For the soldiers on the front lines, World War I introduced an unprecedented level of violence. But it was not the "the war to end all wars" — quite the contrary, writes guest author Jörn Leonhard.
Image: picture-alliance/StockPix/A. Wilson
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World War I ended on November 11, 1918, bringing peace to the West — but not to Eastern and Southeastern Europe. The Great War precipitated the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and gave rise to severe interethnic conflicts.
The historical significance of the Great War derives not only from the sheer number of war dead, but also from the new quality of violence it entailed. While most of those who died were soldiers — unlike in World War II — civilians were subjected to a new quality of violence, for instance in Belgium and northern France, in Serbia, Armenia, large parts of Eastern Europe, in Africa and Asia.
Many individuals were recruited as soldiers from colonies in India, Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, and perished far from home. Many soldiers were badly wounded in the fighting, obliging the state to provide long-term care for war invalids on their return home.
World War I, therefore, did not actually produce a victorious nation, or state, or empire. And neither did it put an end to global warfare. Only war itself emerged victorious, so to speak. And with it the totality of violence, which contradicted the maxim that had evolved during the fighting that this would be "the war to end all wars." Indeed, this belief had boosted the participants' determination to continue waging war. Ultimately, however, World War I did not have the outcome that many had hoped.
End of WWI and its aftermath
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New forms of violent conflict emerge
In the years immediately after Armistice Day 1918, war remained the norm rather than the exception. In Ireland and Poland, conflict broke out as new nation-states were established. In Russia, a bloody civil war ultimately saw the Bolsheviks triumph. In Turkey, violence was used as a way to forcefully undo the provisions of a peace treaty.
What began in the summer of 1914 as war between European states gradually grew into a multitude of other violent conflicts which continued long after World War I formally ended.
The first half of the 20th century was a period of violent catastrophes and turmoil, and it almost seems as if it took the remainder of the century just to heal these wounds. But the scars of war remain visible to this day.
Remembering the war
The way World War I is recalled in Germany significantly differs to the culture of remembrance in the United Kingdom, France, and other countries that were involved. In Germany's national psyche, the horror of the Holocaust and World War II continue to overshadow the bloodshed of World War I. This is why for Germans World War I is not known as the Great War as it is in the UK, but merely the war that preceded World War II. For them, World War I appears almost as if it belongs to a time much further away.
Remembering the massive destruction and extreme violence of World War I, and reflecting on what harm humans can inflict on each other in modern warfare, must be part of our modern consciousness, to help us understand how we arrived in our complicated present times. It should not, therefore, be regarded as a distinct historical episode without any bearing on the here and now.
Jörn Leonhard is a professor of Western European modern and contemporary history at the University of Freiburg. He has published two seminal works on World War I: Die Büchse der Pandora — Geschichte des Ersten Weltkriegs (Pandora's Box: A History of the First World War) (2014) and Der überforderte Frieden - Versailles und die Welt 1918-1923 (An overwhelming peace — Versailles and the World 1918-1923 (2018).
'Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One' reflects on the brutality of the Great War
Marking a century since the end of World War I, a new exhibition at London's Tate Britain explores how artists responded to the physical and psychological horrors of the "war to end all wars."
Image: IWM (Art.IWM ART 518)
Ypres After the First Bombardment: Christopher R. W. Nevinson, 1916
The British landscape painter presents an aerial view of the Belgian city of Ypres after it was first bombed in 1915, employing the abstract motifs used by cubists and futurists. Nevinson, a devotee of Italian futurism, initially believed the conflict was a sign of progress in the machine age. But after serving as an official war artist in France, he became ardently anti-war.
Image: Museums Sheffield
The Rock Drill: Jacob Epstein, 1913-1914
This "machine-like robot, visored, menacing and carrying within itself its progeny" was initially a futurist symbol of progress, but Epstein decided to rework his sculpture after he became aware of the scale of death as the war unfolded. A drill was removed, and the figure was cut off at the waist, a symbol of modern man suddenly neutered and made impotent by a war that it also started.
Image: The Estate of Jacob Epstein
Wire: Paul Nash, 1918-1919
Having served on the Western Front in France, the British surrealist artist extensively documented life and death amid the trenches in his paintings. As he wrote to his wife in 1917: "Imagine a wide landscape flat and scantily wooded and what trees remain blasted and torn, naked and scarred and riddled. The ground for miles around furrowed into trenches, pitted with yawning holes."
Arise, you dead!: Georges Rouault, 1922-1927
Part of the French artist's War series of Expressionist engravings, Arise, You Dead! appropriates the skeleton, a representation of death in medieval mythology, to reflect on the inevitable futility of battle on the front during the Great War. A Catholic who worked extensively with religious motifs, Rouault was perhaps also commenting on the essential immorality of war.
Image: ADAGCP, Paris and DACS, London 2018
Paths of Glory: Christopher R. W. Nevinson, 1917
This oil painting epitomized Nevinson's hardening view of the ignominy of trench warfare with its portrayal of anonymous dead soldiers laying facedown in the dirt among endless barbed wire. His unwillingness to portray the glories of war meant the work was nearly censored, but before that happened he hung the painting in London and affixed a piece of paper over the bodies that read "Censored."
Image: IWM (Art.IWM ART 518)
Dada Rundschau: Hannah Höch, 1919
Hannah Höch was a pioneer of the photomontage technique that became synonymous with dada, a highly political art that mocked the elites who had plunged the world into war. The kaleidoscope of images and newspaper headlines refers to "gigantic world folly" as epitomized by German leader Friedrich Ebert in bathers, while American President Woodrow Wilson hovers as a "peace angel" above.
Image: DACS, 2018
The Petit Bourgeois Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild Electro Mechanical Tatlin: George Grosz and John Heartfield, 1920
After the war, German artists like Heartfield and Grosz commonly depicted broken bodies with prosthetic limbs, a feature of war survivors who brought home the physical and psychological scars of the "war to end all wars." As a dada sculptural montage, the work also parodies the arrogance of technology and militarism, the lost head simply replaced with a light bulb, a mark of bright ideas.
Image: Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, N.J. 2018.
War: Skull: Otto Dix, 1924
This etching was part of Otto Dix's war cycle created in the 1920s that imitated Francisco Goya's famous The Disasters of War prints from a century earlier. Like Goya, Dix, who also served on the front line on the losing side in World War I, darkly evoked the gruesome horror of war with a rotting skull infested with vermin and maggots. His series aimed to "exorcise the experience of war."
Image: Estate of Otto Dix 2018
To the Unknown British Soldier in France: William Orpen, 1921-1928
This controversial painting by the Irish war artist shows a soldier's coffin in a mausoleum draped in a British flag, an army helmet atop. It was modified in 1927 after initially showing two semi-nude soldiers guarding a tomb. One of three commissions to commemorate the Paris Peace Conference, Orpen portrayed "the ragged unemployed soldier and the dead" instead of politicians and diplomats.
