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"Heroes" and "whores": the politics of gender in Weimar Antiwar imagery - Weimar antiwar artists' drawings and paintings of prostitutes and war veterans
Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 1997 by Dora Apel
At the peak of a debate over the memory and meaning of World War I, the ten-year anniversary of war mobilization in 1924 became the crucial point of convergence for many of the social and political issues that had surfaced in antiwar imagery in Germany. During this moment of intensified concentration on themes of war, antiwar imagery was presented in art exhibitions, left-wing periodicals, mass-produced lithographic portfolios, and photographic albums. Antiwar pictures were exhibited in the anarcho-pacifist Ernst Friedrich's newly founded International Antiwar Museum in Berlin and distributed through the cultural arm of the German-Soviet International Workers' Aid. War photographs previously censored by the German government during the war, along with prints from Otto Dix's fifty-part etching series Der Krieg (War), produced in 1924, and Kathe Kollwitz's 1923 suite of seven woodcuts entitled Krieg (War), were exhibited together in Friedrich's Antiwar Museum in August 1924, thereby publicly linking the two preeminent antiwar artists in Germany, Dix and Kollwitz, with the pacifist propagandist Ernst Friedrich at the height of commemorative activities.
At the same time, Friedrich published the first book of war photographs to appear in postwar Germany. While his photographic narrative produced a different effect from that of the art of Kollwitz or Dix, all were part of the visual field representing the pacifist discourse. Friedrich saw war photography as the most expedient medium in which to put forward his own brand of pacifist political argument. Kollwitz, whose most famous antiwar images were commissioned by Social Democratic organizations, put her images to political use representing Social Democratic pacifism. Dix, distrusting straightforward political rhetoric, was more ironic and intentionally ambiguous in his imagery, assuming the stance of the independent, avant-garde artist. Nonetheless his works were widely regarded as pacifist interventions and became highly controversial. The examination of conflicting ideological positions among Weimar artists makes it possible to relate both the production and volatile reception of antiwar imagery by Dix, Friedrich, and Kollwitz to the Weimar debate over World War I and its implications for the construction of masculine or feminine subjectivity in visual representations of soldiers and veterans or in images of rape, prostitution, and proletarian women.
Such presentations of gendered subjectivity in Weimar art have been left largely unexamined in the art historical literature.(1) Yet a look at antiwar imagery raises a number of provocative questions about the representation of soldiers and women. German soldiers were often depicted as morally and physically "pure," while female prostitutes were portrayed as corrupters of soldier-males and of the nation. Idealized presentations of proletarian women played on stereotypes of the mother as a self-sacrificing icon who inevitably, if tragically, dedicated herself to motherhood, forsaking both a sensual and political life. Did women, assumed to be naturally pacifistic because of their maternal nature, bear a greater responsibility for the war by failing to oppose the mobilization of their husbands, sons, and brothers? Were disabled and shell-shocked veterans who were unable to return to the work force "feminized" by their incapacitating war experience? How did the discourse of manliness survive the critique of militarism?
It was once an axiom of Marxist ideology that the litmus test for any political program claiming radical credentials was its position on "the woman question." The assumption was that a failure to elaborate an emancipatory program for women was a signal defect that not only debilitated the program as a whole but marked it as one that had not broken with bourgeois values on a fundamental level? As we shall see, the lines of ideological difference between antimilitarist opponents and bourgeois patriots overlapped when it came to issues of sexual identity, making the "progressiveness" of antiwar representations a contradictory issue. This discovery of politically engaged Weimar artists' complicity with bourgeois attitudes on gender and sexuality scarcely comes as a surprise in light of the similar perspective that critics, especially feminists, have applied to the artistic avant-garde in the last twenty years. My aim, however, is to assess the political implications of works produced by Weimar's foremost antiwar artists and propagandists in order to investigate the historical nature of assumptions about gender and their relation to pacifist, feminist, and patriotic ideology.(3) The ways in which patriotic ideals of heroism, manliness, and maternity were redefined and deployed in antiwar visual imagery are revealing not only because they complicate claims for the progressiveness of leftist Weimar artists, but also because they provide a better understanding of the ways in which assumptions about gender were contested or incorporated into institutions of war and postwar German society.
