He engraved these black-and-white vignettes just after painting The Trench, a horrific masterpiece that distilled the western front into one grisly carnival of death. It was as if Dix needed to vomit his memories in order to purge himself of all that haunted him. The prints gathered in Der Krieg (The War) are just part of the hideous outpouring of images he unleashed. He was compelled to show them, with nothing held back. In what might now be called post-traumatic stress, he kept seeing the horrors of the trenches. It was after he went home that the nightmares started. At the time, he later confessed, he did not think about them too much. Otto Dix's Skull, from his 1924 set of first world war drawings, Der Kreig Photograph: British Museum/DACSĭix had seen these things as a frontline soldier. While British war artists, for example, were portraying the generals, Germans saw the skull in no man's land. For no other artists saw this dreadful war as clearly as German artists did. We need to shake off the nostalgia of a centenary's forgetful pomp and look at the first world war through fresh eyes – German eyes. Even the German war guilt clause written by the victors into the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 has been turned into "fact" – after all, who wants to trawl through the complex causes of this conflict and face the depressing truth that it ultimately happened because no one in July 1914 understood how destructive a modern industrial war could be? It's as if the clock is being turned back and the propaganda of the war believed all over again. What did he see? Today there is a fashion, in Britain, to celebrate the heroism of our grandfathers and their hard-won victory of 1914-1918. In 1924 the German artist and war veteran Otto Dix looked back at the first world war on its 10th anniversary, just as we are doing on its 100th.
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