basic necessities, such as food and medicine – all of these signaled the advent of an entirely new kind of conflict. This was a war that in countless ways blurred, and began to erase, the line between civilians and combatants, between war fronts and home fronts.² That line would be largely effaced in the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War, and entirely obliterated in the Second World War.³

Governments employed coercion and propaganda on a massive scale to galvanize feelings of loyalty, willingness to sacrifice, hatred of the enemy, and national purpose in their citizenry.⁴ The initial “war enthusiasm” that propelled many men to volunteer in August 1914 had morphed into the need for a warlike logic of duty, will, hardness of character, and strong nerves by 1915, due to the calamitous death rates and lack of foreseeable end to the conflict.⁵ Seemingly unending artillery bombardments and shell fire had obvious consequences on soldiers’ morale, behavior, and anxiety levels.⁶ In contrast to the battles waged on the Eastern Front where there was far more troop movement, helplessness, hopelessness, fear of dying, “horror of isolation,” and, above all, “disempowerment,” feelings of “impotence to determine their own chances of survival,” made “service in the trenches of the Western Front a uniquely frightening, depressing and stressful experience.”⁷

The public face of war did not show the piles of dead corpses and maimed bodies each major battle produced or the debilitating psychological effects that the war had on soldiers. With few exceptions, if any dead were shown at all in photographs, they were the enemy’s dead.⁸ Posters and photographs depicted their nation’s wounded soldiers wrapped in unstained head bandages and clean white arm slings, with not one amputee in sight. The real trenches did not resemble the neat underground homes that looked like summer youth camps; yet, such idealized versions appeared in posters and newspaper photographs that claimed authenticity or were constructed for displays on home fronts to satisfy the curiosity of civilians.⁹

On the European Eastern and Western Fronts, soldiers described a very different war. Hugh Walpole’s letters from June 1915, when he served in the Balkans with the Russian Red Cross, provide searing testimony. He wrote, “Every kind of horror. Wounded on both sides of the road in the wood crying and screaming. . . . Day before yesterday eight hundred wounded in twelve hours. I cut off fingers with a pair of scissors easy as nothing!”¹⁰ German artist Otto Dix immediately volunteered when war was declared and, despite being wounded several times, served all four years of the conflict. He described in his diary the war he had grown grimly familiar with: “Lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, grenades, bombs, caves, blood, liquor, mice, cats, gas(ses), cannons, filth, bullets, mortars, fire, steel, that is the war! All devil’s work!”¹¹ The British poet Wilfred Owen’s letters tell of once healthy men who were sucked into and suffocated by mud, walked bent over like old men under the strain of their 70-pound equipment sacks, drowned in water-filled trenches and shell holes, and coughed to death from poison gas.¹² The war consumed soldiers at an exorbitant rate.

The Germans became known for their efforts to make their dugouts and trenches as home-like and hospitable as possible, especially when compared to the trenches built by the French.¹³ Otto Dix corroborates this view when he described one of his drawings to a friend on June 4, 1916: “In front is our battle-trench. It is cleanly concreted and is swept two times a day. Genuinely German, isn’t it?”¹⁴ Nonetheless, the Germans’ more sophisticated trenches depended upon location and were the exception, rather than the rule.¹⁵ The mud from seemingly non-stop rain on the Western Front sucked soldiers into shell-holes and caused them to drown.¹⁶ Tetanus infection from wounded soldiers lying on soil steeped with bacteria; long waits before the many who were wounded could be treated by doctors; trench fever; trench foot; dysentery; millions of rats and lice, both of which carried diseases; and swarms of flies plagued German soldiers and their dead, much as they did their adversaries.¹⁷ One German infantryman described his regiment’s accommodation as being like “pigsties,” writing, “I can only be amazed that I have not been suffocated in filth.” And Captain Helmuth Fuchs noted in his April 7, 1915 diary entry that a position he had visited was “almost waist-deep in water and had two sodden corpses stuck in its breastworks.”¹⁸

In his comparative analysis of British and German soldiers’ morale, historian Alexander Watson notes that the often-limited water rations, long exposures to risk on the battle front, news of pervasive food shortages on the German home front, and food limitations on the frontlines in the last two years of the war had a demoralizing effect on German troops. They worried about their families going hungry, wondered why they were risking their lives if their government could not provide for their loved ones, and felt their own hunger would prevent them from winning the war.¹⁹

On the home front, Germans were suffering from malnourishment due to scarcities of even the most basic foods. Bartering, black marketeering, hoarding, hamstering, queuing for hours, surviving the latest ration reductions, plundering, rioting, participating in hunger strikes at factories, fainting from lack of food, and starving increased each day.²⁰ The cumulative effects of poor planning by the German government and inefficiencies in the food distribution system, as well as bad harvests, the terrible winter of 1916–1917, and the extensive British “hunger blockade,” as the Germans called it, were devastating and resulted in a pervasive public health crisis on the German home front.²¹ In a letter to her brother in the summer of 1916, which censors confiscated and filed under the category of “anti-German activity,” Lina Dorstewitz described that the “food supply [in Saxony] had become ‘horrendous’ and civil war appeared in the offing. ‘No one has money any more; in any case one cannot buy anything with it.’” She had lost 37 pounds in the past year.²²

Germany’s deplorable state of widespread and severe malnutrition deteriorated further as the blockade was maintained by the Allies after the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918.²³ Continuing the blockade was a punitive measure, intended to ensure that the Germans fully understood they had lost the war and would sign the provisions of the treaty dictated by the Allied victors. Moreover, many British citizens did not believe the stories of rampant starvation, calling such claims “Hun trickery.” They, along with many French officials and citizens, wanted revenge after years of warfare and death. Prime Minister Lloyd George told Allied leaders at Versailles that the Germans were being allowed to starve, and warned that German memories of forced starvation could turn against them one day. British soldiers in Germany began to write home about the terrible state of German civilians; hunger, they reported, was everywhere. The French prime minister, Clemenceau, however, continued to push back against such reports.²⁴ By the time the Allies’ restrictions on food imports to Germany were officially lifted, which occurred not after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919, but only after the German government ratified the treaty on July 12, 1919, several hundred thousand Germans on the home front had perished from starvation and starvation-related diseases.²⁵

Equally debilitating, the Germany army kept its soldiers at the front until “they were no longer capable of holding the line,” which caused great stress, exhaustion, and demoralization. In contrast, the British Expeditionary Force observed a policy that regularly relieved their soldiers in active sectors. Finally, in the fall of 1917, the German army adopted a system of rotation similar to the British.²⁶ Nonetheless, few changes were actually implemented. The Germans were plagued by ongoing food shortages at home and manpower shortages on the front, battles that featured unceasing artillery fire, such as the fifteen-day opening bombardment at the Third Battle of Ypres during which the British fired 4.3 million shells at their German counterparts, and fierce fighting that resulted in high casualty rates. The severe strain of those factors, and little time away from the frontlines, resulted in soldiers’ desertions, surrenders, psychological break-downs, and cases of collective disobedience.²⁷ As one German psychiatrist noted, “there were few . . . who returned home with ‘entirely unscathed nerves.’”²⁸

Unlike governmental posters that depicted healthy, happy men marching to the front in clean, crisp uniforms and shiny helmets, soldiers who returned home, either on leave or medically discharged, had been utterly changed by their experiences.²⁹ Some came home without faces or legs or a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 The Great War and the Uses of Art
• 2 German Artists and the Great War
• 3 The Life and Art of Otto Schubert
• List of Illustrations
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright