Embedded Files
Otto Dix
Otto Dix was born in Germany in 1891 to a working class family. His father was an iron worker and his mother was a seamstress. As a child, he was introduced to art by his cousin who was a painter, who helped him get an apprenticeship to be a painter. In 1910, Dix went to the city of Dresden to attend art school. When the war began in 1914, Dix was caught up in the excitement of the war and volunteered to serve in the German army. Dix commanded a machine gun unit on the Western Front and fought against the British in the Battle of the Somme. Dix was wounded several times in the war; the last time was in August 1918 when he was nearly killed from being shot in the neck. A medic was able to stop the bleeding and saved his life. The war ended while Dix was recovering in the hospital.
During the war, Dix kept a diary and a sketchbook with which he chronicled his experience. They would provide
material for a series of fifty drawings that he would create called simply, The War. Dix was profoundly affected by the war. He described a recurring nightmare in which he crawled through bombed out houses. His experience with war and its aftermath became a dominant theme in the art he produced after 1914. Dix returned to Dresden after the war and tried to go back to studying art, the memories of the war soon crept into his work. Dix was haunted by the brutality of war and he tried to capture this in his painting. He painted deserted battlefields that were carved with military trenches and strewn with bodies. Dix’s painting showed soldiers as mutilated, wounded, suffering or mad. In 1924, Dix published fifty of his pictures in a book called simply “The War”. Two years later, in 1926, he became a professor of art in Dresden. However, by this time Hitler had come to power in Germany. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis hated Dix’s art which they considered “Degenerate” (immoral, degraded) and because it did not glorify German soldiers and instead was critical of World War I. When Hitler came to power in Germany, Dix lost his job as a professor and the government took away his art and many of his painting were destroyed. Toward the end of World War Two, Dix was actually forced to join the Nazi army in a unit of older men who were forced to fight once all of the younger men had already been wounded or killed. Otto was captured by the French and spent the end of the war as a prisoner. After the war, he returned to Germany and worked as painter until he died in 1969.
Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen was born in 1893 in England to a working class family. Owen became interested in poetry as a child and passed the exams to attend university. However, he was unable to get a scholarship and his family was too poor to pay for his studies. Instead, Owen worked as a teacher in both England and France before the war. It was during this time that he worked on developing his poetry.
In 1915, Owen enlisted in the British Army. After military training, he was sent to fight on the Western Front as an officer. In the fighting, Owen suffered several traumatic brain injuries from falling into a bomb hole and from being blown high in the air by an explosion. He was diagnosed with “shell-shock” (the term used at the time for post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD) and was sent back to Britain to recover at the Craiglockhart War Hospital. It was here that met Siegfried
Sassoon, another British soldier who was a very famous poet at the time. During their treatment, Sassoon gave Owen guidance and encouraged Wilfred Owen to bring his war experiences into his poetry. It was during this time that Owen found his true poetic voice. Most the poems for which he is now remembered were written during this time period. The poem, Dulce et Decorum est, is one of Owen’s most famous poems. The title is in Latin and means, “It is sweet and honorable” and it refers to a poem by famous Roman poet Horace, who said it was sweet and honorable “to die for one’s country”. Many people in England who supported the war used this saying to describe the young men killed in the war, implying that the war would be a big adventure for the young men, and that if they died they would die with honor. Owen said that this view of the war was a lie. In the poem he described how dying in war was horrific and meaningless.
In October 1918, Owen returned to military service on the Western Front to be part of the British attack to break the final German defenses, called the Hindenburg Line. He bravely led his soldiers in the attacks and was awarded the Military Cross. He was killed in battle on November 4, 1918 – exactly one week before the war ended.
Vera Brittain
Vera Mary Brittain was born in England in 1893 to a wealthy family. Her father owned a paper factory. She had a close relationship with her brother, Edward, who was a year younger. In 1914, she attended Oxford University as a student and became interested in the women’s suffrage movement, which was fighting to win women the right to vote.
When the war began in 1914, Brittian described it in her diary as ‘the most thrilling day of her life”. Brittain’s brother Edward volunteered to be an officer in the British army – men from wealthy families typically were automatically made into officers, which means that they led groups of regular soldiers into battle. In 1915, Vera became engaged to Roland Leighton, one of her brother’s closest friends, who was serving on the Western Front. It was during this time that Brittain decided to leave her studies at Oxford and volunteer to become an army nurse. Her work as a nurse opened Brittain’s eyes to the horror of the war. She described this when she wrote to Leighton, “I have only one wish in life now and that is for the ending of the war. I wonder how much really all you have seen and done has changed you. Personally, after seeing some of the dreadful things I have to see here, I feel I shall never be the same person again, and wonder if, when the war does end, I shall have forgotten how to laugh.” In December of that year, while she was working as a nurse in a military hospital in London, she learned that her fiance, Roland Leighton, had been killed by a German sniper. Six months later, in July 1916, she learned that her brother had been wounded in the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
Brittain was sent to the island of Malta to work as a nurse, but decided to return to England in June 1917 to care for a friend of her brother
who had been blinded in the fighting. However, the friend died two weeks after her return. She then went to work as a nurse in a battlefield hospital in France where she cared for both wounded British soldiers and wounded German prisoners. During this time, she wrote about the brutal and inhumane craziness that she felt while she was caring for people were trying to kill her own friends and family. After several months in France, she returned to England to take care of her sick parents and work in hospital there. In June 1918, she learned that her brother Edward was killed fighting in Italy. Over the course of the war, Brittain lost her brother and all of her male friends. She continued to work as a nurse until 1919 when the war ended. She returned to Oxford University to study history.
After the war, Brittain dedicated herself for working for peace. She wrote a book, “Testament of Youth” about her wartime experiences and the deaths of her brother, fiancé, and their friends. She wrote to show that the war was not ”glamour or glory, but abysmal grief and purposeless waste.” The book was a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, and in the autumn of 1934 Brittain left for a successful lecture tour of the United States. In 1937, as another world war threatened the work, Brittain became a pacifist (someone who opposes war) who wrote and spoke out against war. After the war, she continued to write and work for peace until she died in 1966.
Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque was born in Germany in 1898 to a working class family. Remarque was studying to be a teacher when he was drafted into the German army in 1916. Remarque served in a military engineering unit building and repairing buildings and barricades on the front line. He was wounded in an artillery (bombing) attack in July 1917 and spent most of the rest of the war in a military hospital recovering from his wounds. The war ended a few days before Remarque returned to active service in 1918.
Following the war, like many soldiers, Remarque tried to return to society and build a life for himself. And like many former soldiers, Remarque had difficulty with this readjustment. During this time, he worked as a teacher, accountant, and even a tombstone salesman, before he settled on being a writer. His personal life was also chaotic with his first marriage ending in divorce.
In 1928, Remarque wrote “All Quiet on the Western Front” based on his own wartime experiences. The simple and blunt language underlined the horrific reality of war described in the book. In the introduction to the book, Remarque wrote, “I will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have survived shells, were destroyed by the war.” He describes a group of school friends who all enlist in the army at the start of the war and how, over the course of the war, they are all either killed or wounded in the fighting. All Quiet was first published in 1929 and became an instant best-seller, selling more than 1 million copies in Germany alone and being translated into 23 languages. The next year, Hollywood produced a film version of the novel that was released to an international audience.
The success of “All Quiet” made Remarque an international figure and a wealthy man. The book also brought Remarque into conflict with the Nazi Party, which was coming to power. The anti-war theme of novel went against the Nazis attempts to rewrite and glorify the history of the German army in First World War. The Nazis invented a story that Remarque was a Jew, and interrupted the screening of the film in Berlin and publicly burned Remarque’s books because, in the eyes of the Nazis, the books “betrayed the soldiers of World War One”. When Hitler took over Germany, the Nazis attempted to have Remarque arrested. Remarque fled to Switzerland and eventually to the United States, where he became a citizen in 1947. For the rest of his life, he only returned to Germany for short visits. Even though Remarque had left Germany, it did not stop the Nazis from pursuing his family. In 1943, during World War Two, his sister, Elfriede was arrested for criticizing the Nazi government. After a trial, she was sentenced to death because, as the judge said, “her brother was beyond the control of the court, she would have to atone (make up for) for his guilt.” Remarque used his experience with Nazi Germany to become a voice against oppressive governments. His 1952 novel, “Spark of Life”, was about the Holocaust. It sold poorly in Germany. Remarque went on to write several more novels set in 20th century Germany that had an anti-Nazi theme. He died in Switzerland in 1970.
Page updated
Report abuse